Acer’s Aspire TC-895-UA91 ($429.99) is, in many ways, just what most budget desktop shoppers are looking for. Affordable, compact, and fully featured, this basic mini tower includes the essentials, plus some extras that its like-priced competitors lack. Packing a “true” desktop-strength 10th Generation Intel Core i3 processor with legitimately capable performance, a 512GB SSD, and support for USB Type-C, SD cards, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, this basic PC has nothing major missing and a lot to like. (Some closely priced machines rely on lesser laptop-grade CPUs.) This combination of processing pep and feature set tops the competition on value, earning this Aspire our first 2021 Editors’ Choice award for budget desktops.
A No-Fuss Design
You can tell at a glance that this desktop is about the basics, and for this category and at this price, that’s perfectly okay. From its relatively compact size to its modest look, there’s nothing about the design that screams “powerhouse” or “flair.” The look is inoffensive, and unless an all-black device clashes with your décor, it will blend in fine with your office or bedroom setup.
It won’t take up much space on your desk or floor for a traditional tower, either, at 13.4 by 6.4 by 13.8 inches (HWD). The competing HP Slim Desktop (10.6 by 3.7 by 11.9 inches) and Lenovo IdeaCentre 3 (11.8 by 3.9 by 10.6 inches) are even more compact, but that’s fair enough when they’re even less expensive (and less powerful), especially when one has “slim” right in the name. (These machines, as alluded to above, are based on lesser-powered laptop processors.)
Internal access is about as simple as the rest of the build. Removing two rear screws allows you to pull the left side panel off the chassis, granting access to a basic interior. About one third is blocked off by a metal backplate, onto which you could mount additional hard drives. (A spare SATA power connector is hanging near, as are several SATA data connectors on the motherboard.)
Behind that is the housing for the DVD drive, and beneath that (on the motherboard) the 512GB M.2 SSD. In the unobscured area, you can see the rest of the motherboard, including the mounted CPU air cooler. The power supply is contained in the top left corner.
Above-Average Features
The setup in our unit includes an Intel Core i3-10100 processor, 8GB of memory, and the 512GB of storage. There’s a little room for expansion in terms of memory—ours is configured with a single 8GB stick, and there’s a free slot next to it. The board maxes out at 32GB of memory.
There isn’t a huge amount of expansion possible, all in all, but if you do need to do maintenance or some upgrades, there’s plenty of space inside. Ultimately, aside from perhaps adding more RAM, this is meant to be an affordable plug-and-play solution, so DIY upgrades are not the priority.
This motherboard does include a PCI Express x16 slot, but your options for adding a graphics card are limited. Aside from the size restriction of the case for larger GPUs (you have about 6 inches of clearance from the PCI card backplane to the metal drive frame in front), the included power supply unit (PSU) is only 300 watts. It uses non-standard power connections to juice the mainboard, however (no standard 24-pin ATX power connection), so swapping in a different, higher-watt PSU to power a beefy graphics card is a no-go, or at least not easy.
A low-powered, slot-power-only video card could be a solution, but you’re otherwise restricted. Some calculations we did on the venerable Outervision PSU Calculator suggest you could squeak in a GeForce GTX 1650 card with the PSU in this configuration, provided the card is short enough and doesn’t need a dedicated power connector.
From here we move on to connectivity, a crucial part of any desktop. This system offers an above-average selection for this price range, starting with a USB 3.1 Type-A port, a USB Type-C port, an SD card slot, and audio jacks on the front panel (in addition to the disc drive mentioned earlier).
The rest are on the rear: two HDMI connections, four USB 3.1 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, and an Ethernet jack. This sum of connections is better than some competitors (the IdeaCentre 3 and HP Slim don’t have USB-C, for example), one of multiple aspects that make this system a stronger value than the less-expensive competition.
The inclusion of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth is undeniably useful, as well, though most competitors do offer this too. The desktop also comes with a very simple wired mouse and keyboard, which do the job if you don’t already own your own peripherals.
In summary, compared with the HP Slim Desktop (which we rated well), you’re paying about $50 more for a Core i3, double the storage, and USB-C. That processor is of particular interest, so let’s see how it fared on the benchmark tests.
Performance Testing: A Perfectly Capable Core i3
To judge this system’s performance, we pit the benchmark test results against those of competing budget desktops, including several of the systems mentioned above. Also joining the fray is the late-2020 version of the Apple Mac mini, featuring Apple’s own M1 processor, and another edition of the Acer Aspire we tested about a year before this one. (See more about how we test desktops.)
The Mac mini is much more expensive than the rest, at $699, but it’s still worth including here as a foil to these Windows towers. You’ll note that it’s absent from some of the results below—in those cases, those are Windows-based tests that the Mac mini and its macOS could not run. The other, older Acer Aspire is also an interesting inclusion—it’s more expensive than this model at $548, due in part to its Core i5 processor, but keep an eye on the performance differences in spite of that.
Productivity and Storage Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet work, web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system’s boot drive. Both tests yield a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.
While PCMark 10 isn’t the most important measure for high-end media editing machines, it’s an essential measure for budget desktops. This demonstrates how well the Acer Aspire will be able to handle your day-to-day home and basic office tasks, and this score is encouraging. We consider anything over 4,000 points to be proficient, and you can be happy with that result given the price. PCMark 8 shows that these are all speedy SSDs that ensure quick boot and load times.
If you need to do more (light) office work at home than you did in the past, this desktop is up to the task, though I’d hesitate to recommend it as your main work PC if your workload is strenuous. The Core i5 chip in the other Aspire unit is an Intel 9th Generation processor, and the jump to 10th Generation in this unit closes the gap even though it’s a Core i3 chip, thanks to the restoration of procsssor-thread-doubling Hyper-Threading in the lower reaches of the 10th Generation Core line. (It was eliminated in many 9th Generation Intel desktop CPUs, including the Core i5-9400 in the older Acer.) Meanwhile, this Aspire unit is much faster than the cheaper laptop-grade Athlon Silver- and Gold-based models, justifying the already modest price difference. Does all of this hold up in the more demanding media tests? Let’s see.
Media Processing and Content Creation Tests
Next is Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video editing trial, another tough, threaded workout that’s highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads. In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video (the open source Blender demo movie Tears of SteelTears of Steel) to a 1080p MP4 file. Lower (faster) times are better.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and add up the total. The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost.
The clear answer is yes, the trend from PCMark continues here. The TC-895-UA91 is only a bit slower than the Core i5-based UA92 and significantly faster than the HP Slim and Lenovo IdeaCentre 3. None of these is a specialized media-editing machine, to be sure, but the value of the Core i3 over the Athlon solutions is clear. If you need to do a touch of photo or video editing, don’t expect lightning speed, but the system will be able to complete the job without keeping you waiting all day.
Synthetic Graphics Tests
UL’s 3DMark suite measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff. The results are proprietary scores.
Both Aspire units performed almost identically here because, well, they utilize the same integrated Intel UHD Graphics 630 solution from the CPU. The others trail behind a bit, but realistically none of these machines is up to the task for 3D workloads or meaningful gaming experiences.
If you want to load up some browser games, visually simple Steam titles, or 2D games like simulations or strategy games that lean more on the processor than the GPU, this desktop can do the job. If you intend to play games on your home desktop, though, you’d need something with a dedicated graphics card; check out our favorite gaming desktops, which include some more budget-friendly picks. As noted, the graphics-upgrade upside on this PC is very limited.
A Top-Value Budget Desktop
The Acer Aspire TC-895-UA91 looks to be the best value so far among a recent crop of general-use budget desktops we’ve been testing from Acer, HP, Lenovo, and others, and there’s really no room for complaint. Like the UA92 before it, this model has a sound overall combination of features and components at a still-competitive price. It offers enough performance superiority over the less expensive competition to justify its higher price, plus extras they don’t include, like USB-C support and an SD card slot, and more storage space.
This Aspire configuration achieves this without giving up much, really, other than making you settle for a slightly larger (though still compact) chassis and an extra $50 in cost (versus the HP Slim Desktop, our next-best pick). We think the Aspire TC-895-UA91 is quite the fair value, and the best current offering we’ve tested to date for budget shoppers looking for a general-use desktop for home. That earns it our Editors’ Choice laurel for the category.
