Acer Aspire AM3970G-UW10P

• Pros

  Included monitor makes for a great value. Built-in Wi-Fi. USB 3.0. Some room for expansion.

• Cons

  Not so great for gaming. Lots of bloatware.

• Bottom Line

  The Acer Aspire AM3970G-UW10P is a fairly average desktop, with a good dose of positive features, including a bundled monitor and two USB 3.0 ports.

• Design and Features
  The AM3970G's metallic black chassis is scarcely distinguishable from that of the Acer Aspire AM3970-UR11P ($699.99 list, 3 stars). Design-wise, the AM3970G-UW10P $688.97 at Walmart.com straddles the line between utilitarian and flashy, sporting a side-mounted power button and optical drive housed behind a glossy plastic face on the front of the system. There's also a removable 3.5-inch bay for internal drive expansion as well as a multicard reader encased within this section.
  
  The top of the system has a flat indented surface where peripherals can be placed alongside four USB 2.0 ports and headphone and microphone inputs. The majority of ports are at the rear, where you'll find eight additional USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports. HDMI-out, audio ports, PS/2 ports (for mouse and keyboard, although the included ones utilize USB 2.0), a DVI port, and Ethernet. There are three empty PCI-E x1 slots, whereas the system's sole PCIe x16 slot is occupied by its 1GB ATI Radon HD7350 discrete GPU. While this GPU is on par with entry-level graphics cards, it has the advantage of being DX11-compliant, giving it an edge over DX10-compliant Intel HD Graphics 2000 built into the Intel Core i5-2320 processor. There's decent room for expansion, including an empty drive bay, allowing for a second drive in addition to the included 1TB hard drive, although the 8GB DDR3 RAM occupies all four of the motherboard's DIMM slots.
  
  Unlike the Gateway DX4860, the AM3970G comes loaded with a fair amount of software. Although some of these programs are useful, particularly Office Starter 2010 and the Nero suite (there's an included 16X DVD+R/RW SuperMulti Drive), most of them can be classified as bloatware. Included in this latter category are the usual suspects, like Bing Bar; desktop links to eBay, Skype, and Netflix; Evernote; the Times Reader; Wild Tangent games suite; and a slew of proprietary software of varying usefulness, ranging from Acer Games to Acer eRecovery Management.
  
  Performance
  Acer Aspire AM3970G-UW10P As one would expect, the AM3970G doesn't so much blow the competition out of the water as much as float somewhere in the middle of the pack, buoyed by its 3.0GHz Intel Core i5-2320 CPU and 1GB ATI Radeon HD7350 GPU combination, yielding fairly average results in our benchmark tests.
  
  Its PCMark 7 score of 2,611 edged past both the Acer Aspire AX1930-UR10P ($499 list, 3 stars) (2,371) and the Acer Aspire AM3970-UR11P $709.99 at TheNerds.net (2,371), while only falling slightly behind the Gateway DX4860 (2,660) and, to a greater extent, the Asus Essentio CM6870 ($999 direct, 4 stars) (3,304). And, notwithstanding the fact that the AM3970G couldn't complete the 3DMark 11 test in Extreme mode, its Entry-level score of 709 may have come up short of the Esssentio CM6870 $999.00 at Amazon.com by a wide margin (2,832) but was within striking distance of the Aspire AM3970 (944). Moreover, it's worth noting that the AM3970G's DX11 compliance did, at the very minimum, allow it to actually complete this test, unlike both the Aspire AX1930 and the Gateway DX4860.