Lenovo Erazer X700 - 57315583 Pro Reviews

What the Erazer is all about is straddling two worlds: gaming and mainstream consumers. For a gaming PC though, Lenovo’s first dip into the pool feels closer to the shallow end. Reminding us of its commodity PC roots, Lenovo offers only four pre-configured Erazers with no custom order options, dull-gray insides, bloatware and very few overclocking options. Sandy Bridge-E, a micro-ATX board and an aging GTX 660 also provide ammunition for faulting the X700. Additionally, the overclocking button could have been better implemented (no reboot necessary and more customizability).Despite its faults, the Erazer’s sharp-looking custom case, liquid cooling, X79-based motherboard, dual-graphics option, removable storage trays and overclocking all manage to plant one foot firmly in gamer country. The X700 can comfortably handle modern titles at 1920x1080 and high/ultra settings and most features enabled... as long as you don’t mind turning off MSAA. The possibility of adding a second GTX 660 GPU for SLI gaming also helps future proofing the X700. As a box of compromises, the success of this “good enough” gaming PC hinges on price. Online at $1290, the X700 is a solid gaming value even without an SSD. At $1699, the Best Buy config though is a tougher sell. Even so, it does have one huge advantage: the X700 will be the best gaming PC on Best Buy’s floor. With parents looking to wow their kids with an amazing gift this Christmas, the X700 may do well and I believe Lenovo is banking on that.

The truth about Lenovo’s Erazer X700 is that it’s a home workstation that games well, rather than a purpose-built gaming powerhouse able to handle professional tasks during the workday. Huge storage capacity, Blu-ray burning flexibility, and a workstation-class CPU would have made this the perfect excuse for me not to visit the computer lab back in my university days, and I believe that a large number of today’s power users will find the Erazer X700 similarly suits their needs.

The Erazer also offers a couple of bonuses: It's one of the few consumer-brand gamers to offer plenty of expandability and a second graphics-card slot (though you may want to replace its 625-watt PSU if you're planning to pack the interior), and it's a gaming desktop that looks like a gaming desktop, not a generic tower. Even if it does remind us of Monty Python's Black Knight.