Acer Aspire M3400: How Much Does $649 Buy?

Reviewing the Dell Studio XPS 7100 recently was very interesting and even enlightening. Our audience may chiefly be people who build their own machines (and indeed we certainly review enough hardware), but it was refreshing to see the oft-maligned "factory build" put in a good showing and justify its existence in our world of enthusiasts and builders. If you didn't feel like putting together your own machine for high-performance gaming and computing and didn't want to pay through the nose for a custom enthusiast build, the XPS 7100 was a fine choice.

But we're not talking about a twelve-hundred-dollar mean machine here. We're talking about a $649 budget build, and in this author's opinion those waters are substantially more fraught than the consumer market for machines north of a large. A reliable budget build is the kind of thing a good enthusiast can specialize in, so the question for Acer becomes...is the M3400 worth the trade-offs? We lose name brand components and the individual warranties that go along with them, but we gain something that's been built and tested from the factory and at least guaranteed to work as is, and we potentially gain more computer than we could've gotten for the price had we built it ourselves.

The Acer Aspire M3400-U2052 (gotta love those catchy Acer names) is the top end of the M3400 line. Starting at the top, we have the heretofore-thought-to-be-defunct AMD Phenom II X4 820; the 800 series Phenom IIs had a very brief tenure in the marketplace but apparently live on in OEM circles. The only difference between an 800 and 900 series Phenom II X4 is in the amount of L3 cache: the 820 sports only 4MB while the 900s have the full 6MB. Given the middling performance differences in most circumstances between the entirely cacheless Athlon II X4 and the Phenom II X4, the lost 2MB of L3 probably isn't worth losing any sleep over. At 2.8 GHz, the 820 should provide plenty of performance for the price.

There are two extremely pleasant surprises in the Aspire M3400's build. The first is the use of the modern AMD 800 series chipset, which brings 6Gbps SATA support along with generally improved storage performance. If nothing else, the motherboard has legs that it may very well be able to stretch as prices on SSDs continue to fall while performance continues to rise. The other is the inclusion of a Western Digital Caviar Blue 640GB drive. These drives have been excellent and reliable performers since their introduction years ago and have remained near the top of the performance heap for mechanical hard drives; I might just be biased, though, I've been running four in my own tower for years and have been consistently pleased with their performance along with their low acoustics and power consumption.

Everything else in the Aspire M3400 seems bog standard, but there is an odd bird in this configuration: the Radeon HD 5450. In Ryan's review of it he wasn't particularly impressed and it's not hard to see why: the 5450 offers virtually no practical improvement on its predecessors. The inclusion here is even more questionable, because while a Radeon HD 5450 on the shelf can at least be justified as a potential HD playback performance upgrade, the M3400's motherboard has capped HDMI and VGA ports that suggest an 880G integrated graphics part on board. The 880G already has enough horsepower to handle decoding HD, and the 5450 isn't going to bring enough of an improvement in image quality or gaming performance to justify its inclusion. Okay, it's roughly twice as fast as the integrated HD 4290 and it has DX11 support, but it's a $40 entry-level GPU when $65 gets four times as many Stream Processors in the HD 5550. All things being equal, we'd rather have gone up to the full 8GB of DDR3 or the HD 5550 rather than get the 5450.

The M3400 is rounded out by a DVD+/-RW combo drive, standard media reader, and gigabit ethernet. We'd have liked to see some kind of wireless networking solution included, or a Blu-ray reader (which may have driven costs up, but they're so cheap these days anyhow), but these omissions aren't deal-breakers. As a whole, this review unit seems reasonable for the asking price, but let's take a closer look.

Acer Aspire M3400 Closer Look

Well, we'll say this: the Acer Aspire M3400 is positively glowing—and no, it isn't pregnant, unless you count the blue LEDs adorning the top right corner of the face. The power button is on top of the tower as has become increasingly common, but it's part of what amounts to a glowing blue stripe on the corner that runs through the two optical drives before being buried in the case. It's not unattractive, but it sure is bright.

The two 5.25" drive bays are both hidden behind textured doors that blend with the face of the tower, but their ejection mechanisms are very, very odd. Most of us are probably used to pressing a button and having the drive eject, but the switches you see on the face aren't buttons. You actually slide down the small panels adjacent to the drive bays to eject the drive. It's an interesting design choice that doesn't really add or remove from the overall look of the case, but we have to wonder if a mechanism like this is going to wear out over time as opposed to just including a conventional button on the fascia.

Finishing off the face of the tower is the media reader, which we might have liked to see closer to the top instead of beneath the drive bays, but it doesn't look out of place. The single glossy black accent running down the right side is also attractive, and on the whole the boxy look of the Aspire M3400 works in its favor.

If we go up the face and back to the top of the tower, we find the massive power button sitting on the bottom right corner of a very glossy black plastic panel. Just above it are four USB 2.0 ports along with mic and headphone jacks, and then above those is a tray for loose CDs. The tray uses a matte plastic lid with the same texturing as the front of the tower, and it snaps open and closed reasonably easily. The sides of the Aspire M3400 are uneventful, with ventilation holes over the video card and processor on the left side of the tower along with an indented "Acer" logo.

When we get to the back of the machine, though, we find it curiously spare. It's true we're operating on a budget here, but the pickings on the M3400 are curiously lean. PS/2 ports are a cute idea, but this is a brand new computer that comes with a USB keyboard and mouse. It may be time to take Old PS/2 out back and put a bullet in his head once and for all. The port cluster is stunningly barren otherwise: take the PS/2 ports out of the equation, ignore the capped HDMI and VGA ports, what are you left with? Six USB 2.0 ports, a gigabit ethernet jack, and just three audio jacks. Even the most budget of motherboards these days comes with six for proper surround sound. The lack of an eSATA port is also felt pretty deeply, and then to make things seem even odder, there's a pair of USB ports mounted below the 80mm exhaust fan in their own custom slot. This was the most efficient design? At least there's a measure of room for expandability below the cluster, with the Radeon HD 5450 occupying just one of the PCI slots, leaving three open ones. So what can we do with them?

Popping inside the case of the Aspire M3400, we begin our journey into the true land of budget hardware and Acer's design continues to raise even more questions. As far as drive expansion goes, Acer specs for just two drive bays (which would leave just one available given the other is occupied by the hard drive), but eyeballing it shows we have two places we can add hard drives beyond the existing one: a second in the side-mounted hard drive tray, and a third below the media reader.

And here's where it gets confusing: the motherboard has the full monty of six SATA ports on it, the maximum available to the SB850 southbridge. But there isn't enough space in the tower to use all six unless you pull the media reader and replace it with another hard drive and let it sit sticking out of the face of the tower. You know what might have been wise? Pulling the bizarre USB daughter card from beneath the 80mm exhaust fan and replacing it with a single eSATA port. But let's not go using all the available room on the I/O panel for more ports!

The rest of the board is uneventful, with two PCIe 2.0 x1 slots and a single PCI slot at the bottom. But above the board is what's going to ultimately cripple the build and deny users much more in the way of expansion: a meager 300W generic power supply.  A visit to the Power Supply Calculator tells us that 300W LiteOn unit is already getting pushed about as far as it's willing to go with the hardware included in the Aspire M3400, so maybe the lack of expandability is by design. Power supplies are where factory machines tend to cut the sharpest corners, and nowhere is it more apparent than here. If you're interested in upgrading to a more potent GPU down the road, plan on swapping out the PSU as well for a slightly beefier unit. Thankfully, the PSU is a standard ATX 2.x design and you don't need to worry about proprietary plugs.

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.

Acer 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.