Boot Time

The ThinkCentre A70z boots in approximately 45 seconds.

Power Consumption

The A70z draws 43.1 watts at idle, bumping up to 80.6 watts under load.

Audio Performance

We ran the ThinkCentre A70z through the standard media encoding test regime here at TweakTown, which includes music and video transcoding.

All systems are tested "as is", which means operating systems and drivers can and do vary and some come pre-installed with applications that may or may not affect performance.

Any anti-virus or security applications are disabled and uninstalled before any testing is started, as they can affect test numbers.

For the iTunes encoding test we took the White Stripes - Under Great White Northern Lights album in MP3 format and encode it to AAC format using iTunes and time the results with a stopwatch.

The system performed this task in 70 seconds.

Video Performance

For the movie-encoding test, we took the Microsoft Magic of Flight VC-1 WMV (1080p HD) video with six-channel audio and transcode it to XviD (1080p HD) with LAME MP3 two-channel audio and an MP4 container using MediaCoder 0.7.3.4616 32-bit edition.

The A70z took 212 seconds to complete this task.

The system proved quite adept at playing DVDs. We watched a few scenes from Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, which looked great on this machine. Matte-finished screens sometimes shortchange DVDs in the area of picture sharpness and color depth, but happily this was not the case with the ThinkCentre.