Acer Aspire TC-885-UR16 Desktop Review

The Acer Aspire TC-885-UR16 is straightforward a cleanly assembled power desktop that boasts of impressive all-around performance. It’s a desktop that’s equally good for home powering daily office and home day-to-day tasks. Under the hood, it comes with an Intel Core i7-8700 Processor, 8GB DDR4 memory and 1TB hard drive.

For the price, the Acer Aspire TC-885-UR16 fits the bill as a budget home and office desktop with IT-friendly serviceability and upgradeability on the side.

Acer Aspire TC-885-UR16 Desktop, 8th Gen Intel...

Pros

  • Beautiful design
  • Excellent performance
  • convenient to manage case
  • Sufficient room for expansion
  • lots of ports
  • minimal heat emission
  • DVD-RW drive available

Cons

  • Lacks SSD
  • Slow booting
Acer Aspire TC-885-UR16 Desktop, 8th Gen Intel...
  • 8th Generation Intel Core i7-8700 Processor (Up to 4.6GHz)
  • 8GB DDR4 2666MHz Memory, 1TB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive & 8X DVD-Writer Double-Layer Drive (DVD-RW)
  • 802.11ac WiFi, Gigabit Ethernet LAN & Bluetooth 5.0

The Acer Aspire TC-885 series ranks high among the best budget PCs in the market right now, sharing ranks with PCs such as Dell Inspiron 5680. Acer wanted to target budget PC consumers with a desktop that looks good and has a snappy performance for daily productivity. The Acer Aspire TC-885-UR16 is an iteration of the TC 885 series built to serve as a solid, reliable workstation.

We loved the fact that it works silently even under load making it a great choice for dorm rooms and home/office settings. While we appreciate that Acer Aspire TC-885-UR16 is a workhorse capable of dutifully serving you, we would love to know how it stacks up against the competition.

Acer Aspire TC-885-UR16 Specs

Processor 4.6 Intel Core i7-8700
RAM 8GB DDR4
Storage 1000 GB Mechanical Hard drive
Graphics Card Intel UHD Graphics 630
Operating System Windows 10 Home
Dimensions 13.8 x 6.4 x 13.4 inches
Weight 16.05 pounds
Power Supply 300W
Networking 802.11ac WiFi, 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet LAN (RJ-45 Port), Bluetooth 5.0

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Design and Features

Other than punchy performance, the Acer Aspire TC-885-UR16 is guilty of a remarkable subtle but impressive design. From first glance, the design is as sleek as it is powerful, certainly reminiscent of the HP Omen Obelisk’s understated design. The chassis comes with uniquely ridged edges which give it a vaguely aggressive aura. The front face is pyramidal-shaped and also has a sleek line that runs at the center dividing the front face into two halves.The front face of Acer Aspire TC-885-UR16 Desktop is neat and comes with an optical drive.

One side only has the embossed “Acer” name while the other half has an optical drive and host of ports. Also, just as the HP Omen obelisk, Acer included their logo at the top center of the face. Overall, the demure matte black metal case is attractive and doesn’t scream gamer at all. There is also no glass side panel on the sides as common on some gaming desktops. However, it is easy to get inside the hood (open a few screws at the rear). The left side panel is grilled and acts as the desktop’s vent.

At 13.78 x 6.42 x 13.39 inches and 18.6 pounds, the Aspire TC is neither too large nor too small. It won’t take up a large chunk of your office desk space and fortunately won’t break your back when lugging it around the house or office. The sturdy metal build should allow you to put the PC standing upright or resting on its side without worrying about the panel scratching.

Upgradeable interior

Like we mentioned, getting inside is easy. There isn’t much visual interest inside considering it isn’t a gaming desktop and has no RGB lighting, radiator pipes from the liquid cooling system. What you’ll find inside is a 300-watt power supply, 12GB DDR4 in 2 slots (no other free memory slots), a single 1 PCIx 16 slot, PCIe X1, one M.2 for SSD and one M.2 for WLAN/Bluetooth. Generally, from a first onset, this means you can upgrade a few components if you want to improve performance in the future.

Sufficient Amount of Ports

Our unit came packed with an extra wired keyboard and mouse which is the norm with desktops nowadays. They both are usable but we would recommend upgrading to wireless mouse and keyboard for better positioning. As for connectivity options, the front face of the PC holds a single USB 3.1 Type C port, one USB 3.1 port, microphone, and headphone jacks and an SD card reader. There is also a DVD-RW drive which isn’t a neccessity but is helpful in the event you ever want to run your software or play movies through DVDs.

The rear has a host of ports. It’s sufficient to say the bulk of the ports are located here. You’ll find two more USB 3.1 ports, 4 USB 2.0 ports (which can be used for mouse and keyboard connecting), two HDMI ports and one VGA port. Other connectivity options include 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0.

Performance

The Acer Aspire TC-885-UR16 is not the most expensive system but it has a few features that give it a leg up over some of its pricier competition. It runs whisper-quiet thanks to the Intel Core i7-8700 Processor packed inside. This 8th Generation processor raises the performance envelope thanks to its six hyper-threaded cores. At base clock speed, it runs at 3.2GHz and 4.4GHz at 4-cores.

Meanwhile, the six cores working together reach up to 4.3GHz which for the most part is exactly the same as the Intel Core i7-8700K. Ultimately, the difference between the two cards comes is the fact that Intel Core i7-8700K is overclockable while our unit isn’t.

Frequencies Base 1 2 4 6
Intel Core i7-8700K 3.7GHz 4.7GHz 4.6GHz 4.4GHz 4.3GHz
Intel Core i7-8700 3.2GHz 4.6GHz 4.5GHz 4.4GHz 4.3GHz

Nonetheless, the processors 6-cores and 12 threads place this desktop as a great choice alternative for gaming and handling daily productivity. Compare to its predecessor (i7-7700), the two extra cores provides better performance by almost 50%. In real time use, it is capable enough to handle any kind of task you throw at it. It proved quite smooth in photo- and video-editing and running software and applications.

Memory and storage

Its other high-performance components are the 8GB DDR4 memory and 1TB mechanical hard drive. Combined with the 12 threads and 8GB memory, this PC is capable of slicing through parallelized workloads such as Adobe’s Premiere video-editing software. That being said, the performance on such software and tasks (such as rendering videos)would have profited if the memory was a lot more than 8GB. But that only applies to users looking to use this PC for intensive tasks.

Otherwise, the 8GB is more than sufficient for daily productivity and most modern gaming titles. It should easily handle streaming music, live chats, web browsing on multiple tabs, and every other in between task.

As for the storage, Acer included a 1TB 7200RPM hard drive. The hard drive storage space is enough for saving most of your work, data, and games. Also, the HDD comes with great sequential read speeds. Considering the operating system is installed on the HDD, the system boot time is a bit longer and applications launch is slower. If you’re like me, and consider speed over storage space, installing a Solid-state drive (SSD) is the best solution here.

Gaming Performance

The Core i7-8700 integrates an Intel UHD Graphics 630 which is not powerful enough to handle most modern games. You will need a dedicated graphics card to have enough muscle to play modern games at high resolutions and decent frame rates. For that reason alone, the Acer Aspire TC-885-UR16 is not a gaming machine. If you really have to game, then perhaps try some online games or modern titles at the lowest settings (which takes out the fun out of the game!)

Our Final Take

The Acer Aspire TC-885-UR16 is a compact machine with subtle and demure aesthetics which make it fit easily into a home office setup. Aside from its great price point, we loved it for the fast hexa-core processor that makes it an effective multitasker. At the less than $700, you get an 8GB RAM, 1TB mechanical storage, plenty of port options, optical drive and an expandable easy to access the case. If you’re planning on tweaking the system in the future, the internal space supports future upgrades.

Overall, if you’re planning to use it for home and office productivity, then the Acer Aspire TC-885-UR16 will serve you for quite a few years.

Our recommendation, however, is coupling the fast CPU with a quick SSD for the best experience. Otherwise, the Acer Aspire TC-885-UR16 is a great value desktop that has the power and won’t break the bank. Consider it in your shortlist next time you need to upgrade your home, dorm room or office PC.

Are there other Alternatives?

There are a couple of alternatives in this home and office desktop space. First, I would recommend the Acer Aspire TC-885-ACCFLi30 Desktop, a classy but formidable PC. It packs high-end 8th generation 4-core (i3-8100), 8GB DDR4 memory, 1TB HDD coupled with 16GB of Optane memory. Well, it has a less powerful processor compared to our unit but makes up for that in pricing. It’s a total beast and it sells for much much lesser than our unit. If you can find it at $400, then it is a deal.

For about $500, the Acer Aspire TC-885-ACCFLi5 Desktop is an exceptional performer that’s equally at home powering daily office and home day-to-day tasks. Under the hood, it packs 8th Gen Intel i5-8400 processor which is impressive for run-to-the-mill tasks, 12GB of RAM and 2TB of hard drive storage. Just like our unit, it’s also easy to service and upgrades. Again, its Achilles Heel in relation to our unit is the i5-8400 processor. Our unit has relatively better performance thanks to its i7-8700 CPU.

Finally, our last recommendation is the CyberpowerPC Gamer Xtreme VR GXiVR8060A7 gaming PC. This powerful gaming desktop brags of an Intel Core i5-9400F processor, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 graphics card, 8GB of RAM, and a 120GB SSD + 1TB hard drive. Just from its features, it’s easy to tell it’s built as an excellent entry-level gaming desktop. What we loved about it, is the fact that it comes with a dedicated graphics card, plenty of storage and ports.

It’s great for multitasking, video editing, coding or just simple multimedia or office tasks. For user who want to upgrade the Acer Aspire TC-885-UR16 and don’t have the skills, this CyberPower PC has all the right components.

Should you buy it?

Yes. While it won’t satisfy users looking for a gaming machine, the Acer Aspire TC-885-UR16 is a great choice for daily productivity.

Acer Aspire TC-885-UR16 Desktop, 8th Gen Intel...
  • 8th Generation Intel Core i7-8700 Processor (Up to 4.6GHz)
  • 8GB DDR4 2666MHz Memory, 1TB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive & 8X DVD-Writer Double-Layer Drive (DVD-RW)
  • 802.11ac WiFi, Gigabit Ethernet LAN & Bluetooth 5.0

Liam Weissman

A lover of MacBook Air and the Dell XPS line of laptops, Liam has been researching and writing as a guest blogger for numerous websites for over 10 years. Now, he blogs about tech trends, PCs, laptops, gadgets, and other emerging gadgets on FancyAppliance.com.

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