Acer X3400

Acer X3400

At first glance, you might notice a similarity between the $450 Acer Aspire X3400 and the $600 Gateway SX2311-03 budget desktop (prices as of September 24, 2010). But even though both budget desktops have comparably modest dimensions and a certain likeness in general appearance (minus some glossy paneling here and there), they are by no means twins in construction and features. Acer's budget PC is inexpensive enough to make it a compelling--but not perfect--package. Part of the reason for the Acer's system low cost is its triple-core AMD Athlon II X3 435 processor, clocked at 2.9GHz. The SX2311-03 is equipped with a quad-core Phenom II X4 820. Both systems share the same amount of DDR3 memory--4GB in total--though Acer also cuts the storage capacity of its desktop to 500GB versus the SX2311-03's 1TB. Even given these variations, however, the two systems are fairly even in general performance. Acer's X3400 hits a score of 104 on our WorldBench 6 test suite--4 points behind Gateway's SX2311-03. But both systems pale next to Gateway's midsize tower PC, the SX2840-01 ($560), which earned a mark of 118 on WorldBench 6.