The Lenovo IdeaCentre AIO 3 ($559.99) is an entry-level all-in-one (AIO) PC that at first blush looks pricier than it is. The funky base adds a dash of style to the system’s appearance, and lends solid support to the 23.8-inch display, which is more generous than the 21.5-inch panels commonly found in AIOs at this price. Look closer, though, and the IdeaCentre shows some missed opportunities. The display may be larger than those of other budget AIOs, but the backlight is disappointingly dim. The webcam is also underwhelming, the storage capacity is tight, and there’s not a single USB-C port. You’re better off spending a couple hundred dollars more on the HP Pavilion 24 All-in-One, which is more capable and better-equipped. Or, spend less and ditch Windows in favor of Chrome OS with the HP Chromebase All-in-One 22.
A Dull Display With a Classy Base
The IdeaCentre AIO 3 reviewed here is the base model. It retails for $559.99 at Lenovo.com and features an AMD Ryzen 3 4300U CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD. The Ryzen 3 is a mobile-class chip intended for use mostly in laptop PCs, a chip compromise not uncommon in budget AIOs that don’t have room for the powerful cooling system required for a desktop-class CPU. The step-up model costs $699.99, for which you get a mobile Ryzen 5 processor and double the storage space. Both models feature a 23.8-inch, non-touch display with a full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) native resolution.
For a budget all-in-one, the IdeaCentre AIO 3 looks pretty classy. The elegant stand suspends the display above your desk or table. The stand is made from a single bar that curves around in a C-shape and extends upward behind the right side of the display. The stand not only looks cool, but it also lends solid support to the rest of the AIO. Plus, it provides a convenient spot for stashing the keyboard out of the way when you aren’t using it.
Thin bezels frame the display to give the system a modern look. The display measures 21.2 inches wide by 13.2 inches tall, and the bottom bezel sits 4.5 inches above your desk. You get neither height nor swivel adjustments—only tilt. From the display bezels and back panel to the stand and bundled keyboard and mouse, everything is decked out in black, which makes the IdeaCentre AIO 3 look more like a corporate PC than a home entertainment center.
The full HD resolution of the display suffices for casual use like browsing the web and watching 1080p videos. It’s less ideal for staring at text all day and any serious media editing. Text looks a bit blurry, and the edges of images can look fuzzy.
The display is rated for a modest 250 nits of brightness, which is common on budget all-in-ones as well as entry-level laptops. Testing with a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor showed it’s a bit brighter than its rating at 272 nits, but this is a display on which you’ll likely keep the brightness setting at its max. I had it maxed out for most of my time with it, and it offered enough brightness and contrast in my home office, which gets a modest amount of natural light.
We also used the sensor to measure the display’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes it can show. It was a tick away from full coverage of sRGB at 97%, along with creditable coverage of Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 at 75% and 78%, respectively.
The IdeaCentre AIO 3 features a pair of 3-watt stereo speakers that produce middling audio output. They sound no better than your average laptop speakers. They reach an acceptable level at max volume, but there’s little separation between high and mid tones, and little to no bass. They pale in comparison to the dynamic sound produced by the 5-watt speakers in the HP Chromebase All-in-One 22.
Blasts From the Past
Despite the cabinet’s modern look, a few features (and a few missing features) make the IdeaCentre AIO 3 seem like it’s behind the times. For starters, there is a dearth of USB Type-C ports, which means you’ll need to locate a dongle whenever you want to connect a USB-C device to the machine. And hiding behind the display next to the power button is a DVD-RW drive. Unless you’ve got a movie or photo collection you haven’t transferred off of discs yet, this is likely a useless feature. The last time I burned a CD or DVD, Jamiroquai was still a thing.
I’d happily trade the DVD drive for a USB-C port or two. Most of the ports are located in a neat row on the back panel behind the display. There you’ll find a pair of USB 2.0 ports, a USB 3.1 port, an HDMI-out port, and an Ethernet jack.
On the left side you get another USB 3.1 port, an SD card reader, and a headphone/microphone combo jack.
Wirelessly connectivity is a generation behind with Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) and Bluetooth 5.0, although the lack of Wi-Fi 6 isn’t uncommon among budget PCs.
Lenovo bundles a basic, wired keyboard-and-mouse set with the IdeaCentre AIO 3. Both are serviceable, but the resulting clutter of wires on your desk ruins the otherwise clean design of the system. It’s unusual for a budget all-in-one to include a more expensive wireless pair, but you do get just that with the HP Chromebase All-in-One 22.
Testing the IdeaCentre AIO 3: Ryzen Up
The Lenovo IdeaCentre AIO 3 is among the first Windows-based all-in-one PCs we’ve reviewed since we moved to our new suite of 2021 benchmarks, which leaves comparing its performance with the competition a bit challenging. For benchmark testing, we included Apple’s 24-inch iMac, but it’s incompatible with many of the Windows-based benchmarks we use, so we added a budget non-AIO desktop in the Core i3-based Dell Inspiron Desktop (3891). Because the IdeaCentre AIO 3 uses a mobile processor, we also included a pair of laptops: the Ryzen 5-based Lenovo IdeaPad 3 14 and the Core i5-based Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 13.
The main benchmark of UL’s PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10’s Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a PC’s storage.
Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
Our last productivity test is Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s famous image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
The IdeaCentre AIO 3 finished right where we expect it would on PCMark 10: in between the Core i3-based Dell Inspiron Desktop and Core i5-based Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 13, and behind the Ryzen 5-based Lenovo IdeaPad 3. The M1-based iMac led the way on our HandBrake, Cinebench, and Geekbench tests.
The IdeaCentre AIO 3 finished last on Cinebench and Geekbench, and bested only the Galaxy Book Pro 13 on HandBrake. It fared a bit better on our Photoshop test, indicating that it’s capable of some light media editing but not to the level that it’ll catch the eye of bargain-hunting content creators.
We test Windows PCs’ graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark suite: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for systems with integrated graphics), and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).
We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.
On both the 3DMark tests and GFXBench tests, the IdeaCentre AIO 3 and its integrated AMD Radeon graphics finished ahead of the Dell Inspiron Desktop, which features Intel’s previous-generation UHD integrated graphics. But the IdeaCentre AIO 3 was behind the Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 13, which features Intel’s latest integrated Iris Xe graphics silicon, and the Lenovo IdeaPad 3 14, which features integrated Radeon graphics. With underwhelming 3DMark scores and frame rates less than 60 frames per second on GFXBench, the IdeaCentre AIO 3 is a poor choice for gamers.
Open to Chrome? Head to the Chromebase
The Lenovo IdeaCentre AIO 3 is an entry-level all-in-one that makes sense if you are looking to max out the amount of screen real estate for the money. It serves up a larger display than you might otherwise find for the price, but a full HD resolution stretched across a smaller 21.5-inch screen might look better. And the mobile CPU and lack of USB-C make the IdeaCentre hard to recommend unless you find it deeply discounted during a clearance sale.
You’ll be better off spending a bit more for the HP Pavilion 24 All-in-One, our favorite budget Windows all-in-one, if you can. Or, if you are looking for an all-in-one to add as a secondary computer in your home, the HP Chromebase All-in-One 22 is a great choice if you are open to embracing Chrome OS.
