Lenovo H330

Lenovo H330

My, how far Budget desktops have come. While Lenovo's orange-accented H330 is definitely "budget"--it starts at just $650--it packs some impressive specs, including an i5 processor, a Blu-ray disc drive, and a 1TB hard drive. Plus, it performs like a lower-end nonbudget desktop. Our review model, which is priced at $799, sports an Intel Core i5-2500 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and an AMD Radeon HD 6450 graphics card. It also has a 1TB hard drive, which is very roomy for a budget machine, and it runs a 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium. It has no built-in Wi-Fi or Bluetooth (it's a budget tower, after all), but it did ship with a Blu-ray disc player--unusual in a machine that's otherwise very budget-like. In PCWorld's WorldBench 6 benchmark tests, the H330 scored an impressive 158, which will put it at the top of our budget desktop category. Our previous leader, the Micro Express MicroFlex 23B, scored 141. That machine, of course, has a Core i3-2120 processor and half the RAM, not to mention a price tag that's $200 lower than the H330's. (The H330 is also a step or two up from its earlier sibling, the H320, which immediately follows the MicroFlex 23B on our chart.) Graphics performance, however, was less than impressive.