I Regret Buying This - Lenovo IdeaPad 3 Review (AMD Ryzen 4300U, 8 GB, 512 GB, 15.6" 1080p) By Techtesters

It is pretty much common knowledge that when you work directly with manufacturers, they will usually send you their super high-end flagship products to show off what they can do and how far they can go, but actually most common comments under pretty much. Every laptop preview are focused on finding something: that's much cheaper instead, because not everybody has thousands of euros or dollars available to spend on a laptop, and now, with all that in mind, I decided to just go ahead and buy one of the cheapest laptops that I could find. Because, let's be honest here, I don't think that anyone in their right mind would willfully send me their super budget model. So I wanted to find a laptop that will cost me around five hundred dollars uh. They will have some decent and reasonable specs, so no old, outdated hardware, and that could be good enough for that light, everyday use now and in the future, and I thought that this Lenovo IdeaPad 3 would fit this description just perfectly. It has a quad-core AMD Ryzen, 3 4, 300 use, CPU, 8, gigabytes of dual channel memory, a 512 gigabyte, SSD, a full HD display and a price tag of 529 euros which, to be honest, sounded like a pretty good value deal until I started testing it.

So let's see how it performs, how it compares to other laptops I tested so far, and talk about why you should probably try to spend a little more on your next laptop. Let's go. This video is brought to you by sea sonic and their prime series power supplies. These top quality power supplies are very efficient, they're, whisper, quiet, extremely reliable and my go-to choice for most of my test rigs and builds around here and to make the deal even sweeter. Sea sonic wraps it all up in a cozy 12 year, long warranty check them out using the links in the description below out of the box.

It is actually a pretty good-looking laptop with its light silver brushed, aluminum, look and a very discreet logo. On the side. The panels are plastic, of course, but I actually think it looks very clean and very modern, and it should have no issues fitting in that professional environment in terms of size. It's a pretty standard, 15-inch laptop. It is, you know, not the smallest one out there, but it is thin and light enough to carry around now.

The build quality is not really amazing, as you would expect from an old plastic budget laptop. It feels fine if you just handle it normally, but there is quite a bit of flex in all panels, both inside and out. The hinge feels all right. It doesn't feel like it will break anytime soon, unless you really, you know, start throwing the laptop around, you will need two hands to open it up, and that gets you to what's one of the nicest budget laptop keyboards I've seen so far, it does look a bit old school with a large font and no backlight, and it even feels a bit old school with a long travel distance and that cricket feeling, but that actually makes it extremely pleasant to type on now. I normally use mechanical keyboards and I found this to be easier to get used to than most premium thin laptops, so it is not fancy in any possible way, but on a budget laptop, I'm really happier to find a keyboard that offers that good feedback and a jumped than a modern looking keyboard.

That is too light to touch the touchpad. Isn't that bad either? So don't expect a premium touchpad experience, but I've definitely seen worse. So I will give it a pass today. Now, when it comes to connections, you get one HDMI port, one USB 2 type, a port and two USB 3 type, a port on the left side and an USB 2 card readers and an audio jack on the right side. So there are no USB type-c connections.

There is no thunderbolt support and there is no Ethernet connection, which I kind of think it's a bit of a shame as it could easily fit on a laptop of this size. Overall, I do think three USB type-a ports is pretty okay for a budget laptop, but one of the main reasons I picked this laptop is because it comes with a dozen 3 4300 due processor. It is a four core four thread CPU that is actually surprisingly capable it outperforms the intel ice lake, CPUs you'll, find in the much more expensive dell, XPS, 13 or racer blade stealth and, I would say, perform similarly to an 8th, gen Intel Core i7 and even previous generation dozen 7 CPU. So that's enough to handle some photo editing or even some light, video editing and if you're, considering this laptop as a school laptop, it will handle most applications. You need just fine.

I do think it's worth looking at a 4000 series, dozen 5, if you can afford it, but for a budget system, this is a completely fine processor. The laptop doesn't have a dedicated GPU, but the built-in graphics of these dozen CPUs are good enough to let you play an occasional game or two in your spare time. Now, of course, you can forget about any AAA titles, but lighter games like Minecraft, like League of Legends overwatch and cs go can definitely be played, at least at that casual level, and just when you think that all this is sounding pretty solid for a budget. Laptop Lenovo just destroys all those nice and positive things by using the absolute worst display I've ever tested, I kind of knew what I was getting into, because the specification page of the shop I was buying it from kind of clearly stated that the panel wouldn't really be that bright and that it would offer a poor color gamut. But I actually didn't expect things to be this bad now.

The one and only good thing about this panel is that it has 1080p resolution. That's it. It is a tn panel with a peak brightness of 234 nits. So that's just about okay for indoor use, but it is completely unusable in any remotely bright environment. RGB color gamut is 55, meaning that the colors will look quite washed out as it just you know, cannot display all the colors it needs and as a result of that, the color accuracy is pretty bad as well.

So, even though the CPU can handle it, there is no way you could do any kind of photo or video editing using this screen. But the absolute worst thing is the contrast which comes in at 429 to 1 making it by far the worst result. I've ever seen the display just cannot show black, and instead you get that uncomfortable gray color, and it is also completely unable to display any contrast in light areas either. So I'm going to give you a nice example. I wanted to get some white sneakers for myself online and on some pages you could barely make out the shoe from the white background.

It is just you know, not there, it disappeared, and on top of that, because it is a tn panel, the viewing angles are absolutely terrible. If you don't look at a panel at that, one exact angle, brightness and colors will drop off fast and again, you will not be able to make out anything on the screen anymore. Now I know that most of the 1080p IPS panels in laptops that will cost you around 700 euros, aren't particularly great either they will barely offer better color performance, but the other results were usually within reason, and this panel is just so much worse, and I think that's a great argument to you know, invest a little more in your laptop. If you can afford it, so this panel might be able to handle some office use, it might be fine for browsing in a bit of gaming. So if this is all you can afford, it will be usable, but if you can add a bit more to your budget, I do recommend getting a laptop with a better panel than this one.

It is also a surprisingly quiet, laptop coming in at around 36.9 decibels, when stressing both the CPU and integrated graphics with a really comfortable 62 degrees on the CPU, while it's running at 3.5 gigahertz, so terminals are definitely not one of the things you should worry about now. The speakers are actually surprisingly. Okay, you shouldn't expect them to sound fantastic, but playing a couple of games or watching Netflix really didn't sound that bad. If you're, looking for some reliable and fast external storage, SSDs are the way to go, it doesn't matter if you're just going to use them to copy some files to work from them, for example, or to keep your games on they're, just such a useful tool to have- and I would say the webcam is in that same category- so it's nothing exceptional, but it will be good enough for occasional use. I do like the little privacy slider that turns the webcam on and off, so there is no need for those silly stickers.

People usually like to use over their webcams okay. So this is a test of the camera and of the microphone on this laptop and, as you can see, it is pretty rough. Even though I have all these lights around me so um I mean it's gonna, be fine for a teams meeting or two, but don't expect miracles from it. It kind of fits the price range. It is very easy to open this laptop up, and you can easily clean the fan.

You can swap the Wi-Fi five chips to a Wi-Fi six model if you want to and replace the SSD, if you need more storage now, half of the memory is replaceable, but the other half is soldered on this tiny PCB in a spot where it looks like they just should have been able to fit a second socket instead and there is a spot for a 2.5-inch drive without actually having the connections for it. So there is an actual connection on the motherboard itself right here above the battery, but the cable is just not there now losing the 2.5 inch. Slot is completely fine in my opinion, but only if you put a bigger battery instead, not like this one and the thing is the battery life really isn't that bad at all, with close to five hours in PC, mark productivity test and six and a half hours of watching Netflix, but I don't know, imagine how great it could have been if Lenovo just put in a larger battery instead of this small 35 watt hour, one instead and that's pretty much all I have to complain about today. I guess, if you are buying a cheap laptop, you should expect to settle for some cheap parts, but I really didn't expect this panel to be this bad. I mean the brightness, the contrast.

The viewing angles are literally the worst I've seen in a very long time, and that is all kind of sad, because most of the other parts of this laptop really aren't that bad. So, even though it has really decent specs that perform really well, it has decent inputs. It has a decent battery life. This poor panel performance just really hurts that overall user experience. So, in my opinion, the only reason you can justify getting this is, if you're looking for a very simple productivity laptop- and you really don't have more to spend, but for anyone, that's looking for a new daily driver for school for office for a bit of light gaming or some creative applications.

I would completely skip this one and try to spend a little more on a machine that has a better panel. You can maybe check out my review of the Acer, swift, 3 or the Xiaomi Redmi book, for example, which will only cost you a tiny bit more, but they will offer a much better user experience now. That is it for today. I really hope you enjoyed this review. If you did, please give me a like and don't forget to subscribe to this channel and click that bell to never miss a video, see you in the next one guys bye.

Source : Techtesters