Acer Brings Blu-ray to Affordable Desktop

By Geoff Duncan October 13, 2008

Acer Brings Blu-ray to Affordable Desktop

Acer—now the parent company of Gateway—is hoping to find a sweet spot in consumers end-of-year holiday buying plans with its new Aspire X3200 desktop—especially if they’re looking for a compact PC that can handle high-definition video. And the company is pairing it with the new Acer P244W LCd display that handles 1080p content with a native 1,920 by 1,080 resolution.

“The Aspire X3200 packs plenty of power for tackling the demands of multitasking and the latest digital entertainment,” said Acer America’s senior manager for retail desktop product planning Stephanie Eggert, in a statement. “Users choosing to combine the 24-inch display with the compact desktop will have an excellent system for enjoying productivity, movies, music, and games without taking up a lot of space.”

The Aspire X3200 is just 10.4 inches tall, 4 inches wide, and 14.4 inches deep, making it easy to store on (or near) desks and home theater systems. The audio jacks, card reader, and ports are front-mounted, making for easy access. The X3200 sports an AMD Phenom X3 triple core processor, 4 GB of RAM, Nvidia GeForce 8200 graphics, a 640 GB hard drive, a digital media card reader, HDMI output, and a huge helping or peripheral connectivity: an IEEE 1394 port, an eSATA port and a whopping nine USB 2.0 ports (five in front, four in back). The system also ships with stereo speakers, although true home theater folks will (of course) want to hook it up to a more robust audio system. The Acer Aspire X3200 whips with Windows Vista 64-bit Home Premium, and is available now for $679.99.

Of course, folks who are going to get into high-definition video need a suitable display: enter the Acer P244W, a 24-inch LCD monitor with a native 1,920 by 1,080 pixel resolution, a 75Hz refresh rate a 2 ms response time, a claimed 20,000:1 contrast ration, and 300 cd/m² of brightness. The P244W comes with two HDMI inputs, one VGA input, and is VESA-compatible. The P224W should be available now for $339.

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Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

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