The Lenovo Ideapad 3 14 laptop is a very solid laptop and a must-buy for just $450.
To start off with the pros,
This laptop is very light, portable, fast, and powerful. I'm a college student going into I.T. and I edit videos a lot. The RAM, GPU, and CPU can easily handle that type of workload for 1080p video. The Ryzen 5 3500U with Radeon Vega 8 Graphics is more than capable of handling light gaming, 1080p editing, Unity/Unreal/Blender rendering, and absolutely blazes through everyday tasks.
The keyboard has a phenomenal feel to it. While it's definitely no Thinkpad keyboard, it feels much better than most laptop keyboards out there. The membranes give a nice, tactile, solid feel to each large key, providing a comfortable, solid, satisfying typing experience.
The 256GB NVMe SSD gives the laptop a very snappy speed, with a near-instant boot time. While the storage capacity is definitely not vast, it makes up for it in speed. The Ideapad 3 also includes 2 USB 3.0 ports, so an external SSD/HDD is definitely a viable option if you want more storage on the laptop. (it's what I did.)
The 1080p display is crisp, sharp , and beautiful (if you spend some time color adjusting the screen in the Radeon settings.) It's definitely more than viable for watching movies, streaming TV shows, or editing videos in 1080p.
Now for the cons,
The Ideapad 3's battery is definitely not a poor one, but it's far from great. On max performance mode, I rarely get more than 2 hours of battery life out of this computer on full brightness. However, running this on the "better battery" mode barely sacrifices any performance for me, and I've been able to get a significant 4-6 hours of battery life when running that mode.
The trackpad is a very smooth experience, yet moving your finger around on it produces a weird knocking sound occasionally, but I've found this to quiet down as the laptop is used more often. Minor gripe.
I know a lot of people have complained about the screen on this computer, but honestly, it's far from a bad display. Sure, it only goes up to 220 nits (from my testing) so it can't realistically be used outside on a sunny day, but for indoor use, even in a bright room, the display is easy to look at and is bright enough to be very clear. Now, keep in mind, the screen comes with all the downfalls of a TN panel, with viewing angles being rather lackluster, but while looking straight at the computer, there's few displays you can get that beats this one for a sub $500 laptop paired with this powerful hardware.
In conclusion,
If you're looking for a good laptop for under $500 that doesn't look or feel cheap despite the (very solid in my opinion) plastic construction, this Lenovo is an absolute no-brainer. The Ryzen 5 and Vega 8 provides performance akin to laptops over double this one's price. If portability, power, and convenience are what you're keeping an eye out for, I can easily highly recommend this computer.
Qualifications:
- Information Technology Major
-Computer Repairman for 4 years (both desktop and laptop)
-PC system builder
-Overall Computer Enthusiast
Thanks for reading my review!
| Standing screen display size | 14 Inches |
|---|---|
| Screen Resolution | 1920 x 1080 |
| Max Screen Resolution | 1920 x 1080 Pixels |
| Processor | 2.1 GHz ryzen_5_3500u |
| RAM | 8 GB DDR4 |
| Memory Speed | 2400 MHz |
| Hard Drive | 256 GB Flash Memory Solid State |
| Graphics Coprocessor | AMD Integrated Graphics |
| Chipset Brand | AMD |
| Card Description | Integrated |
| Wireless Type | 802.11ac |
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 1 |
| Number of USB 3.0 Ports | 2 |
