Acer Aspire Z3731 review

Acer’s Aspire Z3731 is a rather unattractive all-in-one with an underpowered dual-core Pentium processor. However, it has a rather significant redeeming feature: its price. At £400, it’s easily one of the cheapest all-in-one PCs around, and although its features are basic, it works surprisingly well and comes from a big-name manufacturer with an excellent reputation. If all you need is a basic and relatively inexpensive PC, this could be just the ticket.

If you’re buying a basic PC of any sort, you need to make sure it meets your needs. If you’re after performance, you should definitely look elsewhere. The 3GHz Pentium Dual-Core E5700 processor crawled through our benchmark tests with an overall score of just 35 and a particularly slow performance in our video editing and multi-tasking tests. There’s not much memory here, either – the 3GB of RAM is a little scant if you want to carry out tasks such as mass image editing. The PC comes installed with a 64-bit version of Windows 7, which makes upgrading your memory a possibility, but there’s a lot of screws to remove and it’s a fiddly job.

The PC’s graphics capabilities are similarly poor. The motherboard uses Intel’s elderly G43 chipset, which provides you with G4500HD on-board graphics. The PC will play HD video files at the screen’s native 1,920×1,080 resolution, but its gaming performance is poor and this isn’t a computer for the latest games. The 500GB hard disk isn’t particularly generous, but isn’t bad for the money. Despite a rather poor all-round performance in our tests, the Z3731 is actually a perfectly capable little PC; it’s fine if you want to browse the web, edit your photos, watch videos or do any of the tasks that people usually want a computer for.