Lenovo ThinkCentre M58e Small Form Factor Business Desktop PC

Mar 30 2009 - For a business that is looking to get dedicated desktops with full desktop performance but that consumer less power and take up less space, the ThinkCentre M58e is certainly a strong choice. With its solid performance thanks to the latest platform with DDR3 memory and a dedicated graphics card, it certainly outperforms laptops that most companies use. It is a bit more expensive and has less storage than most consumers are accustomed to.

Mar 30 2009 - Lenovo's ThinkCentre M58e small form factor desktop system tries to balance power and performance in a package that is a good value for business customers. Because it is designed for business, the system has a number of features that do not make it a good choice for consumers but much better suited to a corporate environment.

Performance is quite strong thanks to the use of the Intel Core 2 Duo E7300 dual core processor. While this is a fairly low end desktop processor model, the performance is much strong than what is typically found in laptop systems that businesses use. The system also uses the new DDR3 memory to give it a boost in memory intensive applications. The 2GB of memory is a bit low but it is sufficient for most business uses.

Storage is the big area that many may be disappointed. The 250GB hard drive is half the size of what most budget desktop systems comes with and is much closer to what a laptop PC would store. One nice feature of the ThinkCentre M58e is the inclusion of an eSATA port that allows for easy expansion via the high speed external peripheral interface.

Most small form factor system rely on integrated graphics processors to handle graphics. This isn't typically an issue for businesses that don't have a need for 3D graphics, but by including an ATI Radeon HD 3470 graphics card, the ThinkCentre M58e does have a graphics card that can give a boost to the new Adobe Creative Suite applications that will offload some tasks to graphics cores for additional speed.

The $900 to $1000 price tag will probably deter many people from looking at the ThinkCentre m58e, but they should be aware that this price also includes a three year parts and labor warranty standard.