Asus Essentio CM5570-AP003 review

While the Gateway SX2700-01's slim tower form offers limited expansion room inside, the Asus Essentio CM5570-AP003 makes it much easier to upgrade because of its larger case. The motherboard has room for a single 16x PCI Express graphics card as well as a pair of standard PCI card and a 1X PCI Express card for wireless networking. You can also add an extra hard drive and another optical disc drive, but future memory upgrades will require you to throw away at least one memory card, as all four slots are currently occupied.

Juice box
Off (watts)	2.64
Sleep (watts)	4.08
Idle (watts)	51.57
Load (watts)	81.41
Raw (annual kWh)	208.27776
EnergyStar compliant	No
Annual operating cost (@$0.1135/kWh)	$23.64

The Essentio CM5570-AP003 doesn't perform quite as well in our power tests, meaning you'll have to pay more per year to keep this PC running. The cost comparison below drives the point further in favor of the Gateway SX2800-01, which requires less power to operate at a faster performance rate than the Asus. The $2 difference per year isn't that big of a deal, but it's clear that the Essentio is not as efficient as it could be.

Asus falls short once again in customer service support. The Essentio is backed for a full year, but its phone support is limited to 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. PT, and only from Monday to Friday. And even though Asus includes links on the Windows desktop to its support page, even that only gets you as far as its woefully underdeveloped drop-down menu-based help site. HP and Gateway (along with pretty much every other PC vendor) both offer much more robust online assistance.

Find out more about how we test desktop systems.

System configurations:
Asus Essentio CM5570-AP003
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit; 2.6GHz Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5300; 6GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM; 32MB Intel MGA X4500 integrated graphics chip; 750GB, 7200rpm hard drive

Dell Inspiron 545s-1476N
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit; 2.6GHz Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5300; 4GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM; 256MB Intel GMA 3100 integrated graphics chip; 640GB, 7200rpm hard drive

Gateway DX4822-01
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit; 2.6GHz Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5300; 6GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM; 32MB Intel GMA X4500 integrated graphics chip; 1TB, 7200rpm hard drive

Gateway SX2800-01
Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64-bit; 2.3GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200; 4GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM; 32MB (shared) Intel GMA X4500 integrated graphics chip; 640GB, 7200rpm hard drive

HP Pavilion Slimline s5220y
Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-bit; 2.6 GHz Pentium Dual-Core E5300; 4GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM; 256MB Intel GMZ 3100 integrated graphics chip; 640GB, 7200rpm hard drive