Medion Akoya AIO PC P5501 D review

The Medion Akoya AIO PC P5501 D offers a level of processing power usually out of range at its price point. If you're purely looking to crunch numbers and aren't bothered about its pain points, the Akoya AIO PC P5501 is an unexciting, yet passable machine.

We liked

Having an Intel Core i7 CPU means that the Medion has the raw computing grunt to chew through CPU-intensive tasks, and its 2TB HDD offers plenty of storage capacity for storing files and programs.

We disliked

Quite a lot. The display suffers from rotten viewing angles and poor colour saturation, its speakers lack any definition when turned up and the ports along the rear bottom edge are difficult to access. Additionally, it can't be upgraded and only features a HDD rather than SSD for storage. The machine is also bulky, heavy and isn't responsive enough during touchscreen operation.

Final verdict

If you don't care about appearances, need raw processing power and have a decent external speaker set to hand (in addition to a keyboard and mouse), the Medion Akoya AIO PC P5501 D is good value for money.

On the other hand, unless you're a power user who needs Hyper Threading and other benefits offered by Intel's Core i7 CPU chip, you could bag yourself a more exciting model with better build quality for roundabout the same cost - such as Lenovo C560's Touch, Acer's Aspire AZ3-615 or HP's Pavilion 23-p000na.

Although it doesn't have a touchscreen, Apple's 21.5-inch iMac can be had for £849 (around $1,343 or AUS$1,567) and should be considered by anyone seeking best-in-class build quality and the ability to dual-boot to both OS X and Windows 8.1.