Lenovo IdeaCentre K430 Pro Reviews

With its affordable price tag and good range of features, the Lenovo IdeaCentre K430 gaming desktop is a solid choice. But better options exist for gamers on a budget looking to play in high-quality settings.

While we’re not really fans of the Lenovo K430’s unnecessary CPU-throttling power switch, we certainly liked plenty of other things about the K430, even when comparing this PC to systems with similar components. For starters, the K430 boots in a reasonably snappy 35 seconds—not bad, considering there’s no solid-state storage here. And while we noted some preinstalled software of dubious value, the PC isn’t as cluttered with bloatware as, say, some recent HP desktops we’ve tested. We wish Lenovo had included a Blu-ray drive for this price. But if it’s Blu-ray you’re looking for, one of the frequently changed "eCoupon" deals on Lenovo's site was, when we posted this review, selling a K430 configuration with the same CPU and graphics card, plus Blu-ray and an extra 4GB of RAM (for a total of 16GB) for a reasonable $969, just $40 more than the model we’re reviewing here. So poking around Lenovo's configuration options on its site on a given day might yield a better-value configuration than the one we tested.