Because the Dell will give him the same performance for less money. It doesn't have the unnecessary video card. It would become far superior with the addition of the SSD I linked, and the total would still be less than the Lenovo. The ASUS, for the same price as the Lenovo, has a superior CPU with a decent integrated GPU (Intel HD 4600). It would outperform the Lenovo based on that alone. But by outperform, I simply mean technically superior. He will probably never push any of those CPUs near enough to ever see a difference.

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im a big fan of the i5 and i7 chips

That's fine, but to be a fan of series of CPUs that span in performance and IPC differences over many years is odd. Are you familiar with AMD's APUs, especially the Kaveris released this year? The AMD APU in the HP is a good chip, and offers the benefit of having a good integrated GPU. It's not that important, though.

Truth be told, the CPU is not really as important as you might think. 90+% of his everyday performance will be bottlenecked by the mechanical hard drive unless you transfer the OS to an SSD. In this instance, the i5 will outperform the AMD APU, but the point was to present some better configured options that are cheaper (the HP and Dell at least) and will provide the same experience. Given his desire to just stream video, he wouldn't even notice a performance difference if he bought a $400-500 tower with an i3 or AMD A8.
Like, any of these:
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ive heard mixed things on ASUS. the best buy reviews are bad and so are amazon on it. just curious.

I hate when this happens. I hate reviewers so much sometimes. For reviews of computers and computer components, it helps to read the negatives to determine if they are valid.

Here are the ones on amazon:

3-star review: Guy is complaining because the case design makes a full-size video card upgrade problematic. Yeah, no shite. It also wouldn't have an adequate power supply for that kind of upgrade. None of them will.

1-star review: Bitching about a rebate not being honored, probably because he made a mistake in the rebate process. It's also not even relevant since there is no rebate being offered currently.

1-star review: Once again, bitching about the rebate. Yes, Amazon reviewers are the worst.

The one 1-star review on best buy: "my desktop has crashed twice in the past year where I have to send it back to the factory for repair. It is a totally unreliable product . run as fast as you can from ASUS products."

Totally invalid. Any computer can crash, and it's almost always because of hard drive failure. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the reviewers' fault it crashed. What does "crashed" even mean in this context? I'm betting the reviewer doesn't know either. There is nothing different about the internals of an ASUS computer compared to HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc. ALL of them get their components from companies like Foxconn, Quanta, ECS, Pegatron, etc. ASUS motherboards are generally made by Pegatron (which used to be part of ASUS) and are good quality -- not sure who their other ODM partners are these days, but I'm sure Foxconn is at the top of the list. Foxconn makes pretty much everyone else's motherboards, including Apple.

I'm not saying your dad should buy the ASUS, as it's overkill for his use. However, it's completely invalid to consider ASUS to be inferior to the rest. Buying the $680 Lenovo instead of the ASUS would also be very foolish.

This post was edited on 8/13/14 at 11:05 pm