Leo hesitated. He’d never even tried.

The game loaded. The first frame rendered. 22 frames per second.

The laptop was bought by a college freshman named Leo. Leo wasn’t a gamer, not really. He was a journalism major with a part-time job at a campus coffee shop. His budget was the square root of zero. He needed a machine to write essays, stream lectures, and—if the silicon gods were merciful—play a few rounds of StarCraft II with his roommate.

“Well,” it whispered to the 4GB stick of DDR3-1333 RAM next to it, “here we go.”

One night, Marcus launched StarCraft II . “Come on, let’s play a 2v2,” he said.

And for a 32nm, dual-core APU with Radeon TM HD Graphics, that was a glorious way to go.