Lenovo IdeaCentre A310 review

We’ve seen a veritable avalanche of Lenovo gear hit the PC Pro Labs of late, and continuing the flow is the company’s latest consumer all-in-one PC, the IdeaCentre A310.

It’s an unusual piece of kit. Rather than build the motherboard, processor, memory and ports in behind the screen, as with its bigger brother the Lenovo M90z, Lenovo has decided to pack everything into the A310’s base. That means it takes up a little more room on your desk than a standard all-in-one.

It might have ended up looking dowdy too, but in fact the A310 is far from that. With no components bolted on its rear, the screen measures just 19mm from front to back, as slim and svelte as any high-end consumer monitor we’ve seen.

The white and chrome colour scheme looks smart and, thanks to a handful of unusual design touches – a right-angled chrome elbow in the rear right corner of the base holds the screen sturdily in place, while the base is a trapezium rather than square – the A310 is like no other all-in-one we’ve seen.

Beyond the exotic looks, you’ll find the Lenovo A310 is a capable little thing. The 21.5in Full HD screen, for starters, is pretty darned good. A glossy finish gives images and movies deep contrast, while colours are vibrant and brightness good. Dab the touch sensitive menu control to the bottom right of the screen and you can control brightness, and swap between three preset colour profiles: “Movies”, “Text” and “Internet”. Unusually for a modern all-in-one PC, the A310 doesn’t have a touchscreen, but we didn’t miss it at all.

The processor is a mobile model – the Intel Core i3-350M – but has plenty of oomph, scoring 1.36 in our real world benchmarks, with the help of 4GB DDR3 RAM. The presence of only Intel HD graphics, however, means gaming at the native Full HD resolution of the screen will only be possible for the very least demanding titles; in our Crysis test at Low quality settings and 1,366 x 768 it only managed an average of 7.5fps. It’s plenty powerful enough for any HD content you might throw at it, though.