Lenovo H320 Desktop

Lenovo H230

Lenovo, the pumps used desktop themes in a way cooking spaghetti recent years: to throw everything into a pot, stir it around a bit, then pull out something and throw it on a wall to see what sticks. The Essential series is one such innovation come from the Chinese computer giant design revival, they are more affordable feature-oriented, rather than design-centric focus, computer.

That's not to say that the H320 is poorly designed, far away, in fact. This small desktop was born with efficiency in mind, and lives up to the expectations by the smallest possible space on your desktop.

Lenovo is definitely a page from other manufacturers used books, the H320 provides almost - but not quite identical - to offers from other companies like HP and Gateway (Acer). While this is not entirely their fault, because starting at a certain point, all these slim tower desktops look the same, they may have tried a new approach. Apple and Dell, for example, have both very small desktops that offer larger-than-nettop performance.

As with most of this slim desktops, the optical drive is mounted vertically on the front of the machine hidden behind a shiny black plastic door. The entire front is covered with this black shiny plastic and offers seamless - if scratch easily - look.

Both sides are largely featureless, apart from a few strategically placed ventilation holes. It would be nice if Lenovo some sort of stand on at least one page for those users who would rather lay horizontally instead of vertically on the desktop had locked.

The front of the H320 offers the vertically aligned optical drive, as already mentioned. As a nice bonus, Lenovo managed to squeeze a Blu-ray read / writable DVD drive. There are two USB 2.0 ports on the bottom, and the usual two analog audio jacks for line-in and headphone output signals. A multi-card memory card reader sits next to the unit's power button on top to complement the curvature of the front-facing ports.

As always, the rear of the machine where the real action is. On the H320, including Lenovo, only four USB 2.0 ports, it's a shame it no longer. There are also three analog audio jacks for line-in, line-out and microphone-in audio sources.

Gigabit Ethernet takes care of sitting around all of the networking and two PS / 2 ports for peripherals at the top. The H320 is equipped with a USB mouse and perplexingly, wired a PS / 2 keyboard. It is high time for PS / 2 ports are completely abolished in a consumer desktop (they have their place in a business-unit focus) and it would be nice to see Lenovo only they can be in favor of USB for the next iteration.

By default, the Lenovo H320 is Essential comes with a VGA and HDMI video connection. What is great that these native to the motherboard, even if now user a basic model with Intel's Graphics HD Media Accelerator HM55 integrated GPU, they are purely to be able to hook up to an external display (like an HDTV) with a digital connection.

For those wishing to update a discrete GPU as the GeForce 310 in this review unit, there is an extra one each VGA and HDMI video ports on the card. The only drawback is that the video connectors on the card and the video ports on the motherboard can not be used simultaneously, which is actually a common problem on desktops as this.