Lenovo ThinkCentre M90z Review

Performance with Half-Life 2 Episode 2 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Gaming Performance

To touch on gaming performance, we chose two games that draw moderately on system resources, Half-Life 2 Episode 2 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. We then ran a pre-recorded demo of each at a resolution of 1280x800. The resulting performance achieved is indicated in frames per second in the graph below.


These benchmarks help illustrate the careful balance between GPU and CPU performance. Our M90z barely beats out the TouchSmart 600 (which is half a year old and a few hundred dollars cheaper by this point) due to the strong CPU overcoming some of the IGP's limitations. But Apple's new $1199 iMac, which has a Core i3 and a low-end discrete GPU, beats out the M90z while still costing less. In general, we were able to play these titles at lowered resolutions just fine, and even at the native resolution of 1920x1080 things were playable if you reduced the details. No one should buy an all-in-one PC with an IGP as a gaming machine, but it is possible to have a little fun on the weekends with this unit, even though there's just an integrated graphics chipset under the hood.