Now this is a neat PC. The unassuming cleanness of the E300’s case is broken by its glowing front bezel, which somehow mixes just enough silver plastic and blue LED lighting to be neither obtrusive nor garish. A rubberised panel sits atop the front, presumably to catch the spare change and CDs that make their way onto any and all of our surfaces, and a pair of case-matched covers offers spring-loaded cloaking for optical drives. While these niceties are not exactly earth shattering, the more slivers of class we can get in a case’s design the better. Only the slide-down door for the front mounted ports is a real problem, as it feels almost as rickety as it does pointless; you’ll find that it’s simpler to leave it open and forget about it.

Delve inside and the clean lines aren’t lost, with neatly arranged internal components giving rise to a strong airflow within. Acer’s latest desktop breathes via the relatively modern AMD Athlon 64 chip, a cleverly designed and efficient processor that’s employed enough in such boxes. It doesn’t quite get us as excited as dual-core would, but you can’t have everything at this price. Cooling the processor isn’t much of an issue, as we rarely managed to tax it enough to force the large internal fans into action. Even so, the side of the machine is blessed with a large panel of drilled ventilation holes that are sure to keep your components chilled as well as coated with a fuzzy layer of dust.

Tidy insides can’t mask the fact that the E300 is internally rather nondescript, partly due to the basic nForce motherboard. A single GeForce 6600 occupies the single PCI Express slot, two 512MB sticks of RAM completely fill the two memory slots, and a PCI modem sits in one of the regular PCI slots, making up for the lack of onboard support. The internal drives are comfortingly strong, represented by the usual 16x dual-layer DVD burner and a roaring 200GB 7200RPM Seagate Barracuda hard drive.

Looking to the future
Unfortunately, the processor is about to be superseded by a newer, faster version, supporting DDR2 via the AM2 socket. The performance of the forthcoming chip isn’t yet known to us – even the release date is fluid – but it’s definitely coming. While the new breed of processors won’t render the E300 useless, the impending rollout of newer chips – along with the restrictive nature of this PC – is likely to leave a sour taste in the mouth of serious users who might have plumped for this model. Without the luxury of a dual-core processor, this ends up being squashed even by some of its cheaper rivals. The Pentium D 820 at the core of Gateway’s 710GB (PC Plus 237, page 34) utterly trounces the E300’s SYSmark score, for example. A lack of free memory slots is, at least when considering this a base system to build on, an unfortunate travesty. You can easily get away with a gigabyte of RAM right now, but look two years into the future – if you want your PC to survive, you’ll need to completely replace its volatile storage, rather than simply upgrading. Room to upgrade is important in desktop PCs. The lack of either a free RAM slot or another PCI Express slot does not bode well for a long, happy lifespan.

Graphically the 6600 is, though a strong card, far from being anything magical these days. It does offer enough muscle to thrash older games to bits, and it’ll happily run current games at a moderate speed. Again though, we’re looking at a component which fills a gap in a system, but offers little future potential – as there is no SLI option. You’ll have to throw this out with the memory in a year’s time too.

Despite all this, the E300 isn’t a total loss. Imagine for a second that technology is not going to progress too far in the future, and sensibly considering the fact that you’re not going to get a bleeding edge PC for £650, we’re quite happy with Acer’s efforts here. The case is well put together, the components are just about worth the money, and the overall result is a nice little desktop PC. But before making a decision, we encourage you to whip out your crystal ball and think about what you’re going to want from a PC a few years down the line. The E300 might take some investment to keep it up to the task.