Lenovo B50 Touch Review

Our Verdict

The Lenovo B50 Touch is a powerful and attractive family all-in-one, if you're willing to pay a premium for it.

For

Crisp, total-HD display
Potent CPU and graphics operation
Loud JBL speakers

Against

Pricey
Stiff keyboard
Some may want to expect for RealSense version

Tom's Guide Verdict

The Lenovo B50 Impact is a powerful and bonny family unit all-in-1, if you're willing to pay a premium for it.

Pros

+
Crisp, full-HD display
+
Strong CPU and graphics functioning
+
Loud JBL speakers

Cons

-
Pricey
-
Strong keyboard
-
Some may want to expect for RealSense version

All-in-one PCs tend to hit a sugariness spot between everyday computing and multimedia fun, and Lenovo's new B50 Touch on is one of the visitor's most refined takes on that balance still. Packing a rich, 23.viii-inch, full-Hard disk display, the $i,399 B50 has a Cadre i7 processor strong enough for getting piece of work done, with solid JBL speakers and discrete Nvidia graphics for when it'south time to play. The presence of besides much bloatware holds the PC dorsum, and some may want to wait for an upcoming version that adds Intel's RealSense 3D photographic camera for fifty-fifty more fun, only overall the B50 Touch is a well-rounded all-in-ane.

Pattern

The B50 is one of Lenovo's slickest all-in-ones yet, with a glossy blackness bezel around its 24-inch brandish, a curved speaker bar at the bottom and a thin silver stripe that separates the two.

The machine's textured back console is thick but attractively rounded, with a large vent grill at the acme that gives the PC enough of space to exhale. A sturdy aluminum stand up supports the all-in-ane's brandish, letting yous tilt the screen at angles of upward to 25 degrees backward or v degrees forward.

MORE: Best All-in-One PCs

Measuring 22.nine ten 18.five x 8.1 inches and weighing just under 20 pounds, the B50 will fit simply fine on a small desk but isn't very easy to lug around. Apple tree's 21.5-inch iMac is thinner and lighter, at xx.eight 10 17.seven x 6.9 inches and 12.5 pounds, while the Asus ET2322 (22.48 x 14.xiii x 1.97 inches) weighs the aforementioned equally the B50, but within a slimmer and shorter frame.

Brandish

The B50's 23.8-inch, 1080p display is big and vibrant enough for kicking back and enjoying a pic. The rainbow-colored swirls of paint on the PC'due south default groundwork looked vibrant, as did the square tiles that make up the Windows Start menu.

The Hard disk trailer for Jurassic World looked bright on the all-in-one. I enjoyed every detail, from the scaly pare of a sleeping dinosaur to the beads of sweat rolling downwardly Chris Pratt's face. The trailer was viewable from nigh 45 degrees on the left and right sides, making it a suitable display for group gatherings.

On our calorie-free-meter test, the B50's boilerplate brightness of 223 nits is better than that of the ET2322 (204 nits) merely simply nether the 230-nit category boilerplate and almost half of the iMac'south whopping 424 nits.

The B50 excelled in representing color, producing 99.5 percent of the sRGB colour gamut. The PC displayed slightly more color than the ET2322 (93.9 pct) and our 96 percentage average, though not equally much as the iMac's 108.six percent.

While the B50'due south colors are rich, they're not as accurate as we'd similar. The PC netted a Delta E (color accuracy) rating of 11.two, which is far from a perfect 0 and less accurate than the ET2322's score of 9.1, our category average of six and the iMac's ii.9.

Audio

Packing JBL stereo speakers with Dolby Plus Home Theater technology, the B50 is loud and crisp plenty to provide background music for your next modest gathering.

The B50's speakers faithfully presented the mix of dreamy and distorted guitars in Title Fight's rocking "Chlorine." I was even more impressed by how well the bass came through, as many all-in-i speakers tend to bury the low terminate.

More-pristine, produced tracks like Fall Out Boy's "Jet Pack Dejection" sounded equally clear, every bit Patrick Stump'due south smooth vocals soared without overpowering the bass lines and pianoforte chords underneath.

The B50 produced a satisfying 92 decibels on our audio test (tone volume from 23 inches away), overpowering the iMac (74 dB), ET2322 (86 dB) and our 84 dB all-in-1 boilerplate.

Buying the B50 gets you a xc-twenty-four hour period trial to Google Play All Access (normally $10 per month), which allows for unlimited streaming of the service's 30 million songs on your PC, tablet and smartphone.

Ports and Webcam

Lenovo's all-in-one has a salubrious option of ports for accessories and actress displays, starting with the two USB 3.0 ports, headphone and mic jacks, and six-in-1 memory carte du jour reader located on its left edge.

On the dorsum of the car, you'll notice three USB 2.0 ports, an Ethernet port, an HDMI-in port for using the desktop as a display and an HDMI-out port for connecting to external monitors. A DVD-RW drive sits on the PC'due south right edge, as exercise the computer's power and slumber buttons.

The B50'due south two-MP, 1080p webcam delivered solid picture quality for video chats and extra-big selfies. While I wasn't able to examine every last stubble of pilus on my confront (I don't think I'd desire to), the camera accurately captured my skin tone, pink polo shirt and the checkerboard lining of my gray hoodie.

A future version of the B50 will sport Intel's RealSense 3D camera, which volition add a range of motion-command and depth-sensing capabilities to Lenovo's all-in-one. RealSense has the ability to create a detailed 3D scan of your face up or any object, and allows for games in which your hands become the controller.

Keyboard and Mouse

The B50 ships with a standard-consequence USB keyboard and mouse duo, only the former leaves a bit to be desired.

The keyboard sports a full numpad and handy dedicated buttons for adjusting volume and launching the Lenovo Vantage Technology, but its strong keys fabricated me experience like I was wrestling to go work done. We generally like keys that require more force, because they foreclose bottoming out or slamming one's fingers into the base. Even so, in this instance, the board required as well much actuation forcefulness, a tough 80 grams, which gave me hand cramps subsequently. Withal, I typed at a brisk 81 words per minute with 95 percent accuracy on the Key Hero typing test.

The included no-frills mouse serves its purpose just fine, with contoured edges that make it comfortable to concord for long sessions. The mouse'southward click buttons proved clicky and responsive, and its lens was accurate enough for me to click around Web pages with ease.

Performance

Powered by a ii.two-GHz Intel Cadre i7-4785T processor with 12GB of RAM, the B50 is more than than fast enough for everyday computing. Even while browsing a dozen Chrome tabs, streaming HD video from Netflix and YouTube, downloading a game, and performing a full-organization scan all at once, the machine ran without a hitch.

The B50 notched a hearty 10,689 on the Geekbench 3 general performance test, which about doubles that of the Cadre i5-powered iMac (five,464) and Cadre i7-4500U-powered Asus ET2322 (5,937) while also besting our seven,013 all-in-one average.

It took 4 minutes and 17 seconds for the B50 to consummate our spreadsheet macro test, which consists of matching 20,000 names to their addresses. Lenovo's PC performed faster than the ET2322 (4:31) and our 7-infinitesimal average, though it wasn't equally quick as the iMac'due south 3:49.

Packing a 2TB, 7,200-rpm hard drive with an boosted 8GB flash cache, the B50 copied 4.97 of mixed media files at a rate of 49.four MBps. This is speedier than the iMac's 500GB, 5,400-rpm difficult drive (38.5 MBps), though non quite as fast as the ET2322's 1TB, vii,200-rpm hard drive (54 MBps) or the boilerplate all-in-ane (58 MBps).

Graphics and Gaming

Featuring discrete Nvidia GeForce GT 840A graphics, the B50 has enough visual musculus for working in multimedia and playing a few PC games. Coincidental Windows Shop titles such as Asphalt 8: Airborne ran smoothly; I noticed realistic reflections off my lime-green Audi and delighted in the game's slo-mo crash furnishings.

While the B50 won't supervene upon your gaming rig, it can handle any mainstream title that doesn't require summit-of-the-line graphics cards. Earth of Warcraft ran at a crisp 52 frames per second at 1080p resolution with graphics set to auto, and remained at a playable 30 fps when we kicked the quality to Ultra.

Past comparison, the ET2322 (GeForce GT 740M) churned out 34 fps at 1080p with graphics on auto, and slowed to an unplayable 21 fps on Ultra.

The B50'due south GPU delivered playable frame rates on the more demanding Bioshock Infinite, but simply on low settings. At 1080p with the effects set to low, the B50 hitting 35 fps. Increasing the effects to high dropped the result to an unplayable fifteen fps.

The B50 netted a score of 85,403 on the 3DMark Water ice Storm Unlimited graphics test, outperforming the ET2322 (62,848) and our 47,437 all-in-one average. The Lenovo desktop'southward Cinebench OpenGL score of 61 was similarly impressive, as it bested the ET2322 (38.9), the iMac (twenty.7) and the 35.8 category boilerplate.

Software

The Windows 8.1-based B50 is a bit swollen on the software side, packing a mix of multimedia and children's software that might overwhelm y'all the first time you roll down to the Apps menu.

Among the more handy apps is Lenovo's ShareIt, which lets you easily copy files between the PC and whatsoever iOS, Android or Windows Phone device that has the ShareIt app installed. In one case the desktop is synced up with your mobile device over Wi-Fi, trading files is as simple as dragging and dropping.

The desktop packs various cloud-storage apps. Lenovo Hightail offers 5GB of gratuitous storage, while the revamped Lenovo ReachIt app serves as a cardinal hub for diverse cloud accounts including Hightail, Google Drive and Dropbox. At that place's besides an app for connecting to Beacon, Lenovo'south storage station, which supports up to 6TB of storage and can stream content to your smartphone, PC and TV.

The B50 comes with a wealth of simplistic, touch-friendly games built in, including Fishing Joy and Detect the Differences. Lenovo Wood Adventure is an interactive storybook, while the self-explanatory Lenovo Wearing apparel Up lets kids experiment with outfits on cartoony characters.

The B50 packs diverse multimedia apps courtesy of Cyberlink, including MediaStory for easily making fun slideshows out of your picture library. If y'all're up for some photograph and video editing, you can endeavor out PhotoDirector and PowerDirector, respectively.

The B50 allows access to both a Microsoft Office trial and Evernote off the bat, but doesn't include a premium membership to either. Equally with whatever Lenovo car, Lenovo Companion serves as a central software hub where you can bank check on your automobile'due south status and warranty, download updates, and order accessories for the PC.

While there are some worthwhile programs that come up preinstalled, I would have preferred if the B50 offered a cleaner slate, and so that I could choice and cull what to download.

Configurations

The B50's starting, $1,099 configuration packs a 1.9-GHz Intel Core i5-4460T processor, 8GB of RAM, Intel HD Graphics 4600, a 2TB and 7,200-rpm hard bulldoze with an 8GB SSD, and a 23.8-inch total-Hard disk drive display.

We reviewed the beefier, $1,399 pick, which has a two.2-GHz Core i7-4785T processor, 12GB of RAM and discrete Nvidia GeForce GT 840A graphics with the same difficult drive and display.

An upcoming configuration of the B50 will sport Intel's RealSense 3D depth camera, which allows for a host of move-control and 3D-scanning applications. That version will first at $one,249 and begin shipping in March.

Bottom Line

Featuring a big, rich brandish and solid speakers, the $1,399 Lenovo B50 Touch on does everything a quality, family-friendly all-in-ane should do. Its 23.8-inch total-HD screen is ideal for movies and touch games, and its strong CPU and graphics performance make it equally apt for piece of work and play. However, a ton of bloatware holds this PC dorsum.

While the B50 Touch is compelling on its own, y'all may want to consider holding out for an upcoming config that volition sport Intel's depth-sensing RealSense camera. The model we tested is likewise pricey for an all-in-ane, every bit you can become Apple's 21.five-inch iMac for as low as $999. Or, if y'all're willing to sacrifice half the storage and the discrete graphics, you tin nab Lenovo'southward own excellent C560 Touch for half the price, at $649. If you're willing to pay a premium, the B50 Touch is a powerful multimedia all-in-i PC.

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Mike Andronico is an Associate Editor at Tom'southward Guide. When he's not writing nigh games, PCs and iOS, you tin usually catch him playing Street Fighter. Follow Mike @MikeAndronico and on Google+. Follow us @TomsGuide, on Facebook and on Google+

Mike Andronico is Senior Writer at CNNUnderscored and was formerly Managing Editor at Tom's Guide. When not at work, you lot can usually catch him playing Street Fighter, devouring Twitch streams and trying to convince people that Hawkeye is the best Avenger.