Over the years, the AIO (All-In-One PC) has gotten a bad wrap. With the notable exceptions of Apple AAPL -0.91% and HP, all-in-ones have been met with tepid acceptance in the market. Largely considered niche’ products that do many things adequately but none exceptionally well, the AIO has the high watermark of performance and functionality of a full-sized desktop set for it, with the limitations of its form factor, size and thermal constraints holding it back. Power users might have considered an AIO like riding into battle on a rocking horse. However, as it has been often said or sung, the times they are a-changin’.
Historically, by and large, all-in-one PCs have been built with lower powered mobile platform components. Often times manufacturers would design machines with mobile CPUs and integrated graphics, along with mobile hard drives running at dog-slow 5400 RPM spindle speeds. Again, Apple, ever focused on the graphics and video workstation professional, liked to cater a higher end build-out with their iMac line but in general, AIOs couldn’t keep up with a full-fledged desktop and there always seemed to be an IO expansion option of some sort missing from the equation. More recently, however, with the latest crop of processors, graphics and solid state storage options to hit the market, AIO manufacturers appear to have been honing their chops and the AIO has gotten legs.
Take Dell’s XPS 27 Touch, for example. I realizemucking your fingers all over a 27-inch 2560X1440 display might not be appealing to some of you (and I sympathize, please use a mouse) but beyond Windows 8′s current shortcomings (Windows 8.1 can’t come fast enough), this AIO puts up benchmark busting results with very solid content creation and gaming numbers. It does so by harnessing Intel INTC -0.36%‘s latest 4th generation Haswell Core i7 quad-core processor and NVIDIA’s new Kepler-based GeForce GT 750M mobile graphics processor with a full 2GB of frame buffer memory. Finally, to give the system a much more responsive feel, the XPS 27 Touch has a 32GB mSATA SSD caching its 2 Terabyte 7200 RPM 6Gbps SATA hard drive. Okay, that’s a lot of speeds and feeds but I’m not apologizing one iota. There’s icing on the cake here too, with a traffic-shaping and prioritizing Killer Wireless-N WiFi adapter under the hood as well; so Skype or an online game session will be less likely to cough or sputter if you’re doing other things on the machine that need bandwidth.
Then there’s HP’s new Z1 27-inch AIO Workstation. This AIO is dialed in for the professional; touchers need not apply. It has an Intel Xeon E3 quad-core chip at 3.4GHz, 16GB of DDR3 1600 memory and an NVIDIA Quadro K3000M pro graphics card. What’s perhaps more interesting about the design HP put forth here, is the mechanical engineering that went into chassis access and its modular component bays. Push down on the unit and it slides down until it’s completely flat on its base. Then just push a couple of release buttons and the top pops open like the hood of a muscle car, exposing its engine, all chromed and braided.
- HP’s 27-Inch Z1 All-In-One Workstation With Intel’s Xeon and NVIDIA’s Quadro K3000M
Okay, I was waxing a bit poetic there. There’s no chrome and no braiding. That was my ’72 GTO when I was in High School. But look at this thing. It’s an all-in-one for Pete’s sake! Those are full-sized DIMMs in the memory slots and a really nice modular setup with custom fan shrouds cooling the GPU and CPU. If you’re a smaller shop, you’ll appreciate being able to work on this thing yourself. If you work for a larger company, the guys in IT will love this thing. It’s not the usual sealed hot box AIO. Sure, it’s a little more bulky than the average all-in-one but the entire system still sits right behind that 27-inch IPS panel.
If I sound a touch too enthusiastic it’s because I really do think the AIO PC has come of age. Better, more robust low power technology has enabled a fully capable computing experience in a thin, sleek footprint that sits clean, right on your desk. In these two machines, Intel and NVIDIA have offered an appreciable performance gain in general compute and graphics performance. It will be interesting to see what AMD’s Kaveri will bring to the table late this year or early in 2014. AMD’s new APU could be a natural for this form factor as well.
source : Forbes
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