Acer Aspire M3400

Acer Aspire M3400

It's tough to find much direct competition at the Acer Aspire M3400's $600 price point (as of September 24, 2010). More-expensive systems tend to offer stronger features and speed, as you might expect. Systems in the budget desktops category, meanwhile, tend to skimp on both. The M3400 makes a decent showing for its cost--but a few missteps ultimately make this a merely good middle-of-the-road budget PC. Powering this midsize-tower desktop is a quad-core AMD Phenom II X4 820 processor that chugs along at a brisk 2.8GHz clock speed; 6GB of DDR3 memory accompany the CPU. The processor's speed and the memory's size are both above-average for the category--but "above-average," of course, isn't the same as "tip-top." The system's 640GB hard drive is a nice touch, too, but again it's underwhelming compared with the 1TB of storage space we see on similarly priced systems within the category. One such rival--and a prominent one, at that--is the Gateway SX2840-01 midsize-tower desktop. The SX2840-01, priced $40 less, spit out a score of 118 on our WorldBench 6 suite of tests, a tad higher than the M3400's mark of 110.