Four Supercharged Desktops For Around £400

Last time, we had a look at what kind of bargain you can get yourself by building a PC system out of components with a total budget of £500.

Not everyone has the time or inclination to build a PC from scratch, though - so today, we’re having a look at four ready-made desktop systems, all priced at around £400.

The Acer Aspire X1301 is a great all-rounder that sells for £399 (including a free copy of SIMS 3 and free delivery) at Dabs. Unlike our systems yesterday, this PC comes complete with monitor, keyboard and mouse - and in many cases, a number of other gems.

First, there's a powerful quad-core processor, something that’s usually unheard of at this price. The AMD Athlon II X4 620, which is clocked at 2.6GHz and comes with 512KB L2 cache, is no slouch either.

The system is housed in a cute little micro tower with flaps that hide the optical drive and the memory card reader, as well as front-mounted USB and audio ports. The bundle also includes a 18.5-inch widescreen monitor with a stylish stand and a resolution of 1440x900 pixels.

Acer has opted for 3GB RAM, which means that you will need to get rid of a 1GB module if you want to upgrade to 4GB, the maximum that the motherboard supports. The 320GB hard disk drive which should be more than sufficient for most users.

Rather than using a separate graphics card, the Aspire X1301 relies on a built-in graphics module, an Nvidia Geforce 7100, which hives off a little bit of the system’s 3GB RAM. The number of expansion options in this system is bewildering.

You get two low-profile PCI Express X16 and X1 slots, one GbE LAN, two PS/2 ports, VGA, HDMI, nine USB ports, eSATA and FireWire, as well as standard audio ports. The system comes with Windows 7 Home Premium installed, as well as a number of software packages such as Microsoft Works 8.5 and Cyberlink PowerDVD.