In the battle of the name brands, Acer came out on top with its Aspire M3970. It doesn’t have quite the same speed as the HP and although it costs $150 more, you get a decent list of extras, including a 24in widescreen monitor. The M3970 uses a 2.8GHz Core i5-2300 chip and 8GB of RAM.
The 2TB Western Digital hard drive was as generous as we saw and you also get a digital TV tuner and Wi-Fi. Toss in a Blu-ray/DVD combo drive and it’s a decent list of features.
One surprising feature was the swappable drive bay, allowing you to quickly swap 3.5in drives, though you need to power down first, so it’s not a hot-swap bay.
As usual with a name brand, however, the graphics card is a letdown: a Radeon HD 6570. On AvP it managed 26.5fps at 1,024 x 768 pixels — it’s the best of the name brands, but a long way behind the local systems.
