Asus Essentio CM5570-AP002 Video

Asus Essentio CM5570-AP002 Video Transcript

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>> Hi I'm Rich Brown, senior editor for CNET.com. Today we're gonna take a look at the Asus Assentio [assumed spelling] CM5570. So this is the basic mainstream desktop, and it's also the first mid-tower we've seen from Asus. You might know them better for their EPCs that are pretty popular in netbooks, and we've also seen a slim tower from Asus before, but never a mid-tower. So that's sort of interesting. There's really not that much to say about this system though. It's kind of your basic budget Windows box. You see the pretty simple front panel here, nice clean design. You'll see there's a DVD burner here, behind that front door. There's also a media card reader here. You get a couple of audio ports and USB ports on the front panel as well. And around back you'll actually see a few interesting features for a system like this. And it's only five hundred ten bucks, keep in mind. So anything above the norm is kind of a bonus here. You have six USB 2 ports down the back, you've got both VGA and DVI video out, you've got 7.1 analog audio, Ethernet networking, digital audio output, as well as a standard old school keyboard jack. But what's probably most unique is that it has an HDMI video out as well as Wi-Fi down here. Now we said this is a mid-tower, so when you see multimedia features like HDMI in particular, you don't necessarily think oh I'm gonna put this in the living room. That said, there are standard desktop LCDs that have HDMI outputs, and you know, if Asus wants to put an HDMI out in here and also keep the price low, we're certainly not gonna complain. So inside the case it's also business as usual. You have a dual core Pentium chip here, you have room for a PCI Express graphics card, as well as two standard PCI expansion slots. You have four memory slots total with six gigs out of the box, so that should be enough. This is a 64-bit Windows system too. So you know, you have plenty of memory headroom, so that's great. There's a nice large hard drive here, 640 gigabytes. You know, overall it's pretty well configured for its price. We're looking at a lot of back to school PCs over the next few weeks. And in the budget segment this is probably the better mid-tower. We've looked at two, this and an HP. But overall we found that slim tower PCs seem to be more popular, and a little more efficient overall in this price range. That said though, you get a nice degree of expandability with the full size case, as well as the extra HDMI and Wi-Fi features that we don't normally see in mid-towers at this price. So I'm Rich Brown, this is the Asus Assentio CM5570.