Acer Aspire AM3970-U5022

Pros: For the price? Everything about this system is awesome.

Cons: It's cheap, keep that in mind and there are none.

Summary: I don't understand the low scores for this system when the Inspiron 620 and Gateway SX 2850-33 base models are not better and scored much higher. The prices listed, btw, are the base models. Though even with maximum upgrades, increasing the price by up to $300, the processors are only minimally better and RAM expansion is far inferior. Also, some of the reviews seem to talk more about the upgraded models than the base. I paid $450 free shipping for this system. Dual core, dual thread 3.1Ghz i3, 1TB HDD, 6GB DDR3 RAM. Expandable to 16GB! And crucial has 8GB (2x4GB) compatible sticks for ~$50. On Dells website you pay an extra $80 to upgrade from 4 to only 6GB with the Inspiron! You have 12 USB 2.0 ports with this system, two more than the Gateway, and while it doesn't have a FireWire port in back it does does have HDMI, 2 SATA III and 4 SATA ports internally. Is it that hard to wire internally? Who uses FireWire anymore anyway?? It has an extra bay to house a second HDD. A media card reader. Includes WiFi card, useless to me in a desktop, but you still get it! This system, for the price I got it, blows the others out of the water. While the Gateway does have a true quad core I have never been limited by the processing power of this machine. And I have installed a graphics card, multiple monitors and used some pretty high end rendering software while playing Fallout NV (ultra settings) on the second screen with multiple instances of Firefox running with over 9,000 tabs open, watching BluRay rips on VLC, transferring files, unpacking RARs and running ISO images on virtual drives. The review says for $50 more dollars you can buy the Gateway? Nah, try $150 dollars, and then it's MOBO limits it to 8GB RAM fully expanded! Obviously a truly superior machine... w8, wut? Okay, so the Gateway comes with a blu-ray player. Well, guess what? This system has an extra optical drive bay! Buy a blu-ray drive for ~$60 and you have dual optical drives! What's that worth? ...not much to me, but it sounds cool, and buying that alone would still put you $100 under the gateway price. Find this system on sale like I did, buy an nvidia GT 240 1GB DDR5 graphics card for $70, buy 8GB RAM for $50 on the crucial website (will be 12GB total), a $60 blu-ray drive and have a boss machine that will do everything but NEO calculations for NASA ...and your laundry, won't do that either. All of that for only $30 more than the Gateway, basically twice the machine. I feel like this system was unfairly bashed for whatever reason. Maybe because the time wasn't taken to do proper research and find the TRUE lowest price.