Lenovo ThinkCentre A70Z & Asus EeeTop ET2203 All-In-One PCs

TEST RESULTS

AC Power Draw

As the EeeTop is based on notebook hardware it was no surprise to see it undercut the Lenovo in power consumption, even with discrete graphics and a larger screen. At typical screen brightness, the ET2203 idled 7W lower, and it used 13W less on CPU load. The two systems were even once the GPU was placed on load as the EeeTop's HD 4570 video card uses much more power than Intel's integrated graphics. Incidentally, both systems are significantly more energy efficiency than the Lenovo IdeaCentre A600 we reviewed in the fall.

Note: the ET2203's power figures were derived with the graphics card set to "maximize performance" in the power options. Setting it to "maximize battery life" prevents the GPU from reaching its nominal clock/memory speeds, but results in a 1W reduction across the board (except when the GPU is stressed in 3D).

Video Playback

Both systems played high definition video fairly well, with the ET2203 using consistently less power. Though equipped with discrete ATI graphics, we could not get hardware acceleration to work on the EeeTop when playing our WMV-HD test clip, resulting in high CPU usage. Flash playback was also more CPU dependent than we would have liked, but that may have been due to old drivers; the latest ATI drivers for the HD 4570 are from September 2009, before Adobe released the beta version of Flash Player that introduced support for GPU acceleration. In addition the ET2203 has a lower CPU clock speed, so that accounts for some of the increase in CPU usage.

Performance

With a Core 2 Duo running close to 3GHz and a 7200rpm desktop hard drive, the A70Z easily beat the ET2203 in our benchmark suite except in 3DMark. The Lenovo posted better times in all our timed benchmarks, particularly anti-virus scanning where it completed the task in almost half the time. The A70Z also booted up in less than 40 seconds which is very impressive for a system running Windows 7. Against the IdeaCentre A600, the EeeTop's results were mixed given the similarity between the two hardware sets.