The 27-inch Apple iMac remains the gold standard among large-screen all-in-one (AIO) desktops, but not everyone can afford a computer that starts at $1,799 and climbs rapidly from there. You could move to the opposite extreme with the HP Chromebase All-in-One 22, which offers a relatively dinky screen and the mostly-for-browsing Chrome OS for a thrifty $480. Or you could try for a sweet spot between the two with the Windows 11-based Acer Aspire C27 (starts at $849.99; $1,299.99 as tested). The model C27-1655-UA93 being tested here serves up a better mix of components behind its 27-inch screen than the baseline big iMac. The tradeoffs are the Acer’s bland looks, which lack the sophistication of Apple’s iconic iMac design, and its lower display resolution, which would be more at home on a 24-inch AIO. But if you forgive those flaws, the Aspire C27 is an affordable iMac alternative that delivers strong performance for the price.
When 1080p Isn’t Quite Enough
The most striking aspect about the Aspire C27’s design is its thin profile. From straight on, the system is nondescript, with thin bezels framing a display perched atop a V-shaped stand. The components are packed in behind the bottom half of the screen, the top half of which is only 0.25 inch thick. At 24.2 inches wide by 17.7 inches high, the Acer is more compact than the 27-inch iMac, and less than half the weight (only 8.8 pounds versus 19.7). The Aspire is not only a good pick for tight budgets but also if you’re tight on space.
One reason the C27 is so petite is that Acer put the speakers behind the display instead of opting for a speaker bar beneath it. The speakers therefore aren’t front-facing, but aimed downward. I was initially skeptical of this setup, but the audio output impressed me because the sound bounced off my desk and filled my small office. Without no subwoofer, the two stereo speakers lack much of a bass response, but there’s ample volume for watching Netflix and YouTube.
As mentioned, the disparity in display resolution between the Aspire C27 and the 27-inch iMac is striking. The Acer’s full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) panel offers only a fraction of the resolution of Apple’s Retina 5K (5,120-by-2,880-pixel) screen. Frankly, 1080p resolution is a better fit for a 22- or 24-inch panel and is stretched thin at the 27-inch diagonal size. Text and the edges of icons look fuzzy, and you can spot individual pixels when sitting a normal distance from the display.
Besides being far from the sharpest, the Aspire’s screen is not the brightest. It proved sunny enough for my home office, which is lit with a combination of overhead lighting and weak winter sunlight from the windows, but I never reduced the brightness setting from its maximum during my two weeks of testing. Our Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software measured the Acer at a meager 216 nits of max brightness, when we usually hope for 300 or preferably 400 nits. It did better in our color gamut or palette measurements, covering 99% of the sRGB and 77% of both the Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 color spaces,. But overall, it falls well short of workstation or home theater standards.
A 720p webcam resides above the display. The camera is just as unimpressive as cheap laptop webcams, offering an underexposed image that was littered with noise or static—in other words, dark and grainy. It’s barely usable for Zoom meetings or really any other application. Perhaps that’s why the top half of the Aspire C27 is so thin; it makes it easy to clip on an external webcam. At least the camera has a physical privacy shutter so you can cover the lens you’ll rarely if ever use.
I Don’t See USB-C
The Aspire C27’s ports are all located in a neat row on the rear panel. I would have appreciated a front- or side-mounted port or two for easier access, but it’s not too difficult to reach the ports around back. What you’ll find there, however, barely covers the basics: You get an HDMI video output, four USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, an Ethernet jack, and audio line-in and -out ports.
The biggest omission from this short selection is a USB Type-C port. If you have a USB-C storage drive, phone charging cable, or other device, you’ll need to keep an adapter handy. The system also lacks an SD or microSD media card slot. Looking for the power button? It’s centered in the bottom bezel below the display.
We usually see an inexpensive, wired keyboard and mouse with low-end to midrange AIO desktops, but Acer ups the ante with the Aspire C27 by including a wireless set. The keyboard is compact, comfortable, and quite functional. The mouse, however, works well enough but is undersized. The smart move is to toss the bundled mouse in your laptop bag for use when you’re on the road and buy a full-size desktop mouse to use with the Aspire.
One item you usually don’t find on a laptop that you get with the Aspire C27 is an extra storage drive. The system features both a 512GB solid-state boot drive for fast access and a 1TB hard drive for extra storage space.
Testing the Aspire C27: Modest Pep With GeForce MX
Our Acer Aspire C27 featured an 11th Generation Intel Core i7-1165G7 processor, 16GB of memory, the 512GB SSD (loaded with Windows 11 Pro) and 1TB hard drive, and Nvidia GeForce MX330 graphics. The Core i7 is a quad-core mobile CPU, while the GeForce MX330 is an entry-level mobile GPU with 2GB of dedicated display memory that represents a step up from CPU-based integrated graphics.
For our performance charts, we compared the Aspire C27 to the Lenovo IdeaCentre AIO 3, the only other Windows-based all-in-one we’ve tested since moving to our new benchmark suite a few months back. We also included Apple’s 27-inch iMac, but that AIO is incompatible with many of our standard Windows benchmarks, so we added two non-AIO desktops, in the budget Dell Inspiron Desktop 3891 and the midrange Lenovo Legion Tower 5i.
On the whole, the Acer felt peppy and handled various multitasking scenarios without a hiccup. Its efficient mobile components allow it to run quietly, too, with barely an audible hum during everyday work. For general use, the Aspire C27 has more than enough muscle to provide a pleasant Windows 11 experience and even handle some light media editing tasks.
Productivity Tests
The main benchmark of UL’s PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10’s Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of the system’s boot drive.
Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
Our last productivity test is Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s famous image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
The Aspire C27 trailed in PCMark 10, but still posted a suitable score (we consider 4,000 points to indicate good productivity for Microsoft Office or Google Workspace tasks). The Core i9-based iMac predictably dominated our CPU tests, with the Legion’s six-core Core i5 chip taking second place. Among the less expensive Windows PCs, the Acer placed in the middle of the pack, with a respectable performance in Photoshop.
Graphics Tests
We test Windows PCs’ graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).
We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.
In both sets of tests, the Aspire C27 slotted in between the Lenovo IdeaCentre AIO 3 and its integrated graphics and the Lenovo Legion Tower 5i that features the midrange GeForce GTX 1660 Super GPU. The Acer can’t be classified as a gaming PC—far from it—but its 83 frames per second in the GFXBench Car Chase 1080p test indicate that it’s capable of playing casual games at its native resolution.
My Kingdom for a QHD Panel
The Acer Aspire C27 is not without its charms. Its mobile Core i7 CPU and GeForce MX330 graphics, along with its 16GB of RAM and ample storage, provide good bang for your all-in-one buck. And its parts are efficient enough that a loud cooling fan isn’t needed to keep thermals in check. The thin, compact design is also a plus for those short on space but looking for a big-screen AIO.
However, it’s that big screen that gives us pause: It’s too bad that Acer doesn’t offer a QHD or 1440p display upgrade that would solve the Aspire’s biggest problem. Its 1080p resolution just doesn’t put enough pixels across a 27-inch panel to provide a sharp picture. For casual home use, the 1080p screen might suffice, but you’ll want either a smaller display or, more likely, higher resolution for content creation and media editing or even if you’ll be looking at text for many hours a day.
