Lenovo B50 All-in-One 23-Inch Multi-Touch Desktop Review
Our Summary and Conclusion
It’s easy to pinpoint B50’s most appealing traits. It’s equipped with a large (but not overwhelmingly enormous) touchscreen monitor. It also has a fairly compact footprint so that it won’t eat a lot of space in your office or living room. Perhaps best of all, its middle-of-road price will be very tempting for anyone who wants ample processing power but doesn’t have the need or means to spring for something like Lenovo's A Series.
On the whole, the base Lenovo B50 would be a well-equipped system with its Core i5-4460T and 8GB of RAM. If you have some extra dough on hand, though, it would be awfully tempting to upgrade to the Core i7-4785T based model we took a look at, particularly knowing that you’ll wind up with a hefty 12GB of RAM and discrete graphics as well. This is a multimedia machine, after all, so it’s unlikely you’d ever regret having as much memory as possible. And we should point out that at the moment, both models are available for the same $999 (there's a $300 difference between their regular MSRPs). The 2TB hard drive is of the 7200RPM variety but the 8GB SSD cache helps move things along nicely, though it obviously isn’t going to offer the kind of performance of a true, standalone SSD. Then again, on a multimedia model that you’ll probably want to stuff full of video and other space-gobbling files, perhaps a spacious magnetic drive was the best choice on Lenovo’s part.
The star of the show, though, is the 23.8-inch touchscreen. Of the three all-in-ones that Lenovo makes, the B Series is the only one with touch capability, and depending on your preferences it’s either a needless frill or an exciting addition. No matter your feelings on the touch aspect though, the monitor produces lush color with excellent sharpness and detail whether you’re playing a first-person shooter or just kicking back and soaking up a movie. The viewing angle is great, too, so if you’re watching from the side you’ll still be able to see plenty of the action without craning your neck.
Like us, you’ll probably be miffed about the wired keyboard and mouse. These aren’t true hardship by any means but they don’t seem to fit the profile for this product, which although is targeted towards average multimedia users still includes those who don’t want the hassle of such unnecessary desktop tangles.
From a performance perspective, this is a good all-purpose machine. Like so many others in its class, it doesn’t quite have the GPU horsepower for the high graphics settings in complex games. But for all general tasks and a bit of fun on the side, the B50 is a solid setup at a fair price that won’t trigger any buyer’s remorse.
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