A few weeks ago, I bought a Acer Aspire X1301 + LCD, since it was a great deal.. C$399 + tax + enviro fees.

I then sold the LCD for $50, leaving me with a C$349 computer.

The plucky little Acer had some problems.. its power for gaming was.. limited, to say the least, and it only took half height cards, which meant it would be difficult to actually get a good card in there. Then I opened it to check something and the power switch stopped working..

So being me, I bought a new case, PSU and a Radeon 4890 1GB graphics card, and .. erm.. upgraded it. I swapped in the motherboard + drives from the Acer, which meant Windows 7 didn’t need to reactivate, and then plugged in this grunty ATI giant of a card. And it works, I get 100+ fps in everything I’ve tried so far ;)

The only problem is that the graphic card doesn’t have HDMI (despite the box saying in big letters that it does have HDMI, and then having a small weasel statement about requiring an adapter), which means right now.. no sound or use VGA. But I have the adapter on its way, courtesy of eBay.