Acer Aspire XC-895
We can’t recommend it as it stands, but if you add your own SSD then it transforms into a cheap, usable system
This is not the Acer Aspire XC-895’s first rodeo. We featured this exact machine in our previous desktop PCs group test ( see issue 317, p76), and despite advances in technology elsewhere it holds its three-star rating. The TL;DR version is this: if you genuinely have only £399 to spend on a new desktop PC, the Aspire XC-895 will do. But we have many caveats.
The first is this: Windows 10 really doesn’t like hard disks, and Acer supplies the XC-895 with exactly that. It provides a 1TB Toshiba hard disk that feels far slower than the graphs on p93 suggest: sequential reads and writes of 175MB/sec and 151MB/sec might not sound too bad, but this system is sluggish.
In fact, this is one occasion when results flatter to deceive. They duly reflect the power of the Core i5-10400 that Acer includes – a tenthgeneration Core processor, so one behind the current silicon – and once that chip’s six cores and 12 threads start tackling a task, it’s pretty fast.
Its 117 score in the PC Pro benchmarks is no lie, because it will rip through encoding (for example) at a strong pace. Likewise its score of 7,604 in Cinebench R23’s multicore test is a fair reflection of the power on offer.
The problem with CPU-focused tests is that they don’t put any load on the storage, and it’s telling that the XC-895 finished the photo-processing portion of the PC Pro benchmarks in a respectable 76 seconds (even the fastest PCs here took 45 seconds). 11 minutes for our video-encoding test is reasonable too. But when we switched to our tougher multitasking test, it took almost half an hour; the PCSpecialist Opal R completed this test in under five minutes.
Nor is the supplied memory to blame. You will get some benefit from upgrading the supplied 8GB of RAM to 16GB – there’s a spare socket – but the real bottleneck is that hard disk.
There is hope. If you open up the XC-895 and unscrew the M.2 Wi-Fi 6 card, you’ll unearth a slot for a super-short M.2 2230 SSD. These aren’t commonplace, but at the time of writing you could pick up a 256GB SATA3 Transcend stick for £34. Alternatively, you could squeeze a 2.5in SATA drive into the slim bay underneath the hard disk; it’s fiddly but it’s an option.
We emphasise these upgrade paths because in everyday use we found the Aspire XC-895 a pain to use. It may have nothing to do with the sluggish hard disk, but we couldn’t persuade even low-end games to run happily. The exception was Dirt: Showdown, which returned scores of 21fps at 1080p and a barely playable 33fps at 720p. F1 2020 stalled before it started, and Metro: Last Light refused to get past the opening scene.
But even with the best SSD in support, the Intel UHD Graphics 630 will struggle (it’s the same accelerator as in the Dell Inspiron Small Desktop, if you wish to find a parallel). You can use the empty PCIe x16 slot for a dedicated graphics card, but it must be half-height so your options are limited. It doesn’t help that Acer only includes a 180W power supply, and at its peak this system consumes 111W so – once you take efficiencies into account – there isn’t much “power budget” to play with.
Another reason to buy a graphics card would be to improve on the video outputs provided, with Acer settling for twin HDMI outputs. You will also find six USB ports at the rear, but none support the fastest
USB 3.2 standard. The front is better equipped, with a USB-C (again USB 3.1, so 5Mbits/sec max) and USB-A port plus a SD card slot. There are also 3.5mm jacks for a microphone and headset, with a further 3.5mm jacks at the rear (mic, line out, line in).
Before we leave the Acer Aspire XC-895, we would like to single out one aspect of its design: its sheer compactness. At 100m wide and 330mm deep, it only takes up a tiny amount of space on a desk, and the fans only kick in when the system is pushed. From this viewpoint, it’s a pleasant companion. You even benefit from a wireless keyboard and mouse, which rely on RF rather than Bluetooth.
If we see the Aspire again, we hope it will be a model that comes presupplied with an M.2 SSD. As it stands, we could only recommend the Aspire to people who are willing to install solidstate storage themselves.