-Hi, I'm Rich Brown, senior editor CNET.com.
Today, we're gonna take a look at the Acer Aspire AM3970-U5022.
So, this is the budget PC cost about 550 bucks and it's really a pretty boring desktop actually.
There's not really a lot of going on here.
Acer has sort of a new design for its towers.
It's maybe a little bit interesting.
Swinging over the side here, you can see a kind of curbs up towards the front.
What that does, it makes the SD card
and the slots a little bit easier to get to.
Overall, the system is really pretty simple.
There's a DVD drive here in the front.
On the top o the case, you got a gadget rig as well as some port.
We got some USB ports here, couple of audio jacks and on the back of the case is you have a basic array of connectivity options, got old school PS2 mouse and keyboard jacks in here in top, VGA output as well as HDMI output from video, hand full of USB ports, Ethernet out, 5.1 audio, and apparently one wireless antenna jack.
We're glad to see HDMI on a system like this that's not always a guarantee, but we wish there is maybe some more audio outputs as well as maybe different output here too to save USB 3, Firewire, eSATA.
That's a trend we're sort of noticing lately is that this budget system really have shed a lot of their newer connectivity options.
Now inside the M3, you got basic room for upgrading, but not much it's a lower wattage power supply.
There's a Core i3 CPU down here, got 6 gigs of ram on 3 sticks with 4 memory slots,
So, you do get room to add more memory stick without having to throw away the current ones.
You also get a little bit of upgrade from down here.
There's a one graphics card slot as well as a couple of other PCI express slots if you wanna add say a TV Tuner or a sound card, but again due to power supply, it really limits you, and you can support more than say the most budget graphics cards.
For hard drive, you got a 1 terabyte drive over here as well as room to add one more.
So, certainly find desktop for its price.
That said, we found other systems out there in the same price range including from Gateway which Acer owns
that offer better features for the dollar, so you definitely be wise to shop around.
I'm Rich Brown.
This is the Acer Aspire AM3970-U5022.
