ASUS ET27 All in One PC Review

We recently published a review with one of Intel’s VP, Mr Christian Morales and I remember him mentioning that sales of All-in-One PCs are on the rise. This doesn’t come as a surprise when you see something like the ASUS ET27 that dropped into our labs a couple of weeks back. There are quite a few models with different configurations that ASUS has released around this 27” AIO- the one we are specifically looking at is the ET2701INTI.

Build quality & design

If I was to describe the the ASUS ET27 in one word, it would be gorgeous. The black frame around the large screen flushed below a glass panel along with a silver bar below it gives the ET27 a very sophisticated look. Add to that the metallic looking stand and you have a device that will look equally at place in an art gallery as it would on your desk.

Where ASUS can use a bit of reworking is the sides of the device. On the right you have a Bluray drive however instead of being a slot-in type, its a tray that pops out spoiling the look. Also on the left, a hinged door hides some of the ports, however, with the sub-woofer connecter here, the door is pretty much kept open all the time making it unnecessary. ASUS should have reposition the subwoofer connector to the back of the PC where the video inputs and networking port is present along with two USB ports. On the left where you have the subwoofer port, you also have audio outputs, an SD card reader, an eSATA port as well as a pair of USB 2.0 ports.

Specifications & Performance

Depending on what you want to use the computer for, the ASUS ET27 could appear as a pretty decent or a very mid-range PC to you. If you mostly use your PC for things like web surfing, using office applications and watching videos, then its plenty fast. But if you like to game or run a whole bunch of applications at the same time then the lack of an SSD and the low powered GPU spoil the fun. Here is the list of specs of the unit we recieved.

The following table shows the benchmarks posted by the ET27 and for comparison, we have taken the recently reviewed HP Spectre ONE and Acer Aspire 5600U All-in-One PCs.

Screen and Sound

The ASUS ET is equipped with a 27” LED backlit touch screen with a ten point multi-touch sensor. The resolution of the panel is full HD or 1920×1080 which, on such a large screen makes text appear pixelated. I can understand that Windows 8 makes good use of touch however a 27” screen is not going to be placed right in front of your face and thus, extending your hand to reach the screen becomes a bit of a chore. Also with video inputs on the back, you will probably not be touching the screen much when watching TV or movies. I think ASUS should have used a higher resolution non-touch panel on the ET27 which would have given a crisper look to the fonts and might have even resulted in a slightly lower cost that could have been allocated to using a better GPU.

Coming to the sound, ASUS has certainly packed a good pair of speakers along with a sub-woofer. While the PC sounds pretty good, the subwoofer did not add as much of an impact as I thought it would. It’s a bit small in size and is more suitable on a desk than the floor where subwoofers are generally kept. Regardless, the short cable on the subwoofer doesn’t allow you to place it on the floor even if you wanted to.

Conclusion

I’ve skipped the heat and noise section in this review because the ASUS ET27 is extremely silent and temperature levels barely reached lukewarm at best. Were it not for the light on the power button below the LCD, I wouldn’t even be able to tell if the PC is turned on or not when the screen went off.

Priced at AED 7299, I found the ASUS ET27 a bit on the higher side. It is certainly very well designed but in the end, you know that you’re paying for the design as the components inside aren’t really super-highend.