Acer Veriton Vero Mini First Impressions

Acer’s Veriton Vero Mini is an eco-friendly small form factor (SFF) PC and an interesting business-class alternative to the Intel NUC.

And first things first, there’s a lot of stuff in the box. In addition to the cute little Veriton Vero Mini, I found myself pulling out a wired keyboard, wired mouse, the power supply (in two pieces), a VESA mounting bracket, and a stand, each in its own static-resistant bag.

Those last two items offer a nice hint of the versatility of this SFF PC. Sure, you could just place it on your desk in landscape mode, like a mini desktop PC, but can also mount it on the back of your display for the ultimate in space savings. Or, place it upright on your desk like a tiny tower PC, using the stand.

I’m a big fan of minimalism and so the VESA mount briefly taunted me.

But I’m an even bigger fan of easy access to PC ports, and so I went with the stand, which attaches to the base of the PC with a single screw, and put the VESA mounting bracket back in the box with the keyboard and mouse. (I have my own solutions, which are both ergonomic and wireless.)

The PC itself is, of course, cute and diminutive—it’s just 1.4 x 7.3 x 7.3 inches and weighs just 2.87 pounds, though the 135-watt power supply is of course external and larger than a typical laptop charger.

The front panel is curiously adorned with gray or silver flecks, which I at first mistook for some kind of dust or whatever. But I assume this is due to the device’s use of post-consumer recycled (PCR) plastics. You see similar “flaws”—many would call them visual niceties—in Acer’s Vero products as well. (The sustainability continues to the PC’s packaging, which is made of 100 percent recycled plastic and 100 percent recyclable paper.)

Expandability looks solid, though I’d like to see Thunderbolt 4/USB4 in there somewhere: the front panel features a combo headphone/microphone jack, a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port, a USB 2 Type-A port, and a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port.

And on the rear, you’ll find a full-sized HDMI port of indeterminate capabilities, a full-sized DisplayPort port, two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, two USB 2 Type-A ports, and a gigabit Ethernet port. And in addition to the Ethernet, the Acer also supports Wi-Fi 6 and some form of Bluetooth.

But the Veriton Vero’s processor choice is both interesting and, to me, unusual: it’s an Intel Core i5-12700T chipset, a 12-core (dodeca-core) chipset with 8 performance cores and 4 efficient cores, and backed by integrated Intel UHD Graphics 770 (and not Iris Xe). I had never heard of a T-series Intel Core processor, let alone this exact model. But it’s a 35-watt desktop PC part, and a bit of research confirmed what I suspected, that the T-series processors have lower power limits than Intel’s other desktop chipsets. They are, in other words, designed specifically for SFF PCs like the Veriton Vero.

(By comparison, mainstream Intel NUCs typically use 15-watt laptop-focused U-series chipsets.)

Beyond that, the Acer includes 16 GB of DDR4 RAM and 1 TB of PCIe SSD storage. So the internal components—and external expansion, too—are mostly a generation behind the most modern or high-end parts. But that’s not unusual for a mainstream business-class PC like this.

The Veriton Vero can be had with Windows 10 Pro or Windows 11 Pro, and Acer bundles various managed business utilities and services. Which I’ll look at after I’ve recorded Windows Weekly this week, since I can’t mess around with that setup without more lead time.

Pricing is about $1200 for this configuration, though the entry price is about $850 for a model with a Core i5-12400T (6-core) processor and 512 GB of storage. You can upgrade the RAM in both cases to 64 GB, and both come with 3-year warranties.

More soon.