No borders, but some limits
Lenovo Ideacentre AIO 510S
There’s something to be said for the simplicity of an all-in-one PC, as long as expansion potential isn’t your priority. The Ideacentre AIO 510S’s finish is silver plastic rather than aluminium, but you’d never guess from a distance, and the metal V-shaped tilt stand adds a futuristic touch. The top section is strikingly slim with only its chunky curved lower back (see image below) marring its wafer-thin profile.
Only a sliver of black space separates the 23in screen from the edges, so Lenovo has mounted the webcam on a little pod that pops down from underneath. This means video callers get an odd worm’s-eye view up your nose, but makes the machine look sleeker when you’re not on camera. A pair of USB 3.0 ports have been usefully added to either side.
On the back are two more USB 3.0 sockets, Gigabit Ethernet, a headphone jack and an HDMI port: this isn’t for a second monitor, but to let you plug in another device to use the built-in screen (such as a DVD player). The 510S also incorporates a quite acceptable pair of Dolby Home Theatre-certified speakers. A keyboard and mouse are included, requiring one of those USB 3.0 ports for their wireless dongle.
The 23in LCD is big enough to use Windows 10 comfortably, but small enough to make its Full HD resolution look reasonably sharp, and we were satisfied with its brightness, contrast and viewing angles. Covering just under 90 per cent of the SRGB colour range, it’s not ideal for graphics work, but serious photo or video editing is beyond its comfort zone anyway. It’s a touchscreen too, so you can control Windows with a swipe of your finger.
So what’s inside? Well, at first glance you might see ‘i7’ and think £800 looks a very good deal for a PC with a top-of-therange processor and a monitor thrown in. Hold your horses: the i7-6500u is a low-power version normally found in laptops. Accordingly, our tests showed the 510S couldn’t even keep up with a mid-range i5 tower: Windows 10 ran quite smoothly, but for anything more than everyday office tasks you might want to look elsewhere.
The basic 5200rpm mechanical hard drive provides a useful 1TB capacity, but very little in the way of speed, making the system slow to boot up and load programs. 3D gaming potential, meanwhile, is very limited. If you really do only want a basic PC, an i5 model costs £100 less.
For anything more than office tasks, look elsewhere