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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
57 Comments
View All Comments
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.