Acer’s Veriton L series of commercial desktop have been a trendsetter in term of its design and extremely small footprint. The new Aspire L3600 brings the same technology to consumers and continues to up the ante with a new chipset and faster processors which translates into better overall performance. This 3-litre Ultra Small Form Factor (USFF) design is particularly popular in certain markets like in workplaces with space constraints, but it is also gaining acceptance in the living room, thanks to its great looks and space-saving design. It also meets Intel’s VIIV platform requirements, but unfortunately this is not a good news to everybody because VIIV related online services are only available in North America.
Acer Aspire L3600 desktop computer is a small form factor media centre PC with a lot of Intel parts inside and hence comes with a Viiv (a platform initiative from Intel similar to Intel’s Centrino and vPro) badge.
Inside the PC:
When you split open the L3600, you will find a 500GB 7200RPM SATA drive, an Intel Core 2 Duo E4600 2.4GHz, with 2GB of memory, all running off the integrated Intel G31 express chipset. A slot loading DVD drive handles the multimedia duties. And the inputs include a multi-card reader, two front side USB 2.0 ports and headphone socket hidden by a front flap.
Features:
The rear side sports 4 USB ports out of which two will be used in default for the keyboard and mouse and also the VGA and DVI ports. The HDMI is absent which is undesirable as it is a media center PC. The L3600 handles audio separately which was prominent with its usage of DVI. It handles the audio separately through the six audio jacks coming from the rear side of the unit. It also supports 1 MB cache memory and hence you can overwrite DVDs using DVD rewriter which has come with dual layer. The package includes a memory card reader which has the ability to read 4 distinct types of memory cards.
Despite its small size, Acer provides a whole range of ports and connectors. This includes six USB 2.0 ports (two in fron, four at the rear), two Firewire port, Gigabit Ethernet, a DVI as well as an analogue D-Sub VGA port. There are five audio-out ports plus a microphone jacks. There’s also a multi-format card reader here. The Aspire L3600 has an FM/TV tuner card so there are also coaxial connectors for external antennas. Users can also plug in an S-Video or Composite video signal via a breakout cable(which is provided). The 320GB Western Digital Caviar SE hard disk drive should prove to be big enough for most users and the slot loading Pioneer DVR-K06RS DVD writer further helps reduce the unit’s size. Using a notebook hard disk would have freed up more spaces, but these are more expensive and capacities above 160GB are still quite rare and rather expensive.
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