Acer Veriton M498G-UI5650C

The Acer Veriton M498G-UI5650C is a good, inexpensive business desktop PC, with future-proofing written all over its cavernous interior and a speedy Core i5 processor. If you're looking to equip (or upgrade) a small office on the cheap, take a look at the M498G-UI5650C first before moving on to the more expensive enterprise-class business PCs.

If you're trying to outfit an office on the cheap, the Acer Veriton M498G-UI5650C gives you a whole lot of power and future-proofing for only about $700. Expandability. Three-year warranty. Core i5 power. Good price. A little bloatware. Not as many enterprise-class features as competitors.

Design
The M498G-UI5650C has a fairly pedestrian, mid-tower design with lots of expansion room. The system has 4 USB ports, headphone jack, and microphone jack up on the top of the chassis toward the front panel. This feature makes it convenient to plug in USB and audio devices when the tower is sitting on the floor next to your desk. The front of the system has rows of parallel horizontal lines topped off by a couple of angled lines, consistent with Acer's business PC ID. Aside from that small decor, the system is a plain black box.

You'll need a screwdriver to take the case off the first time (you can leave the screws off), but once you've take care of the two screws, the case door is held shut by a latch. Once you're in, you won't need a screwdriver to install PCI/PCIe cards. The system's hard drive sits in a green plastic sled, and easy to swap out in case of a hard drive failure. The system's three additional hard drive bays have empty sleds for expansion. There are a couple more free hard drive bays without sleds, as well as one free optical drive bay. The system also has two free memory DIMM slots, a PCIe x16 graphics card slot, PCIe x1 slot, and two PCI slots. The case is lockable, and has a case intrusion alarm to appease your security-conscious IT manager.

Features
The M498G-UI5650C came with a dual-core Intel Core i5-650 processor with Hyperthreading, 4GB of DDR3 memory, a 500GB 7,200rpm SATA hard drive, integrated graphics, and a DVD burner. All this makes it a candidate for your workers who need a little more power than the average $399-500 dual-core business desktop can muster. For example you may have workers that need to do light image editing or put together quick videos for YouTube-style marketing. This PC would be a better option for them. Hardcore, full-time multimedia workers will, of course, need a more dedicated workstation or Mac desktop.

The system comes with Windows 7 Professional pre-loaded, but you can alternately install the Windows XP Professional operating system, if that's what your company uses. Just go into the system recovery utility, and you can choose XP instead of Win7, though you will have to reformat the drive when you switch.

The system is mostly free of bloatware: It certainly has a lot less than Acer's Aspire consumer-oriented PCs. The M498G-UI5650C has the usual Microsoft Office 60-day trial and McAfee Internet Security 60-day trial. The system also has Acer's eSobi news reader pre-loaded, but at least the system is free from stuff like eBay, Wild Tangent Games, and the like. Rounding out the software is a bunch of Acer's helper utility apps: Acer eSettings management, QuickMigration, PowerSaver, Smartboot, and HelpDesk. The system isn't vPro certified, so it won't fit into a corporate IT structure that needs enterprise-class hardware management, but that's OK if all you only need to deploy two or three desktops at a time to your small office. The system comes with a 3-year warranty, which is very good for a PC that costs under $700. Business PCs should come with a 3-year warranty, but most consumer grade PCs come with only one.

Posted in: Acer,Desktop