When it comes to accessories, the Aspire has one of the best bundles supplied for this roundup: including an MCE remote and a radio/TV antenna! It also has a decent specification list: 3Ghz Pentium 4; 160GB HDD; and 512MB RAM. The only sticking point here, amongst all this multimedia goodness, is the inclusion of the Mobility X300 video card. It's like building a Ferrari and installing a two-stroke motor. It doesn't make much sense.

Otherwise, the Aspire is a well built unit with an attractive black/silver midi-size case. On the front there is a memory reader, two USB ports, and headphone and mic ports. Underneath are four solid rubber feet that help isolate the unit from other devices such as an amplifier or DVD player.

The sides of the case are held on by two thumbscrews at the rear, which makes accessing the inside of the case easy. The internals are neat, but upgrade options are limited: all three PCI slots are taken up by the graphics adaptors. There is space to add extra hard drives and a DVD ROM if needed, though.

Being a Windows MCE unit, the Acer is also bundled with an LCD monitor. But unlike the 27-inch behemoth included with the Pioneer, the Acer comes with a more modest 17-incher, which is ok for the study but a little small for the lounge.

The unit performs quite well in PCMark04 given its highly specced processor, with a very decent score of 4389 marks. But because of the hobbled nature of the graphics card, the games results are towards the bottom of the pile. A result of 11.8 fps in Doom is not even playable, and only one notebook fared worse.

This is an excellent media system, with everything needed to get all your pre-recorded entertainment up and running. The only disappointment is the graphics adaptor, an extra hundred dollars spent here on a X600 or similar would have made this a killer system. As such this is not recommended as a games system, and would fare much better hooked up to a TV – disregarding the included 17” monitor.