The AX1930’s Intel Core i3-2120 CPU delivers two cores of processing power (expanded to four with the chip’s built-in hyperthreading) at a clock speed of 3.3GHz. That, coupled with four gigabytes of memory, does much to help the AX1930 achieve great scores for the budget category on our WorldBench 6 suite of tests. In fact, its score of 136 is right up there with some of the best we’ve tested with a comparable price.

The system’s included hard drive sits at 500 gigabytes, but some competing $500 systems touch a full terabyte. Only a standard DVD combo drive and multiformat card reader grace the front of the AX1930’s compact chassis. While it’s difficult to find Blu-ray support on a system at this price, it’s not impossible: the does it for only $100 more (with plenty of other extra features, to boot).

Internally, well, there’s not much to discuss. The system’s small case has no room to add any more hard drives or optical drives--you’d have to replace what is already there, and you better clear out your entire afternoon schedule before you start digging for the AX1930’s hard drive. On the plus side, the budget PC comes with a free PCI Express x16 and x1 port--but again, this small system won't accommodate a beefy discrete video card.

That’s unfortunate, too, as the AX1930’s integrated graphics aren’t geared for modern gaming in the slightest (go figure). We could achieve playable frame rates on our Unreal Tournament benchmark only when we dialed back the resolution to 1024 by 768 (on both medium and high-quality settings).

The front of the system comes with two USB ports; that’s it. The system’s rear bumps the total number of USB ports to eight, but you won't find any other connections for external devices--just good ol’ USB 2.0. A single VGA port, an HDMI port, and a gigabit ethernet port round out the list.