Lenovo IdeaCentre Horizon 27 Review: Our First Table PC

[Crashman]

The latest all-in-ones look a lot like huge tablets, right? An internal battery adds portability to Lenovo's 27” IdeaCentre Horizon, but is this cool concept still functional as a desktop, or does the push toward mobility sacrifice too much performance?

Lenovo IdeaCentre Horizon 27 Review: Our First Table PC : Read more

 

[Pyree]

Would be nice if they have truth or dare.

 

[majudhu]

This explains the "for those who do" part

 

[sgadadish]

My only question is why not Haswell?? with all it's benefits for mobility where are the portable with the processor...

 

[stupiduser]

As reported on Slashdot IT - "defence agencies of key Western governments such as Australia, the US, Britain, Canada and New Zealand have banned Lenovo gear from being used in sensitive areas, because of concerns that the Chinese vendor has been leaving back doors in its devices for the Chinese Government."

I wish Tom's would aim their incredible testing abilities at these types of claims. I would like to know if MY Lenova is making me vulnerable.

 

[az0937]

http://forums.overclockersclub.com/

 

[az0937]

http://technologygian.blogspot.com/

 

[Crashman]

Try using this for any length of time as a table pc and your neck and back will be in knots. Not enough gpu power to really make it interesting for gamers but i can see this in industrial, medical applications, schools etc. I can see apu's being used in this application at a much lower price point.

You're right, if we treat this as a huge tablet or an IPC, it looks pretty good. Thanks!

 

[rcald2000]

I'm a help desk technician and I'll tell you one thing that I've learned about mobile graphics cards in all-in-one PCs; they are a very bad idea. Just yesterday I had the pleasure of troubleshooting a 4-5 year old Dell all-in-one, which had a problem with the video going black for thirty seconds at a time. I of course attempted to upgrade the video drivers, and found out that neither Dell nor nVidia had ever updated the drivers. I believe the computer originally shipped with Vista 32 bit but was advertised as being Windows 7 upgradeable. I base this opinion on the reviews that I read about the machine, and also on the fact that it had both a Windows Vista and Windows 7 logo sticker on it. Dell's site didn't have any drivers newer than 2009 and nVidia's own auto video driver detection application couldn't identify the video card. In conclusion, I think using a mobile video card in a like this size is lame. But I do applaud Lenovo for trying out new ideas. I would have more faith in the form factor if a company like Samsung was behind it. Also, I should mention that I'm typing this very review on my Lenovo X230.

Lenovo X230
i7 ivy bridge processor
16 GB RAM
500 GB 7200 rpm drive
HD4000 integrated graphics
* connected to one external Dell UltraSharp U2412M 24" monitor.

 

[Ed Chombeau]

Retired; and need big screen to see ; would take it on car travel but airline travel?

 

[Crashman]

Try using this for any length of time as a table pc and your neck and back will be in knots. Not enough gpu power to really make it interesting for gamers but i can see this in industrial, medical applications, schools etc. I can see apu's being used in this application at a much lower price point.

Retired; and need big screen to see ; would take it on car travel but airline travel?

It's about as long and wide as an oversized carry-on bag. Which means you may get it past the gate, or not, depending on how strict the airline staff is being at that gate. And you'd want something to protect the screen.

 

[Marlin Schwanke]

Buying budget priced gear from any Asian company is a crap shoot. I don't think Samsung, Acer, Asus or Lenovo have very good customer service. They all just shift product out the door and start working on the next one.

 

[magic couch]

Anyone else find it strange how in the photoshop CS6 test enabling OpenCL actually slowed down the rendering for the Dell tablepc? What's up with that?

 

[Crashman]

Anyone else find it strange how in the photoshop CS6 test enabling OpenCL actually slowed down the rendering for the Dell tablepc? What's up with that?

Certain filters are threaded, and others are OpenCL-enabled. So OpenCL and CPU-only tests are different.

 

[JPNpower]

These monster screen thingies are awesome. Most likely the future (for airplane entertainment awesomeness). Reminds me of the (fake) old Microsoft Surface commercial.

Why have a PC? Just buy a big a## table.

 

[Crashman]

These monster screen thingies are awesome. Most likely the future (for airplane entertainment awesomeness). Reminds me of the (fake) old Microsoft Surface commercial.

Why have a PC? Just buy a big a## table.

Maybe, but they'd need CPU and SSD upgrades to appeal to a wider market.

 

[magic couch]

Certain filters are threaded, and others are OpenCL-enabled. So OpenCL and CPU-only tests are different.

Ahh, I thought it used both as I've seen some reviews on this website where software uses the cpu and gpu accelerated openCL together.

Also a weird thing I've noticed is that in this article 7zip hands down beats every other program in both file compression time and size, yet in articles such as this one winrar is faster by a factor of over 2. Why is there such a discrepency? The articles are even using the same versions of the program.

 

[Crashman]

Certain filters are threaded, and others are OpenCL-enabled. So OpenCL and CPU-only tests are different.

Ahh, I thought it used both as I've seen some reviews on this website where software uses the cpu and gpu accelerated openCL together.

Also a weird thing I've noticed is that in this article 7zip hands down beats every other program in both file compression time and size, yet in articles such as this one winrar is faster by a factor of over 2. Why is there such a discrepency? The articles are even using the same versions of the program.

The would be a great question for our developer. I think the command line switches outlined in the "test setup" page might provide the answer, but only if I knew what those switches meant

 

[JPNpower]

Crashman, thank you for your reply in the comments for all your articles.

 

[magic couch]

The fastest cpu in your first link was a I5 3570k 4 cores/4 threads 8 gb ram second test was i7 3770k 4 cores/ 8 threads 16gb ram. It could be winrar although having the slower algorithm is more optimized to scale up the work loads on the I 7.

Maybe, but that seems really strange. I know 7z is multithreaded.

 

[magic couch]

They both are, what i think your seeing is the benifets of more ram and hyper threading along with winrars better optimization

I don't think that's the explanation. In this benchmark the I7 3930K isn't really faster than the I7 4770K in winrar yet in 7zip the I7 3930K is quite a bit faster than the I7 4770K.

 

[Laptop Repair Service]

My only criticisms will be about the keyboard it's too small for me, the rest looks fantastic, I say this because I have a similar model and the keyboard indeed is very small, something that can be replace if we want.