Acer Aspire M3641-ED7200A Budget Desktop PC

Apr 21 2009 - Acer's Aspire M3641-ED7200A is one of their more powerful versions of their LifeStyle series desktop PCs. Thanks to the Intel Core 2 Duo, the system offers a fair amount of speed for its $550 price tag. Those who will be installing the PC underneath a desk will also enjoy the two USB and audio ports on the top of the PC that make for easy access to connecting peripherals. Those hoping to upgrade the system with a powerful graphics card for PC gaming might be disappointed though as the 250W power supply is not sufficient for most high performance cards.

Apr 21 2009 - Acer's Aspire M3641-ED7200A is a fairly powerful budget desktop PC thanks to the inclusion of a powerful Core 2 Duo E7200 dual core desktop processor over the much more common Pentium Dual-Core's found in similarly priced systems. This combined with the 4GB of PC2-6400 DDR2 allows the system to run applications in the 64-bit Vista Home Premium OS without any real issues. While it may not have quite the performance of quad-core in certain applications, overall it is quite good.

Storage is pretty typical of the budget desktop market. The 500GB hard drive provides sufficient space for applications and data, but it isn't really anything that can't be found in other PCs. At least Acer used a full sized desktop case that provides space internally for more drives for those that want more space later. The dual layer DVD burner handles all playback and recording of CDs and DVDs. A 15-in-1 card reader does come with the system that is being dropped by many manufacturers to save a little money.

The integrated graphics on the Aspire M3641 use the NVIDIA GeForce 7150. This is a bit better than the Intel GMA X4500 in that it can handle some basic low resolution, low detail PC gaming. Stil, anyone serious about using the system for PC gaming would want a dedicated graphics card. While there is a PCI-Express x16 graphics slot, the 250W power supply in the system will prevent the use of many newer higher performance graphics cards. This makes the system less than ideal for someone looking for a low cost system to upgrade for gaming.

One nice feature of the Aspire M3641 case is the inclusion of a small angled block on the top that features two USB 2.0 and audio jacks. This allows for easy peripheral attachment when the system is below the level of the desktop.