Acer Aspire L3600 Review

Acer’s latest consumer PC is seriously anorexic. But don’t let this fool you into thinking that it’s skinny on perfomance. Under its hood, the Aspire L3600 has an Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 processor running at 2.2GHz. This 3-liter Ultra Small Form Factor PC is endowed with nearly everything that a typical full sized desktop PC has, and then some.

Standard specs include an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, 1GB of DDR2 memory, a large320GB hard disk drive and slot loading DVD writer. As you can probably imagine, there’s no space in this tiny box to house a dedicated graphics card, so users have to make do with an integrated solution. This hampers graphics performance quite significantly, but unless you’re planning to play the latest 3D games, this isn’t going to be a problem.

As a media centre PC, the Aspire L3600 certainly shines. Very brightly, I might add. The folks at Acer’s R&D division managed to cram in a TV/FM tuner so those who would like to put this in their living rooms to watch and record TV can certainly do it right out of the box. There are also a video inputs, so if you have an old(er) video cam with analogue only outputs, you can transfer your old videos onto the PC. The only thing lacking is probably a full fledged remote control for users to control the PC, but nowadays you can get third remotes at many computer stores.

Overall, the Aspire L3600 is very well designed and it’s good to see vendors coming out with innovative products. Although this little thing will probably be able to handle most computing tasks, the only thing holding it back is its inability to run the latest games, no thanks to its built-in graphics card. However, if we used in the living room as a media centre PC, the Aspire L3600 will certainly not disappointed. Just remember to get a remote control to go with it.