Lenovo B750 All-in-One 29-Inch Desktop Review

Performance Summary: Lenovo's IdeaCentre B750 All-in-One is a well-rounded machine that's capable of keeping pace with just about any task you throw at it. The system posted solid scores in our synthetic benchmarks, and even showed it can play games -- the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760M cranked out playable framerates in both Lost Planet 2 and Aliens Versus Predator at full HD resolutions.


All-in-One systems are growing in popularity, both because they've come down in price significantly over the past few years, and also because the trend today is towards space saving designs. Lenovo's IdeaCentre B750 All-in-One Desktop represents the highest end of the OEM's newest breed of AIO systems, and true to the category, it's reasonably priced at $1,399 (as configured).

What that gets you is a solid foundation built on top of Intel's Haswell architecture (Core i7-4770) with lots of storage space (2TB), a discrete graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760M), and even a Blu-ray burner. This combination of parts affords the end-user flexibility in what he or she might want to do with the system.

Before we go any further, we have to touch on the 29-inch super-widescreen display, which is the primary selling point here. With a 21:9 aspect ratio, this is truly a cinematic display that excels at watching movies, but it would be a shame to only use it for that. There's a lot of screen estate to play with, which is great for productivity chores, and the high-quality IPS panel is both bright and viewable from a range of angles. It's hard to go back to an ordinary monitor after using the B750.

As much as we like the display and Haswell foundation, Lenovo left itself room for improvement. For one, we'd like to see a solid state drive take residence as the primary storage device -- mechanical hard drive's are yesterday's technology. Secondly, what's with the lack of touch support? And lastly, we're not fond of using custom display drivers. Lenovo should rethink this strategy and allow its users to install drivers direct from NVIDIA. Unfortunately that's not the case, and at the time of our testing, we were stuck using drivers that were several generations old. In addition to hampering performance, this can introduce annoying quirks -- when updating to Windows 8.1, for example, the older drivers failed to initialize the discrete GPU in some instances where it should have, including 3DMark.

Our list of grievances notwithstanding, overall we like the system Lenovo put together. The IdeaCentre B750 All-in-One is big in stature and flexibility, but medium in price. There's a lot of appeal here -- solid performance, above average sound, excellent display, and so forth. It's too bad Lenovo doesn't let you customize the B750 to your specific budget and requirements, but as it stands, the system is worth checking out if you're interested in an AIO PC.