No avid gamer would touch a machine like this, but if the odd game takes your fancy then with the settings down low you might just get away with it. When running the first-person shooter FEAR we were impressed by how smooth it was, even though the settings were quite low.
The Windows Experience Index of 3.8 for gaming graphics and 4.3 for Aero for once seems to be the right score. A 3DMark score of just 516 won’t give you any gaming joy, but the clever ATI Radeon Xpress 1250 architecture is actually better than it first appears to be. Gaming, of course, is way off on models like this.
In reality, upping the processor to even a 1.66GHz or 1.73GHz would make a difference, without significantly ratcheting up the overall price. The biggest fault is the choice of processor: although it’s a dual core model, it has a clock speed that doesn’t make the grade.