The Acer Aspire M3400: How Much Does $649 Buy?

Acer Aspire M3400 User Experience and Performance

Okay, so it's clear we're not going to get a whole lot more out of the Acer Aspire M3400 than what we've got (at least not without spending $50 or so on a better PSU). How does that fare at least? In terms of noise, the M3400 is at least fairly quiet, but that's to be expected given the reasonable 95W TDP of the processor and the quiet cooling on the Radeon HD 5450, a card which in and of itself barely draws any power and thus generates very little heat.

One of the benefits of the rapid increase in performance of desktop hardware is the ability of the processor and memory to handle bloat. Microsoft did their share in mitigating it in Windows 7, but Acer's machine doesn't feel sluggish despite the amount of software it comes installed with. OEMs are often able to hit their low prices on desktop machines by being paid by software vendors to include trials on their machines, and the M3400 is no different.

Acer's $649 desktop comes packed with the usual suspects: McAfee, intent on taking over the antivirus market using any means other than actually producing quality software, is of course accounted for here. Norton even makes an appearance with their Online Backup software. The desktop also comes littered with icons for Microsoft Works, a 60-day trial of Microsoft Office 2007, Nero SmartStart, MyWinLocker (which starts in the tray and can't be disabled or exited short of closing it in Task Manager), and then Acer Games, Acer Registration, and even icons for eBay and Netflix. There's Acer Arcade Deluxe, which impressively has nothing to do with games but is instead a way to organize photos, videos, and music. And there's Acer Games, which does include a couple of casual games as well as a virtual storefront for buying other ones.

Honestly, the bloat could be a heck of a lot worse and again, it doesn't really affect the user experience. Dell's software on the Studio XPS 7100 just loved to pop up and intrude at random intervals, and the software on the Samsung N210 netbook I recently reviewed was even worse (due in no small part to the Atom's utter inability to handle even the most minimal of system bloat). The Aspire M3400, on the other hand, is fairly reasonable once you rip McAfee Internet Security's beating heart from the system and show it to its children before setting it on fire and consigning it to the abyssal hellscape from whence it came.

Our performance figures largely reflect that. The only other system we've tested recently is the Dell XPS 7100, which has a six-core processor and an HD 5870 GPU. It also costs twice as much. Outside of graphics work, though, the M3400 certainly holds up well.

The Phenom II X4 820's extra cores help it overcome competition from the Intel Core i3 and i5 dual cores that dot this end of the price spectrum, and we're comfortable saying the processor can handle pretty much any task you throw at it. The 820 is a solid value. If you want a look at how the 820 stacks up against other CPUs, look at the results of the Phenom II X4 920 and the Athlon II X4 630 in our Bench database; the 920 will be slightly faster, and obviously the GPUs are different, but overall it's a decent processor.

Of course, the Radeon HD 5450 couldn't possibly be asked to pull its weight in graphics heavy applications. DirectX 11 or not, it's just not adequate for anything but the most basic of gaming, relegating it to the HD decoding duties the on-board 880G probably would've managed just fine on its own. Certainly you can play any modern game on the 5450 and it's about twice as fast as the 880G, but you're going to be running most games released in the past two years at low resolutions (1366x768) and low settings.