Acer Inspires With Aspire

MEDIA CENTER PC NEWS

June 4th 2006

Acer Aspire iDea 500

Acer Aspire iDea 500 Reviews
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Acer seem to have slipped under the radar with their new Viiv Media Center PC, the Aspire iDea 500. A press release was in circulation last month, but it's only in the past couple of days that the tech press has sat up and taken notice - and what a good thing we did.

For a start it blends seamlessly into the living room environment. It's one of the slimmest media center PCs that we've ever seen at 70mm high.

Secondly there's been no skimping on the technical specification. It has an Intel Core Duo processor and a Gig of RAM. Where many manufacturers fall down when building a MCPC Acer has succeeded admirably by sticking in two hybrid Analog / DVB-T Tuners so you can watch and record at the same time.

With dual hybrid TV tuners, HDMI, SCART and numerous other ports combined with internal keyboard and remote control receivers as well as a memory card reader, the Aspire iDea has all the connections that you will need.

Most importantly for a PC that is going to sit in the living room it's very quiet. At system idle, Acer says that the iDea 500 will sit around 23dBA of noise. Under more heavy loads, the system outputs roughly 28dBA.

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