The Acer Aspire AX3950 and Acer H233H FullHD LCD

I had a pair of new workhorses recently. People call them Acer Aspire AX3950 and Acer H233H FullHD LCD combo. I called them my workhorses as they are working more than 6 hours a day for my blogging and photography hobby.

I have actually planned to upgrade my PC quite a long time ago when I realised both my PC and laptop’s 200G hard disk was going to get full very soon and Intel Core Duo with Windows Vista just couldn’t cope with my multi photo processing and blogging task. However, too many options left me undecided . Until last May when I found the Acer Aspire AX3900 fitted with an Intel Core i3 530 processor. Its design and bundled specification was just fit my requirement and the selling price was the cheapest among other brands such as Dell, HP, or Compaq. But it was out of stock! Manufacturer had stopped producing it and that was because a replacement was on its way.

I waited for nearly a month until this June when Acer finally released a replacement model for AX3900, and it is called Acer Aspire AX3950. AX3950 is actually the facelift model of AX3900. There are no apparent changes to its spec except the processor has been upgraded to Intel Core i3 540 with 3.0HGHz. Cosmetic wise, AX3950 has a mat textured front top faceplate instead of all-piano black AX3900.

The other spec of Acer Aspire AX3950 includes 4GB DDR3 RAM, 500GB Hard drive, DVD-Super Multi optical drive, 40-in-1 multi card reader (including Compact Flash memory card for DSLR), 8 USB ports, HDMI port, Intel GMA HD graphic card. Every Acer Aspire AX3950 is bundled with Windows 7 operation system, a pair of speakers, keyboard and mouse.

For a small factor mini tower Intel i3 machine selling at RM1,700.00, the overall performance is very good. Multi tasking photo processing could be done in ease since Intel i3 is a multi core processor. With 4Gb RAM and faster Windows 7, everything seems running smooth and fast with this mighty machine. The only let down is the built-in Intel graphic chips which is still not on par with either Nvidia or ATi in terms of performance and speed in processing graphics. A dedicated graphic card with built-in memory of at least 500Mb is necessary if you want to play fast action 3D-games which require super fast refresh rate. I still can live with it since I’m doing mainly still photo processing with Photoshop. Intel HD graphic and Windows 7 is just nice for the 64bit version of CS5. 🙂

Coupled with my AX3950 is Acer H233H Full HD LCD monitor. This is a 23″ wide screen full HD LCD which is also the cheaper option in the market for only RM660.00. Its screen is very bright with impressive colour reproduction. It’s a stylish all piano-black LCD with soft touch light blue coloured menu button. The On/Off white lit button is next to it. Navigating the menu is easy with only few but essential setting available. From there you can adjust Brightness/Contrast and Colour Temperature via RGB setting.

Disappointing part would be its preset colour setting. Both the preset Warm and Cool setting are unusable. I needed to calibrate it under User Custom using the Windows Color Management. The colour setting out from the factory is way too warm. It could not match my camera LCD, my printer or my laptop, which means it will never match other people’s monitors also. This made me mad! Whatever photo I processed  using this Acer LCD without calibration, it turned out too cool or bluish in other’s LCD! What looked colour perfect in my LCD would appear too dull in other’s and this made me crazy! After 1 month of tweaking and adjusting its colour setting, at least it looks alright now. What do you think?

Also remember to switch its default colour space to sRGB in Windows Control Panel. DON”T USE THE DEFAULT COLOUR PROFILE THAT COME WITH THE ACER LCD OR OTHERS. It will not tally with the rest of your system, and your camera. Most of the system and software (like Windows and CS5) are adopting sRGB as market standard, which the white will look white, red will look red, and the blue will look blue in your monitor, printer, Photoshop, or camera LCD. If you use colour space other than sRGB, the blue might look purple, red might look orange and so on. So be careful with this.

Overall, after using the Acer Aspire AX3950 and Acer H233H FullHD LCD for more than 1 month now, I think they are capable and fit for what I’m doing everyday, now and then: Photo Processing, and Blogging Travel. Other than that, I don’t really care… 🙂 – Travel Feeder, your ultimate travel photo blog

About The Author

Cecil Lee

The author is an avid traveler and photography hobbyist who loves to share with others his travel and photo-taking experience in many popular tourist destinations around Europe, Asia and Australasia. Read the exciting stories with many photos captured on his journeys.