Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is my in-depth review for the: Lenovo IdeaCentre 3 Desktop Tower, AMD Athlon Silver 3050U Processor, AMD Radeon Graphics If you prefer a quicker summary, go straight to the summary section. Description: This is a very compact PC; about 11"X 4"X 12". It includes a very basic keyboard and mouse. It has a total of 8 USB ports, split evenly to the front and back (4 and 4). Video output comes from a VGA output and an HDMI. It has a microphone and headset jack in the front, none in the back. It also has native bluetooth and WiFi plus a LAN port for wired connection. Appearance wise, it is very simplistic, with straight lines and a silver / black color palette. Performance: The best attribute for this PC is its solid state hard drive. It is an M2 NVME drive that delivered. The sequential 8Q1T read averaged about 2160 MBps making it top tier for moving quickly within large files, like a Ultra High Definition movie. The Random Read memory was no slouch either averaging about 42 MBps, helping it boot up in about 16 seconds flat and loading programs quickly, to give a few real world examples. Considering the integrated graphics, the display is also pretty decent. Tested with dual monitors and was able to reach 3840x2160 @30Hz for the HDMI while running a secondary monitor on the VGA at 1680x1050 @60Hz (VGA). Movies ran smoothly, no issues there. Web browsing was also very smooth, further confirmed by a 460 basemark score using Chrome. This PC's biggest weakness, in my opinion, was its RAM. After powering it for the first time, I opened the task manager performance tools to see the RAM being 79% utilized with the startup programs, a single tab of internet explorer and a folder opened. Related to this another negative was how much software was preloaded by Lenovo; mostly stuff that I will never use. I will probably do a clean Windows install after adding an HDD for storage, so no issue for me but be aware. After the real world test, I ran a PCMark 10 benchmark. I was not surprised that for the digital content creation my score was pretty low. However, the scores for the essentials and productivity suites were pretty good. This just confirmed what I saw in the real world. For spreadsheets, web browsing and watching movies this is a great computer. For video editing and 3d rendering, not so much. Upgradability: You have two Dims for RAM that supports up to 16GBs. You would have to waste the 4Gbs that you already have to do so but that is an option. There is no PCI express port, thus upgrading the video card is not really an option. The motherboard supports one more extra SATA connection, and the cage can easily fit a 2.5 or 3.5 drive. The power supply is an external brick and the cooling consists of a single heatsink with fan. There is no space to upgrade the cooling but there is no real need to do so as even running the most intensive of the benchmarks, the PC had no issues. Peripherals: The keyboard and mouse are basic but appear to be well constructed. The keyboard is small but functional and the keys are not too loud. The bluetooth and WiFi modules work really well. I did not try the optical drive as it appears that I don't have any optical media anymore. Bang for your Buck: At the time of writing this review the pricing was unavailable. However, from experience, I think this PC would be priced fairly between $339.00 and $399.00. Higher than that, would not be worth it, lower than that it would be a really good deal. The most important thing value wise is going to be what do you want it for. For web browsing, as a media center/ server or working from home doing spreadsheets and Zoom meetings, this one works. For anything heavier than that, not really. Summary Positives: - Compact in size. - High Performing SSD. - Dual monitors support with the HDMI output being able to run a 4K display @ 30 Hz. - Great performance for commonly used applications like web browsers, video playback and spreadsheets. - RAM and Hard drive upgradability. Negatives: - 4Gb of RAM is simply not enough in this day and age. - There is a lot of preloaded software, out of the box. - Adding a light and cheap motherboard powered video card is not an option. Other thoughts: At the end of the day, it will come down to what will the PC be used for and how much is going to cost. For light to medium office work or maybe as a server or cheap media center, this one will do the trick. If priced below $339, this one is a no brainer. If priced above $400, I would see what else is in the market.