Lenovo IdeaCentre Q190 review: Call it a full-figured micro PC

Compared with Intel’s diminutive NUC and Sapphire’s slim and sexy Edge VS8, you might think of Lenovo’s IdeaCentre Q190 as a full-figured micro PC. It’s not the smallest such model, but it boasts a ton of ports, it has enough interior space to move air over its components, and it has a Blu-ray drive option. If you're looking for a home-theater PC, those are important features.

The Q190 is a small monolith measuring 6.10 by 7.55 inches. It’s 0.86 inch thick (expanding to 1.5 inches thick with its piggyback slot-feed optical drive attached). A stand that stabilizes the unit when upright adds about another half-inch of height, but Lenovo also provides a VESA mounting bracket so you can mount the Q190 on the back of a display.

Robert CardinA drop-down panel (lowered here) hides the Q190's front ports.

Mic and headphone jacks, two USB 3.0 ports, and a six-in-one media-card reader are hidden behind a door on the front of the unit. On the back you’ll find HDMI and VGA video outputs, three USB 2.0 ports, ethernet, an optical S/PDIF port, and the power jack for the AC adapter. The computer and the optical drive both have Kensington lock points. The Q190 also has a built-in 802.11b/g/n wireless network adapter. The bundled keyboard and mouse are middle-of-the-road units, but Lenovo’s palm-sized Enhanced Multimedia Remote, which combines a backlit QWERTY keyboard and fingertip mouse and costs $80, is worth a look if you plan to use the system from your sofa.

The Q190 is not quite as quiet as the nearly noiseless NUC, or the Edge with its super-quiet fan, but we didn’t find its noise signature to be bothersome.

Lenovo offers the Q190 in several flavors. The model we tested came configured with a 1.5GHz Celeron 887 CPU; 4GB of DDR3/1600 memory; a 500GB, 5400-rpm hard drive; and a DVD-RW drive. It posted an unimpressive score of 28 on our WorldBench 8 test suite. That's slow, but once it booted and the 64-bit Windows 8 OS had finished caching stuff, the unit proved responsive enough.

Robert CardinThe Q190 isn't as small as some competing micro PCs, but it's better at keeping its internal components cool.

That said, the integrated HD graphics system means that modern gaming is not in this machine's repertoire. And you'll need a super-efficient media player—such as Cyberlink’s PowerDVD, which employs hardware acceleration—to render 1080p at higher bit rates (that’s not an issue, though, with the Q190 model that ships with a Core i3 processor).

As noted, the IdeaCentre Q190 is available in a variety of configurations. Our test unit sells for $397. As most vendors do, Lenovo offers deals that may or may not last. At the time of this writing, the least-expensive Q190 was for our configuration, sans the DVD drive, for $349. The most expensive was a Core i3-2365M model with 8GB of memory, a 1TB hard drive, and a Blu-ray player for $649. Oddly enough, the Q190 has no SSD option—the biggest kick-in-the-pants upgrade around (never mind that Lenovo's website indicates otherwise).

If you're not dead set on having the smallest PC on the planet, the IdeaCentre Q190 gets you most of the way toward micro computing, and its optical-drive options render it more versatile than its smaller rivals.

Jon L. Jacobi has worked with computers since you flipped switches and punched cards to program them. He studied music at Julliard, and now he power mods his car for kicks.
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Lenovo IdeaCentre Q190 review: Call it a full-figured micro PC

Compared with Intel’s diminutive NUC and Sapphire’s slim and sexy Edge VS8, you might think of Lenovo’s IdeaCentre Q190 as a full-figured micro PC. It’s not the smallest such model, but it boasts a ton of ports, it has enough interior space to move air over its components, and it has a Blu-ray drive option. If you're looking for a home-theater PC, those are important features.

The Q190 is a small monolith measuring 6.10 by 7.55 inches. It’s 0.86 inch thick (expanding to 1.5 inches thick with its piggyback slot-feed optical drive attached). A stand that stabilizes the unit when upright adds about another half-inch of height, but Lenovo also provides a VESA mounting bracket so you can mount the Q190 on the back of a display.

Robert CardinA drop-down panel (lowered here) hides the Q190's front ports.

Mic and headphone jacks, two USB 3.0 ports, and a six-in-one media-card reader are hidden behind a door on the front of the unit. On the back you’ll find HDMI and VGA video outputs, three USB 2.0 ports, ethernet, an optical S/PDIF port, and the power jack for the AC adapter. The computer and the optical drive both have Kensington lock points. The Q190 also has a built-in 802.11b/g/n wireless network adapter. The bundled keyboard and mouse are middle-of-the-road units, but Lenovo’s palm-sized Enhanced Multimedia Remote, which combines a backlit QWERTY keyboard and fingertip mouse and costs $80, is worth a look if you plan to use the system from your sofa.

The Q190 is not quite as quiet as the nearly noiseless NUC, or the Edge with its super-quiet fan, but we didn’t find its noise signature to be bothersome.

Lenovo offers the Q190 in several flavors. The model we tested came configured with a 1.5GHz Celeron 887 CPU; 4GB of DDR3/1600 memory; a 500GB, 5400-rpm hard drive; and a DVD-RW drive. It posted an unimpressive score of 28 on our WorldBench 8 test suite. That's slow, but once it booted and the 64-bit Windows 8 OS had finished caching stuff, the unit proved responsive enough.

Robert CardinThe Q190 isn't as small as some competing micro PCs, but it's better at keeping its internal components cool.

That said, the integrated HD graphics system means that modern gaming is not in this machine's repertoire. And you'll need a super-efficient media player—such as Cyberlink’s PowerDVD, which employs hardware acceleration—to render 1080p at higher bit rates (that’s not an issue, though, with the Q190 model that ships with a Core i3 processor).

As noted, the IdeaCentre Q190 is available in a variety of configurations. Our test unit sells for $397. As most vendors do, Lenovo offers deals that may or may not last. At the time of this writing, the least-expensive Q190 was for our configuration, sans the DVD drive, for $349. The most expensive was a Core i3-2365M model with 8GB of memory, a 1TB hard drive, and a Blu-ray player for $649. Oddly enough, the Q190 has no SSD option—the biggest kick-in-the-pants upgrade around (never mind that Lenovo's website indicates otherwise).

If you're not dead set on having the smallest PC on the planet, the IdeaCentre Q190 gets you most of the way toward micro computing, and its optical-drive options render it more versatile than its smaller rivals.

Jon L. Jacobi has worked with computers since you flipped switches and punched cards to program them. He studied music at Julliard, and now he power mods his car for kicks.
More by Jon L. Jacobi

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Lenovo IdeaCentre A720 Review: Full-Tilt Digital Media Maven

Windows 8 is getting closer to release and the amounts of quality all-in-one desktops are on the rise; the Lenovo IdeaCentre A720 is a strong choice. The A720 offers a 10-point multi-touch screen, making it ready for Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 operating system.

Big, Beautiful Screen

This 27-inch system ($1599 as of 8/23/2012) strongly resembles a TV; being a digital media machine is its strongest attribute. A Blu-ray drive is included and HD content looks great on the high-definition, 1920-by-1080 resolution screen. As with many all-in-ones that double as a television, a remote control gives you easy access to the Media Center features, and the optional TV tuner gives you access to other TV functions. The A720 uses Dolby Home Theater 4, which produces more-robust sound quality from tiny stereo speakers. However, bass content is lacking since no subwoofer is included. The A720 strives to be in the center of the living room rather than just a PC on the corner desk.

The A720 stops being just a TV once you get your hands on it—literally. It supports 10-point multi-touch gestures and can be angled anywhere from -5 degrees to a 90-degree flat plane. There are few TVs that can claim to be a touchable table, though I don't recommend eating or setting drinks on it.

Having a big, fancy screen is well and good, but it won't mean much if performance is lacking. Luckily for the A720, the included Intel Core i7-3610QM runs at 2.3GHz but can boost itself to 3.3GHz when needed, thanks to Intel’s Turbo Boost technology. And 8GB of DDR3 RAM helps performance by improving response times.

Performance

The A720 managed to score only a 78 on our strenuous WorldBench 7 benchmark suite. This score means the system is approximately 22 percent slower than our baseline system.

The true culprit behind the lower score is the slow 40-second boot-up time caused by the 1TB 5400-rpm hard drive, a problem that's exacerbated by the tons of preinstalled apps that load up when Windows starts. This shouldn’t be a huge issue if you rarely shut down your computer, but it's something to keep in mind if you transfer a lot of data to and from your hard drive.

A key characteristic of all-in-one desktops is their slim profile. This system promotes itself as the thinnest 27-inch all-in-one in production (just 0.97-inch thick). Though extremely thin, it still comes packed with a discrete Nvidia GeForce 630M mobile GPU on top of Intel’s integrated graphics. While that may suffice for less-intensive games, DiRT 3 and Crysis 2 displayed at a maximum resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels barely managed 29.8 frames-per-second and 13.8fps, respectively. The A720 does manage to reach 60fps on DiRT 3 at a resolution of 1680 by 1050 pixels and low quality settings; but the closest it gets on Crysis 2 at 1024-by-768 resolution with low quality settings is 48.1fps.

Gotta Love Those Apps

Lenovo loves apps, from Lenovo’s signature Lenovo Rescue System to some interesting organizational tools. Lenovo’s Vantage Tools (shortened to LVT) provides two stacks of “cards” that resemble on-screen index cards. These cards represent entertainment and maintenance. All of the A720’s popular applications are there, sorted by category. Think of it as a fancier, touch-enabled quick-launch toolbar. However, it’s slow to launch and not very intuitive. Another of Lenovo’s touch apps resembles a less-refined Windows 8: IdeaTouch 4.5 gives a menu that lists everything from photos to your eBooks in a tile format for some quick touch-based media selection.

Of course you can’t talk about apps without talking about games. There are plenty of fun little time-wasting games that take advantage of the multi-touch screen. Air hockey also spotlights the flexibility of the machine. Laying the system down as a flat table-like surface and situating a second player on the other side nicely simulates a miniature version of those fun nights in the arcade. Most machines like this take pride in being a family-friendly machine. ArcSoft’s PhotoStudio Paint is a more glorified Microsoft Paint for kids that lets them unlock the inner artist. Flipping through the applications page will yield tons of fun little things like these for showing off or killing time.

The A720 comes with a wireless mouse and keyboard that have surprisingly little media capability. They work fine at a distance, but you must use the function button to pause or play. The system also comes with a front-facing 720p camera and a built-in microphone for easy and clear video-chatting or recording fun home movies with Lenovo's “Camera Fun Zone.”

For connectivity, the A720 comes with a standard 802.11n wireless adapter and a Gigabit Ethernet port with Bluetooth enabled. On the base of the system are two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, a flash memory card reader, and a TV Tuner. Both HDMI-output and -input ports are also included. Hook up a console, or use the A720 to play a movie on a big screen—the ports gives you plenty of options.

If you’re looking for more of a bargain and are willing to sacrifice a little graphics power and screen size, the Sony VAIO L24 would be a good alternative. The L24 costs $1400 (as of May 24, 2012) and scored higher on our benchmarks. It has a 7200-rpm hard drive for quicker booting and file transfers, but it lacks a discrete graphics card, relying on Intel’s HD Graphics 4000 from its Intel Core i5-3210M. The screen is still multi-touch–capable and features high-definition 1920-by-1080 resolution, but it's only 24 inches. Of course, not every room needs the larger screen, and the 3-inch deficit may prove to be worth the $200 savings.

The Lenovo IdeaCentre A720 is the perfect machine for a media-deprived room. If you're on a budget, there are better options out there; but if you want the whole shebang (with the exception of a quick hard drive and graphical power), you will be very happy with this purchase.

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Lenovo IdeaCentre Q180 Review: An Inexpensive, Media-Centric Tyke

Lenovo goes ultrasmall with its latest nettop, the Lenovo IdeaCentre Q180. This compact PC's optional optical drive is detachable too, just in case you need its footprint to be even smaller. Unfortunately, tiny, space-saving PCs often come with less-impressive specs and performance, and the Q180 is no different, as this Intel Atom-based machine scored very low on our benchmark tests.

Our review unit, priced at $399 (as of April 9, 2012), packed an Intel Atom D2700 processor, 4GB of RAM, and AMD Radeon HD 6450A graphics. This Windows 7 Home Premium system also carried built-in Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n and the aforementioned detachable DVD-RW drive, and came with a mouse, a keyboard, and a wireless multimedia remote.

In our new WorldBench 7 benchmark tests, the Q180 posted a score of only 38 (the baseline score is 100). This means that the Q180 is 62 percent slower than our baseline testing model, which admittedly has significantly better specs (an Intel Core i5-2500K processor, 8GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti graphics card). Since the Q180 is a nettop, however, such a very low score is to be expected.

The Q180 did not perform much better in our graphics tests; we weren't able to get anywhere near playable frame rates in Crysis 2 or Dirt 3. Video playback on the Q180 was fine, though we saw some dropped frames in action-heavy 1080p content. The DVD-RW drive is decent at playing regular DVDs. Lenovo offers a Blu-ray Disc drive upgrade on the Q180 for an extra $70, but no processor or graphics card upgrade.

Speaking of the optical drive, it is technically removable, but taking the drive off the PC is not easy. The drive, which is basically the same size as the PC, snaps on with the help of some very strong magnets. To take it off, you have to slide your fingernail along the seam and try to pry the two pieces apart. Doing so requires a surprising amount of force--it took some effort to convince the PCWorld Labs analysts that we hadn't inadvertently snapped the machine in half. The drive connects to the PC via an included USB dongle.

This tiny nettop measures 6.1 inches wide by 7.56 inches tall, and is 1.57 inches thick with the optical drive attached. When you take the optical drive off, the PC itself is only 0.87 inch thick. The machine weighs about 5.25 pounds and comes with a matte silver stand that flips over to accommodate either the full system (with the optical drive) or just the PC. The chassis is outfitted in shiny black and matte silver plastic, with a large black power button located in the upper corner.

What few ports the Q180 has are located on the back of the machine, consisting of your typical gigabit ethernet connection, four USB 2.0 ports (one of which you'll have to use with the optical drive), HDMI-out, VGA-out, and an S/PDIF audio port. The unit also sports a lock slot, which is unsurprising considering that this PC is so small and conveniently stealable.

The included keyboard is USB-wired and has Chiclet-style keys with slightly rounded bottoms and a soft feel. The keyboard is comfortable to type on, and it gives good feedback despite its soft-touch design. Also present on the keyboard are volume controls and a silver button for launching Lenovo's Vantage Technology utility suite, which includes one-touch system recovery. The USB-wired optical mouse has two buttons and a scrollwheel. It's light and comfortably sized, and it moves smoothly. It's generic, but it shouldn't bother anyone who isn't a gamer.

The bundled "multimedia remote" is interesting. It comes with a USB dongle, which means that if you have the keyboard, the mouse, the optical drive, and the multimedia remote all plugged in, you're out of USB ports. It's weirdly shaped, and looks sort of like a price-scanning gun--thick at the top and slimmer at the bottom. At the top of the remote is a small BlackBerry-like QWERTY keyboard, as well as multimedia buttons (volume, play/pause, stop, fast-forward, rewind, Internet, and a button that scrolls through open applications, similar to the way Alt-Tab does).

The remote tapers down under the keyboard so that you can grip it, and it has a large black "pointing stick" that's clickable, plus left and right mouse buttons, and a touch-sensitive scrolling area. Despite its weirdness, the remote is surprisingly easy to use (though it's obviously not for composing lengthy email messages), and it would be extremely convenient if you were using the Q180 as, say, a home theater device.

The Lenovo IdeaCentre Q180 is a mediocre performer, but its size, portability, and couch-friendly multimedia remote make it a good contender for media mavens on a budget. It isn't the most capable media-center PC, but if you're looking for a very inexpensive nettop to flesh out an entertainment center or stash in a nook, this is it.

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