Lenovo IdeaPad 3 14 Inch FHD Laptop - (AMD Athlon Gold, 4 GB RAM, 128 GB SSD, Windows 10 S Mode) - Platinum Grey

Product Information

The measured maximum brightness of 246 nits in the middle of the screen and 224 nits as an average for the whole area, with a maximum deviation of 12%. The Correlated Color Temperature on a white screen is 6050K – slightly warmer than the optimal for the sRGB standard of 6500K, which is not bad. Want the numbers? My SpyderX Pro says it covers just 55.4% of sRGB, 38.2% of Adobe RGB and 39.3% of DCI P3, which means it offers dreadfully poor colour accuracy. Maximum brightness is also way below the average at 223 nits, resulting in a poor 706:1 contrast. After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop into airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the Blender Foundation short film Tears of Steel Tears of Steel—with screen brightness set at 50% and volume at 100% until the system quits. The narrow bezel of this laptop gives you a spectacular field of view. By reducing the wasted space at the edge of the screen, you get a much more immersive experience and a stylish modern look to boot. This makes watching boxsets and movies that much more enjoyable, and documents and presentations will look extra impressive too.

Choose this laptop’s priorities with Q-Control. With a simple tap of a button, you can switch between the ‘Max’ and ‘Battery Saving’ modes. Max mode will give you thrilling speeds that’ll let you pull off killer combos in tournaments, while you might want to switch to ‘Battery Saving’ when you’re spending the day unplugged. This means that whether you’re trying to give it your all in a match, or you’re on-the-go, it can give its best performance at all times. Lenovo IdeaPad 1 (15″, 2022) is equipped with a Full HD TN panel with a model number Innolux N156HGA-EA3 (CMN15F5). Its diagonal is 15.6″ (39.62 cm), and the resolution is 1920 х 1080 pixels. The screen ratio is 16:9, and we are looking at a pixel density of – 142 ppi, and a pitch of 0.18 х 0.18 mm. The screen turns into Retina when viewed at distance equal to or greater than 60cm (24″) (from this distance one’s eye stops differentiating the separate pixels, and it is normal for looking at a laptop).

A Budget Baron

There are just a few other points to mention. The Lenovo IdeaPad 3’s speakers are, you may gave guessed, pretty poor. They have the thin, bass-free sound typical of your average budget laptop. The Lenovo IdeaPad 3 is not a great laptop for movie-watching or basic gaming. While this laptop can technically play Skyrim – more on that later – the limited colour reproduction does not remotely show that fantasy world at its best. Input and output ports on a budget laptop are frequently a grab bag—you never know quite what you’re going to get, as the number and type of ports are constrained by whichever inexpensive motherboard design the laptop maker has sourced or concocted. For the IdeaPad 1 14, Lenovo has placed all but one of the ports on the left edge of the laptop. They include the connector for the barrel-style power adapter, two USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A ports, a full-size HDMI video output, and a microSD card slot. (Photo: Molly Flores) (Photo: Molly Flores)

Turning to the ports, the IdeaPad 3 14 features a good selection. On its right side, you’ll find an SD card slot and a USB 2.0 port. I would be happy doing 90% of my work on the Lenovo Ideapad 3 were it not for one thing: the low-quality screen. Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video editing benchmark, in which we put a stopwatch on systems as they transcode a brief movie from 4K resolution down to 1080p. It, too, is a tough test for multi-core, multi-threaded CPUs; lower times are better. If you can afford it, go for the IPS option – it will be worth it. By the way, this laptop features one SODIMM slot. Our configuration is called the IdeaPad 1-15IJL7, and it supports DDR4 RAM. Some models may come with 4GB soldered to the motherboard. Interestingly, our device was equipped with 3200MHz memory, which works at 2933MHz because of limitations with the chipset. PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL. The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet work, web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system's boot drive. Both yield a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better. (See more about how we test laptops.)

Benchmarking the IdeaPad 3 14: Proficient Performance for the Bucks

How about Photoshop? It will run OK for the basics, but 4GB RAM is not enough if you want to start working on big layered images. Photoshop is a RAM hog, and when it runs out you will start to see significant slow-down and potentially some crashes. And despite there being similarly low-priced options like the V15 or the V155, the IdeaPad 1 15 has one major advantage – the IdeaPad name, which for better or for worse, gives the device some reputation. The Lenovo IdeaPad 3 keyboard also suggest this laptop is meant more for work than play. While there’s a certain hollow sound to key presses ringing through the plastic shell, if you type hard, this is actually a lovely keyboard for long-form typing. It performs the basics just fine, thanks to an unusually deep and responsive keyboard and near-silent running. However, the screen is poor and its battery doesn’t get quite close enough to all-day use. But is it still a good value laptop? The IdeaPad 3 14's colors were generally average, par the course for most budget laptops, though it was a little worse than the competition (and a lot worse than the Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 13's great AMOLED panel). Screen brightness, on the other hand, fared a lot better. If it can't be colorful, it should at least be bright.

Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene, this one rendered in the eponymous Unigine engine for a second opinion on the machine's graphical prowess. We present two Superposition results, run at the 720p Low and 1080p High presets and reported in frames per second (fps), indicating how smooth the scene looks in motion. For lower-end systems, maintaining at least 30fps is the realistic target, while more powerful computers should ideally attain at least 60fps at the test resolution. The IdeaPad 3 14 did well, tapping out after 10 hours and 32 minutes. A valiant effort—but still coming up short when compared with the Asus VivoBook S14, the HP Pavilion x360 15, and the Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 13. You don’t get a graphics card, just the integrated graphics that is part of the Core i3 processor. There was little point in subjecting the Lenovo IdeaPad 3 to our usual gaming tests, but I did try out Skyrim to see if it would run.

Peppy Ryzen CPU on a Budget

You should also keep in mind that the build quality of the IdeaPad 1 (15″, 2022) is not fantastic. The plastic body panels flex, but to be frank, we expected the situation to be worse than that. We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and add up the total (lower times are better). The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters. Another way to cut costs is to use lower-quality build materials. For example, plastic is very cheap (there are a lot of different plastic substances though), but it is more prone to flex. In the case of the IdeaPad 1 15, Lenovo uses a combination of polycarbonate and ABS, which has a surprisingly good feel. In addition, it has a very smooth finish, which is the reason for the good feeling but has the unfortunate disadvantage of showing every single fingerprint.