Acer Aspire AX3400-U2012

Here in late 2010, Acer, along with its sub-brands Gateway and eMachines, is swinging for the fences with compact, budget-friendly desktops—and mostly making very good contact. On the low end, Acer has tapped out a few underpowered, entertainment-focused options like the $299 eMachines Mini-e ER1402-05, which packs just a bit more computing power than your average netbook. But in contrast, if your budget can squeak a bit over $500, its "deluxe" budget offerings are mostly triples or homers. One of our favorites in that vein is the Gateway SX2311-03, which packs in a very capable quad-core CPU, Wi-Fi, and a full terabyte of storage. (When we wrote this, it was down as low as $550.)

At $449, the Acer Aspire AX3400-U2012 drops in neatly between these two, in terms of price. And while it loses the bundled Wi-Fi and halves the storage space of the Gateway SX model we looked at, this little PC is much closer to its costlier cousin in terms of performance. That makes it a good mainstream pick for those short on both budget and desk space.
This tower’s triple-core AMD Athlon II X3 435 CPU may logically sound less powerful than costlier quad-core options, but its 2.9GHz clock rate is actually slightly faster than the four-core chip found in the aforementioned SX2311-03. More to the point: Most mainstream software still makes use of only a single CPU core, so you likely won’t notice a performance difference between this PC and a similar machine with an extra core, unless you perform four CPU-taxing tasks at the same time with regularity. (The bottom line on this issue: Unless you use high-end graphics- or video-editing apps, anything over two cores in your CPU is a relative luxury, all else being equal.) The AX3400, helped by 4GB of DDR3 RAM, should be suitably speedy whether you’re using it as a dorm, office, or family PC.
Aesthetically, the AX3400 should blend in nicely in varying environments, as well. This compact tower (measuring 10.5x4x13.9 inches, HWD) sports a slightly different design than the last AX-series PC we looked at (the Aspire AX1301-B1812, back in February 2010). The newer model loses the difficult-to-press power button in favor of a big, blue-backlit square. It's impossible to miss when powered on, and it lies flush with the top of the case, making it more difficult to hit accidentally. The upper two-thirds of the case’s face is covered with a diamond pattern resembling steel plate, giving it some texture. The sides, on the other hand, are matte-black steel.