BUSINESS PC: Acer Veriton 7600GT

This was the first Intel Prescott based PC we received. It's a powerful business desktop from Acer, based on the 3 GHz Prescott processor. The machine comes in an amazing looking charcoal black colored cabinet along with a matching black mouse and silver-black keyboard, both of which are USB based and extremely comfortable to use. There's a special pop-up panel on top of the cabinet, which has four USB ports, mike and headphone jacks. There are four more USB ports at the back of the cabinet. The remaining configuration is also good, with Intel 865G chipset based motherboard, 256 MB 400 MHz dual channel DDR memory (upgradeable to 4 GB), and a 40GB 7200 RPM HDD. It has Intel's onboard Extreme Graphics 2 with 64 MB Video RAM, as well as an AGP slot if you want to add more graphics power. The PC also has an onboard Gigabit Ethernet port, and there are three empty PCI slots and three empty RAM slots for future expansion.

Coming to performance, it fared well in all our tests, scoring 30.4 in Business Winstone 2002, and 45 in Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2003. Plus it scored 131 fps in Quake III Arena and 3951 in 3DMark2001SE (Quake and 3D Mark were done at 640x480x16). These are good scores, thanks to Intel's new and improved onboard Extreme graphics. We also encoded a complete audio CD containing about 770 MB worth of WAV files, to MP3, which took only around 3 mins and 57 secs. Similarly, DivX video compression took only 14 min for a 794 MB video.

The PC also comes with a set of recovery CDs to quickly restore the machine with the factory defaults in case of a crash. Also, it bundles Norton Antivirus 2003 (OEM) and LANScope V6.3 that has Intel LANDesk client Manager to manage and troubleshoot common computer problems. 

Overall, for around 40K it's a good buy for businesses.

Siddharth Sharma