The Acer Aspire M3400: How Much Does $649 Buy?
by Dustin Sklavos on August 5, 2010 3:45 PM ESTAcer Aspire M3400 Conclusion
If our review of the Dell Studio XPS 7100 was mostly favorable, its half-priced and half-powered competitor from Acer has a lot more explaining to do.
Let's start with the positives: the Aspire M3400 is a reasonable value for the money. At $649 it's a touch too expensive to be what would generally be considered a disposable desktop, replaced in three years, but the 800 series AMD chipset, Phenom II X4, 6GB of DDR3, and fast hard drive make a good case for it. And as much as I like to bag on the Radeon HD 5450 (and I do so love to bag on the 5450), at least the dedicated graphics will let you play a few modern games. Heck, if we compare it to our mobile offerings, the HD 5450 surpasses everything up to the Mobility HD 5470.
There's a problem, though: while the Aspire M3400 is a reasonable value, you can actually still do better building your own. $650 will get you a better everything from Newegg or Amazon (quickly becoming a favorite for California customers dealing with an onerous near-10% sales tax): better parts, better warranties, better expandability. Even if you're not a hardware enthusiast, though, we can find better alternatives.
Acer produced a system for Grandma Millie, assuming Grandma Millie wants to edit video or play Doom once in a while, and it can at least be pretty hassle free. She's not going to hook up the system just to be irritated because it's unresponsive (which you know is due to the amount of crapware that came installed with it), but the problem lies later on. That 300W power supply is an albatross hanging around the M3400's neck, ensuring that you'll never get too much more out of it than you already have. You can certainly replace the power supply later, but that just adds to the cost of upgrading. This is money that probably could've been saved up front.
It's disappointing: Acer normally produces some excellent values in the mobile sector at least, and you'll be lucky to find dedicated graphics at all in this price bracket. The problem is that a cursory visit to Newegg reveals an HP Pavilion P6510 at just $519, and the difference in user experience between this tower and that Pavilion is going to be slight. Are 2GB of DDR3, a Radeon HD 5450, and a 4MB L3 cache worth an extra $130 to you for the Acer? What if the HP came with wireless-n standard and a bigger hard drive? Perhaps you really care about a discrete GPU, in which case you can look at this CyberPower system that drops 2GB RAM and downgrades the Phenom X4 to an Athlon X4 but adds an HD 5670 and a 600W PSU—and cuts the price down to $610 to boot.
At the end of the day the Acer Aspire M3400-S2052 isn't necessarily a bad desktop, but it has a hard time justifying the pricetag given the compromises, and the configuration seems marketing driven rather than technology driven in places. Your $649 wouldn't be wasted on the M3400, but we're convinced the money could be better spent—or saved—elsewhere.
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strikeback03 - Friday, August 6, 2010 - link
My wife had a friend build her current desktop for her before I met her, one day last winter I upgraded her graphics drivers and was greeted by a message saying the 6-pin cable to her 8600GTS was not connected and graphics performance could be degraded until it was. The PSU had a 6-pin cable, the guy just didn't use it for some reason, but in everything she did with the system that configuration still worked.Dustin Sklavos - Friday, August 6, 2010 - link
I don't think your particular example of a power supply is a good one, though. Corsair's power supplies are notorious for being underrated and handling power draw well over spec.The power supply will age, and continuing to run it at an extreme load can substantially reduce its useful life. A 300W cheapo power supply like the unit used in the Acer doesn't have a whole lot of room to grow, is probably horribly inefficient, and with too much load placed on it will be liable to burn out...right after the warranty is up.
Dustin Sklavos - Friday, August 6, 2010 - link
And as a sidenote, while it's true that I think hardware enthusiasts tend to grossly overshoot their recommendations for power supplies, decent power supplies for home machines pretty much start at 380W anymore. The power supply should have a little breathing room, room to grow. The 300W - again, not a decent power supply but a bargain bin one that couldn't hope to actually produce that much power under actual usage conditions - in the Acer is starting out bad and just going worse from there.cjb110 - Friday, August 6, 2010 - link
We all like to rag on the bloatware installed, and I've yet to find any one that's actually had a use for any of it. But does it actually harm? Is the performance actually degraded?Could be a basis for an article? esp if you can get the manufactures input as to why they bother? Do they actually recieve anything? Are their machines better recieved by the public? Does Norton/McAfee pay them? Does ebay pay just for an icon?
awaken688 - Friday, August 6, 2010 - link
They did run a recent RAM used at startup. A clean Win 7 used like 750MB, but the other OEM machines were running 1GB+ from Dell, etc... It would be nice to see a benchmark though.7Enigma - Monday, August 9, 2010 - link
One of the often overlooked things with systems that have a lot of bloat is the effect on power consumption of the system. Idle power consumption can be dramatically higher which can add to electricity/cooling costs while making the system more sluggish in general.ImSpartacus - Friday, August 6, 2010 - link
This is impressive, but the enthusiast can not be beaten.I got a similar build for under $500 (after rebates and shipping) with no OS, keyboard or mouse. I used Newegg to do it. It has 3 combos, 2 coupons and 4 rebates.
Antec Nine Hundred (-$15 coupon) (-$20 rebate)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
WD 640GB Caviar Black (-$20 coupon)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
EVGA GTX 460 768MB
OCZ 2x2GB 1600MHz DDR3 (-$20 rebate) (-$17 combo)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.asp...
OCZ Gamerstream 500W PSU (-$15 rebate)
LITE-ON DVD Burner (-$20 combo)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.asp...
Intel i3 530
Biostar TH55B HD H55 Motherboard (-$10 rebate) (-$49.98 combo)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.asp...
Yes, that's a brand new GTX 460 768MB. You could save quite a bit if you cut that out, but I'm a gamer. If you desired, you could probably get a quad core CPU in there if you got a cheaper graphics card.
And I understand this is an incredible hassle for such a deal. I know first hand. I purchased a Dell 7100 for my parents (before it was reviewed here) for $700 on sale just because it was convenient.
Hurray for affordable computing!
silverblue - Friday, August 6, 2010 - link
Nice build, but I'd go for the 1GB flavour of the GTX 460 - better chip, more memory. :)ImSpartacus - Friday, August 6, 2010 - link
LOL!You have to draw the line somewhere, eh?
Oh and the build is under $600, not $500. Typo on my part.
JarredWalton - Friday, August 6, 2010 - link
But you really do have to include OS for sure, and probably keyboard and mouse, if you want to be fair in the comparison. Sure, lots of people "have an OS lying around" (code for pirated software usually), but even if you really have a legit spare copy, that copy cost you money at some point. That's like saying, "Oh, I have a good case and PSU, so I can get the cost down to $400."Anyway, we'll see about getting a new budget guide up some time in the near future. I just need to ping a few cohorts and see who wants to write it. Maybe Dustin can do it.... :-)