Acer Aspire E380 - Athlon 64 X2 4200+ > Reviews > Good Home PC, Bad Gamers PC

Author's product rating:   

Speed	Average
Design	Satisfactory
Manufacturer Support	Needs improvement
Ease of use	Easy
Value For Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Good Processor, plays nice with home productivity
Disadvantages:	Bad graphics card, Stupid Power Button

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Acer E380

I picked one of these up at comet on sale sue to a shop refurbished and as such got a display model for a bargain price of £299.99, excitement and a sense of smugness when other customers were piped to the post by me, ok it didn't have a box and need some spit and polish but it was cheap and for what it is mega cheap!

In The Box (or not in my case):
You get one PC, An Acer keyboard and mouse (wired), Media Centre Remote and Receiver and all your power cables and warranty cards. The Acer E380 Basic Specs are as follows

A dual-core AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 processor
1GB DDR2 Ram
NVIDIA® GeForce™ 6100 chipset
NVIDIA® nForce™ 430 MCP graphics
A Serial ATA 3 Gb/s hard disk with 250 GB
First things first it isn't going to run top `o` range games, but it will perform very very good for a home PC, it has PCI Express x16 Slot for Graphic upgrades and 2 Spare Dimms for memory, and so far has performed very well on SIMs 2 maxed out, it comes preloaded with Windows Vista Home Premium and all its fancy looking eye candy effects are there, it's got a DVD RW and a Built in Digital TV Tuner, 4 rear and 2 Front USB Ports, 1 Rear and 1 Front Firewire, Front memory card slots and Ethernet connections as well as your usual ps2 and serial interfaces, its also has a digital Toslink connection and 5.1 Audio 3.5mm jacks, and is supply with a set of 2.0 stereo speakers and Tool-less access and component clips open the chassis with ease.

Looks:
It's a PC, It's a Tower and it's in silver and black with Blue LEDS where LEDS are usually needed, it looks pretty for a home PC, has sliding front cover a access to add another CD/DVD drive if required, the top has a rubber non slip coating to stick on top, what you will, one complaint about the design is the darn power button is so sensitive and awkwardly placed at knee level that the slightest touch shuts it down, but the button can be disabled, the keyboard and mouse are in black and as standard generic as you can get, no extras and basically worth throwing for a new set, as for the speakers my feet can produce louder sounds, good job my monitor has built in speakers ( PS monitor not included)

Power Up:
The Bios tools do not allow for over clocking or in fact any changes other than very basic controls, boot up time is around 20-25 seconds, the first time you turn on the Acer software advises you to create a restore DVD (do it) as so you can recovery from any very bad crashes or faults, the system comes preloaded with as Acer calls it
"Acer ePerformance Management improves response time, releases unused memory, and enhances overall system health"
I found this to be the opposite and so uninstalled as soon as I could and found performance and boot times increased but someone make like the preloaded rubbish, as the system came with a tuner, media centre allows you to configure and watch TV while a provided media centre remote allows control of this.

Overall its no frill machine but has a decent Mobo and Processor, stick in another Gig of ram and a decent PCI express graphics (as I did) and its very very good, but as it stands you probably would do better elsewhere, the support and customer services are a little difficult but if you use a PC for email, Internet, Word Processing and other boring stuff then it's got more positives than negatives, if on the other hand you are trying to play games well don't bother.