The Acer Aspire M3400: How Much Does $649 Buy?
by Dustin Sklavos on August 5, 2010 3:45 PM ESTAcer 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.
| General Performance Overview | ||
| Dell XPS 7100 | Acer M3400 | |
| PCMark Vantage | 6740 | 7601 |
| Cinebench R10 1-CPU | 3596 | 3252 |
| Cinebench R10 x-CPU | 16140 | 11553 |
| X264 720p Encode Pass 1 | 77.29 | 60.58 |
| X264 720p Encode Pass 2 | 24.79 | 18.25 |
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.
| 3DMark Performance Results | ||
| Dell XPS 7100 | Acer M3400 | |
| 3DMark Vantage Performance | 15533 | 1283 |
| 3DMark Vantage Entry | 30856 | 6639 |
| 3DMark06 | 18209 | 3720 |
| 3DMark05 | 22312 | 6645 |
| 3DMark03 | 69538 | 9381 |
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.
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fire400 - Thursday, August 5, 2010 - link
you'd expect quality comprimise for higher end parts, but here, it's the worse of both worlds.GeorgeH - Thursday, August 5, 2010 - link
The price seems very reasonable to me. I went to Newegg and selected the absolute lowest priced components in each category, and got two prices (due to no X4 820):With 2.8GHz X4 630:
$580
With 3.0GHz X4 945:
$620
Shipping to a California zipcode added ~$30, so you're looking at either $610 or $650.
Compare that to $635 with free shipping on the Acer, and the Acer looks like a great deal. You could get better price/performance by spending a few hours looking for deals and perfectly balancing components, followed by another few hours assembling it all and installing an OS (and maybe a few more hours troubleshooting things if bottom shelf components don't work perfectly), but unless that kind of thing is fun for you it's probably not worth it.
mariush - Thursday, August 5, 2010 - link
So what you're saying the system should be 600 $ if you factor in the shipping.Well, for 600$ you can do much better, for example at power supplies, video card and a slightly better motherboard.
JarredWalton - Thursday, August 5, 2010 - link
As pointed out in the conclusion, though, you can either save $100 and get an HP with very similar performance (provided you don't really want the 5450), or spend the same amount for a slightly slower CPU but get a GPU that's more than twice as fast. It's not a terrible system, but it's definitely budget through and through. If it had a 450W PSU then at least upgrades would be feasible. I'm sure you can run a 5770 in this system, even with the 300W PSU, but I'm not sure how long the PSU will last under such a load. I'd wager the current configuration idles at around 70W and load is probably pushing 200W, and I wouldn't want to exceed that with a 300W PSU.GeorgeH - Thursday, August 5, 2010 - link
I completely agree that the configuration probably isn't ideal and is nowhere close to what I'd select for a personal build. My (very badly made) point was that the system doesn't have a price problem, if anything it has a component selection problem for most uses. In other words it's a niche market system, which doesn't make it a bad product so much as a generally bad fit.blackbrrd - Thursday, August 5, 2010 - link
I have been running a system on a 400w PSU that is rated for 30A on 12v for about 3.5 years now, and it has a 8800gts and an overclocked core2 in it. I haven't had any hiccups from the PSU. As far as I have calculated, the system runs at about 300w under load... I don't see why you need so much extra power just to be safe...strikeback03 - Friday, August 6, 2010 - link
What brand PSU though? Given that this is likely built with the cheapest PSU they could find, it is unlikely to hold up as well as a decent PSU you would purchase stand-alone would.Taft12 - Thursday, August 5, 2010 - link
Did you include an OS in your total?I will say this Acer machine is a reasonably good value, but the features on the motherboard are where you really see a difference between Asus and Gigabyte's lowest-end offerings and the ultra-low-end Foxconn-built trash.
GeorgeH - Thursday, August 5, 2010 - link
OS, KB, mouse, and card reader were all included. The cheapest 880 board at Newegg was a step up from a generic OEM POS, but only a very small one. :)nafhan - Friday, August 6, 2010 - link
Yeah, but the thing is if you're building your own budget box, you can shop around and look for deals rather than just going with the standard retail pricing on things. I put together a similar machine last October for less than $450 (including OS). Less RAM and slower CPU, but much faster GPU and a quality PSU.