Acer Aspire X3900 Review

The Acer Aspire X3900 is a small form factor desktop PC with a powerful Intel Core i3 processor and an abundant feature set. It's great for a space-saving home or office computer and entertainment tuned users.

Acer Aspire X3900: Design
The Acer Aspire X3900 has a mini-ITX form factor, and the cabinet measures 265x100x352mm: significantly smaller than your traditional desktop PCs, even smaller than the HP Compaq dc5800s. The Aspire X3900's cabinet doesn't weigh too much and it can be easily carried around in one hand. The X3900's cabinet has an all-black exterior and it comes with a cabinet lock to prevent access to its innards. Acer has done a good job with distributing ports around the X3900 cabinet's front and back.

The Acer Aspire X3900's optical drive pops out vertically at the front; and just below the drive bay is a flap which hides an abundance of ports: five USB ports, FireWire port, multicard reader, CF port and audio jacks. The power on-off button resides in the form of a transparent plastic strip along the cabinet's top and right edge that glows blue underneath when you switch on the Aspire X3900.

The cabinet has grilled exhaust vents at the top, side and back - enough to dissipate heat efficiently. At the Acer Aspire X3900's back lies 5.1 channel audio support ports, HDMI, eSATA, SPDIF, VGA, PS2 mouse and keyboard ports, Gigabit Ethernet, and four USB ports. That's a lot of ports!

The Acer Aspire X3900's cabinet is cramped on the inside, due to its small dimensions. Accessing the RAM slots, for example, isn't very easy. But the wires are neatly directed around the motherboard and there's no haphazard criss-cross of wires leading to clutter inside the desktop cabinet.

Acer Aspire X3900: Hardware Specs
The Acer Aspire X3900 has an Intel Core i3-530 2.93GHz processor, 2GB of DDR3 RAM (upgradeable to 8GB), 320GB 7200rpm hard drive, and onboard Intel GMA HD graphics. Obvious advantages over older Intel GMA graphics is less heat inside the cabinet and better cooling. But not only good onboard graphics, the Aspire X3900 desktop has a very good basic hardware building blocks. There's no wireless connectivity, but Gigabit Ethernet, eSATA, HDMI, SPDIF, FireWire and CF port. The Acer Aspire X3900 also supports 5.1 channel audio - great to take your home audio experience to the next level.

Apart from the cabinet, the Acer Aspire X3900 desktop PC also bundles in a keyboard, mouse, and two speakers. It comes with an 18.5-inch monitor if you're interested; however our review unit didn't come with one. The Acer AX3900 desktop comes with 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium. In terms of internal hardware, the only thing the Aspire X3900 lacks is maybe a dedicated graphics card. But other than that, Acer has done a great job of packing in every feature and port you would want on a home desktop PC.