Packard Bell OneTwo L I7526 review

At just shy of £800, Packard Bell’s 23in OneTwo L I7526 has a 23in widescreen touchscreen and a fast Intel Core i5-2400S processor. Its white back and chrome stand admittedly gives it a bit of an 80s feel, but it’s fairly attractive. Its living room PC credentials are further improved by its Full HD 1,920×1,080 resolution and an integrated dual DVB-T tuner that lets you watch, record and rewind digital TV.

To pack all these features into a mid-price all-in-one, Packard Bell has made a few sacrifices. There are no USB3 ports, for instance, nor any eSATA ports, so you’re out of luck if you want to connect high-speed storage. Internal storage is pretty respectable, though, with a 1TB hard disk. There’s also a memory card reader that can handle a few more formats than most, including xD.

The PC’s performance in our benchmark tests was particularly good for an all-in-one at this price, with an overall score of 78. It’s easily powerful enough for any application you care to throw at it and can even handle tasks such as video encoding with ease. There’s only 4GB of memory, but the OneTwo nonetheless had no problems in our image-processing and multi-tasking tests.

Graphics performance is another issue. While the integrated graphics capabilities of Intel’s Sandy Bridge processors are impressive, they’re not good enough for serious gaming. Even at Low quality settings and without anti-aliasing, we only got a minimally-playable 24.7fps in Dirt3, so while you’re all set for watching HD video or playing the odd game of Plants vs Zombies, you shouldn’t expect much more from the OneTwo. There’s no Blu-ray drive, either, so you’ll have to use an external drive or settle for standard definition DVDs.

There are more audio outputs than many all-in-ones have, with three rear 3.5mm ports capable of outputting 5.1 surround sound, although these cannot be combined with the front two 3.5mm mic and headphone ports for 7.1 sound. The integrated speakers sound surprisingly good, too, with a bass you can actually hear, clear treble and mid tones and excellent positional audio when you’re sitting in front of the PC. The sound isn’t amazingly loud, but it’s pleasingly clear.

The display looks good, although it’s very glossy, which makes dark screens highly reflective. Colours are rich and vivid, and pale tones are accurate. Contrast is fairly good, although some very subtle detail in dark images was lost. Unlike many all-in-one PCs, there’s even a video output. It’s only VGA, but it’ll do if you want to connect a projector. The supplied keyboard and mouse feel cheap and plasticky – they’re more functional than comfortable, but they do job and aren’t conspicuously uncomfortable to use.

Some definite compromises have been made, but with a whopping eight USB ports there’s plenty of connectivity, and we appreciated the quick processor and large hard disk at this price. However, we recommend spending £89 more to buy the Asus ET2410INTS, which includes a Blu-ray drive among its many features.