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Lenovo ThinkCentre M91z: Stylish, Business-Savvy Sprinter

18.10.2011
Lenovo's ThinkCentre Edge M91z is a stylish all-in-one designed for business users. The machine boasts a sleek, edge-to-edge glass screen, and excellent overall performance. It's not a high-end machine, so you do give up some features--namely fancy multimedia features such as a Blu-ray disc drive and a discrete graphics card--but it should be fine for business users who are looking for something a little prettier than the typical desktop.

Our review model, priced at $900, comes packed with a Core i5-2400S processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 500GB hard drive. These are low-end specs--for example, there's no discrete graphics card, but Lenovo does give you the option of adding an AMD Radeon card. Our model also has a DVD burner, built-in Wi-Fi, and runs a 64-bit version of Windows 7 Professional.

But don't let these specs fool you--the ThinkCentre Edge M91z has plenty of power for your business needs. In PCWorld's Worldbench 6 benchmark tests, the M91z performed very well with a score of 132--just one point behind our current top-rated , the . At $1332 the business-oriented iOne H5 is more expensive than the M91z, but it also boasts a Core i7 processor and 8GB of RAM.

While the M91z's general performance is excellent considering the price, it's not quite as amazing when it comes to graphics performance. This is no surprise, of course--with no discrete graphics card, our review unit must rely on Intel's integrated graphics. Still, in PCWorld's Unreal Tournament 3 graphics tests, the M91z managed an acceptable frame rate of 35.9 frames per second (with medium-quality settings and a resolution of 1024 by 768).

By comparison, the aforementioned Cybernet iOne H5, which sports an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5730 graphics card, has a much more impressive frame rate of 129.7 frames per second in the same test, using the same settings. High-quality graphics performance isn't necessarily a must-have on business machines, but it's still a nice thing to have, especially if you occasionally perform graphics-oriented tasks.

The M91z sports a cool, "infinity screen" design, which means that the glass screen extends from edge to edge, across the bezel. This makes the screen look almost bezel-less (though it has a thin, black one), similar to Apple's iMac and Macbook Pro lines. The bezel is about an inch thick (about three inches on the bottom), and has a built-in webcam and microphone. Four slim buttons are on the bottom of the screen--one for switching to VGA, two for brightness, and a fourth for power.