Scan 3XS Mirage AIO245 review

The Scan 3XS Mirage AIO245 all-in-one PC looks okay from the front, with its 23.6in Full HD screen and silver stand. Unfortunately, it looks less attractive from the side and rear, as the PC is located within an ugly white box that’s attached to the back of the display. It is, however, relatively slim.

The Mirage AIO245’s display is a 10-point touchscreen that’s great for interacting with touch-enabled apps and games from the Microsoft store. The glossy display has a good range of viewing angles, too, but isn’t very adjustable. You can tilt the screen, but you can’t swivel it, you must move the whole PC instead.

Brightness can be easily adjusted via a wheel on the right of the PC, although we found that we tended to brush it by accident when reaching for the nearby USB ports. The PC has preinstalled software that lets you configure a few additional gestures for easy control of media players and photo browsers, but we’d have preferred natural language documentation or even animations instead of the unhelpful icons that illustrate the purpose of the various gestures.

The display is big and bright, but its contrast ratio is a rather poor 597:1. It makes up for it with a colour gamut of 92.5 per cent, though, and it suffers no notable colour tints on pale screens. The surface looks slightly gritty from some angles, but this effect is minimal and much less marked than on some other touchscreens. The PC’s integrated speakers are housed at the bottom of the display and are good for an all-in-one. The mid-range is slightly muddy on complex tracks, but there’s more bass than we expected, along with good, clear treble reproduction and plenty of volume.

Connection ports are divided between the left- and right-hand sides of the PC, so you never need to fumble around the back. Most of the useful stuff’s on the left-hand side, including four USB3 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port, 3.5mm mic and headphone ports and two HDMI ports. One HDMI port lets you output video to a second screen, projector or TV, while the other is an input, which means you could, for example, use the AIO245’s display to play console games.

On the right-hand side of the AIO245, you’ll find the power button, an “Eco Mode” switch that automatically dims the display and a button that switches the screen to whatever’s connected to the HDMI input. We think the power switch is badly placed, as we accidentally hit it a couple of times when we tried to adjust the position of the PC. You’ll also find two more USB ports, an SD card reader and a DVD drive above the buttons. You can select a Blu-ray drive as an option on the 3XS website, should you prefer one.

The Mirage AIO245 is one of the most powerful all-in-ones we’ve reviewed, thanks to its 2.9GHz Intel Core i5-3470S processor. It scored 81 overall in our application benchmarks, which means it’s powerful enough to run pretty much any common application, especially as the processor’s coupled with 8GB of memory. Although it’s an all-in-on, you can upgrade various components, such as the memory and storage drives. We were also pleased to find that it’s equipped with an integrated dual-band 802.11n wireless adaptor.

The PC has a 2GB Nvidia GeForce GT 750M mobile graphics processor, which makes it can run 3D games reasonably well, but you must lower graphics quality settings to produce playable frame rates. Dirt Showdown wasn’t playable at a 1,920×1,080 resolution and Ultra graphics due to an average frame rate of 20.9fps, but slightly reducing graphics quality to High quality produced a much smoother average frame rate of 46.7fps. Similarly, we saw an average frame rate of 18.9fps in Crysis 2 at a resolution of 1,920×1,080 and Ultra graphics quality, which isn’t high enough for smooth play, but reducing graphics settings to Very High produced a smooth average frame rate of 40fps.

The 3XS Mirage AIO245 comes with a wireless Microsoft keyboard and mouse set, and you must sacrifice one of the AIO245’s USB ports to connect the set’s dongle. The mouse uses Microsoft’s BlueTrack technology, which means that it works reliably on almost any surface. The keyboard is a little shallow and rattly, but it’s accurate enough for touch-typing.

The Mirage AIO245 is by no means the best looking all-in-one PC, but it’s powerful, has a large touchscreen and plenty of USB3 ports. It can also play modern games. It’s more expensive than similarly sized all-in-ones, such as the Asus ET2300IUTI, but it’s also more powerful. If you want a powerful touchscreen all-in-one PC, the Scan 3XS Mirage AIO245 is a good buy.