Thursday, December 17, 2009

Lenovo IdeaCentre A600 All-in-One PC


No question about it: Lenovo's IdeaCentre A600 looks unique. The combination of a sharp and angular design, an ultrathin chassis, and a 21.5-inch display definitely stands out against the more traditional "one big flat panel" look that competing all-in-one desktops offer. And at $1149 (as of 7/2/09), the A600 is seriously competitive, especially since it's the most upgradable all-in-one PC we've seen.

The Lenovo's 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P7450 processor has one of the slower clock speeds for all-in-ones larger than 20 inches. Surprisingly, that doesn't have as big of an impact on overall performance as you would think when comparing it with, say, the 3.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 processor of the 24-inch Sony VAIO VGC-LV180J. As for its other main components, the Lenovo's 4GB of DDR3-1066 memory is a step above the DDR2-800 average in PCs of this class, while the 1TB hard drive is among the best you'll find in an all-in-one, matched here only by the 22-inch HP TouchSmart IQ500t and the 24-inch Apple iMac.

The A600's score of 87 in our WorldBench 6 test suite isn't the best we've seen, but it puts the machine in fine company. It ties the IQ500t and beats the 24-inch TouchSmart IQ816 (which scored an 81), but lands 28 percent shy of our all-in-one performance leader, Apple's 24-inch iMac (which earned a mark of 111). Given that the Apple system is nearly twice the price of the A600, however, that's not a bad showing at all.

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