No speed demon but a small, quiet and understated desktop PC

Pros: Small form factor; near silent in use

Cons: Only suitable for undemanding tasks; dated chassis

Bottomline: Ideal for those who just want to do basic office work in near silence and who have limited desk space

Price: £312.50

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If you looking for a no-frills home-office PC and don’t have much desk space, then Lenovo’s Thinkcentre A61e might be just what you need.

An ultra-small desktop measuring just 275x242x81mm (wxdxh), and weighing a mere 3.72kg, the A61e can be used either as a normal desktop or as mini tower and comes in the familiar Lenovo Think series black case.

Powering the A61e is the rarely seen Athlon X2 BE2350; a dual-core processor clocked at 2.1GHz and with 1MB of L2 cache. The BE2350 is one of a series of CPUs with a TDP (thermal design point) of just 45W, which allows Lenovo to use passive CPU cooling.

The motherboard has two Sodimm slots, supporting a maximum of 4GB of PC2-5300 DDR2 memory.
We couldn’t get an overall PCmark05 score because of the low-powered graphics subsystem, but when tested with Sysmark 2007 Preview the A61e gave an overall score of 85 - a good indication that it will power all your everyday office pplications but will struggle to perform other tasks such as video encoding without adding some more memory.

Our A61e came with an 80GB 7,200rpm Sata hard drive and, to back up files, a 16-speed DVD writer.

With an external power supply the A61e is pretty much silent and opening the A61e reveals a tiny ITX format motherboard with just a single 7cm fan to take the heat away from the CPU and ATI690C chipset.

Windows XP Professional comes as standard, but Lenovo offers a choice of operating systems along with a selection of Thinkware software and utilities. You also get a three-year parts and labour on-site warranty.

If you’re an undemanding user and don’t mind the rather unstylish chassis, the A61e is a good-value PC.