Lenovo Flex 5 Series 2-in-1 Touchscreen Laptop I7 Geforce Review
The Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 fourteen punches far in a higher place its weight. This $600 2-in-ane convertible laptop offers better computing performance than many competitors that cost more than twice as much. It's likewise got decent physical connectivity options, a sturdy, well-designed chassis, and a comfortable keyboard. While the Flex 5'due south fourteen-inch display could be brighter and it could stand to lose a few ounces, it'due south still a screaming-skilful value and an excellent mainstream laptop.
More Flexible Than a Clamshell
The Flex five'southward 360-caste swivel makes information technology more flexible than a conventional clamshell laptop. By folding the hinge past 180 degrees, you can prop the notebook up similar a tent, rest it on the keyboard portion like an easel, or fifty-fifty fold it completely flat and apply it equally a tablet.
This flexibility isn't unique to the Flex 5. Lenovo pioneered the 2-in-one convertible laptop concept, and it offers a scattering of such laptop models at all price ranges. Considering a 360-caste hinge needs to be sturdy, it oft results in a bulkier chassis, which is generally true of the less expensive convertibles that Lenovo and many other laptop makers sell. The Flex v measures 0.82 past 12.seven by 8.six inches (HWD) and weighs 3.iii pounds, which just barely qualifies it equally an ultraportable.
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Some flagship 2-in-1 designs are noticeably smaller and lighter, including the 13.3-inch HP Aristocracy Dragonfly (two.2 pounds) and the 13.iv-inch Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 (2.9 pounds). Just these also cost much more than the Flex 5—often around $ane,500 for a decently powerful configuration. And that's what makes the Flex 5 and so appealing to people who want a workhorse laptop. By going up a few tenths of an inch in thickness and a few ounces in weight, you're saving a ton of coin and still getting serious calculating power to get your work done.
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Besides a more relaxed chassis pattern, the Flex 5 is able to offer such a stiff alloy of toll and performance because of its fourth-generation AMD Ryzen "Renoir" processor options. Our review unit of measurement comes with a 2.3GHz AMD Ryzen 5 4500U, with an AMD Radeon graphics processor integrated into the CPU, plus 16GB of retentiveness and a 256GB solid-state drive. With half dozen dedicated processor cores (multi-threading is not possible on this chip'southward cores), the Ryzen 5 4500U benchmarks similarly to many Intel Cadre i7 CPUs in more expensive laptops. It'southward a great leap frontward for mobile computing.
For even more ability, you lot can configure a Flex 5 with an 8-core Ryzen vii 4700U. Lenovo also offers a larger 512GB SSD as an optional upgrade. The maxed-out Flex 5 configuration still rings up at a reasonable $800.
This laptop is such a good bargain that our review configuration, available exclusively at Amazon, had been consistently selling out at the time we wrote this. In improver to the first-class value, coronavirus-related manufacturing delays and full general bug surrounding the launch of a new processor family likely accept as well played a part in the Flex 5's tendency to remain out of stock. If y'all tin can stretch your budget by $100 or then, information technology'southward worth checking out ane of the configurations sold at Lenovo.com, which are still excellent values and may be more readily available.
Plenty of Connectivity in a Soft-Affect Chassis
The Flex 5's chassis may be on the chunky side, merely it'due south not unattractive. Lenovo uses a unique soft-touch plastic coating on the sides and the keyboard deck, which makes the laptop pleasing to concord. The Graphite Gray colour scheme of our review unit is also intriguing, making the laptop darker and moodier-looking than the mostly silverish schemes of other Lenovo ultraportables. If y'all'd rather stick with a lighter color, the Flex five is also available in Platinum Grayness.
On the Flex 5's left border, you lot'll find a power port, an HDMI 1.4b output, a USB Type-C port, and an audio philharmonic jack. The USB-C port can be used to accuse the laptop, and Lenovo includes an Ac adapter with a USB-C plug, rendering the dedicated ability port an anachronism. Since there's only one USB-C port on the entire laptop, it's worth asking if your retailer can substitute a barrel-fashion Air conditioning adapter instead. That way, you'll exist able to charge the laptop and use the USB-C port at the aforementioned time.
On the right border, there are ii USB 3.i Gen 1 Type-A ports, a rarity on ultraportable laptops these days, and handy for connecting i of the vast number of devices that oasis't notwithstanding moved to USB-C. The correct edge also hosts a full-size SD card reader and the Flex v'due south power button. Side-mounted ability buttons are easier to use when the laptop is propped upwards like an easel, but be careful not to accidentally press the push when yous grasp the Flex v on its sides.
Wireless connectivity includes 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2. Back up for the latest Wi-Fi half dozen (802.11ax) standard is absent, but information technology's not a requirement for a laptop in this cost range. The 802.11ac standard is plenty fast plenty for most dwelling house wireless environments.
The Flex 5'due south Screen Could be Brighter
Other than the rather heavy chassis, the Flex v's only other noteworthy flaw is its screen, which suffers from a relatively dim backlight rated for simply 250 nits of brightness. I had to turn the screen effulgence up to the maximum level to view in a daylight-lit living room. The brandish is fine for darker homes, but whatsoever brightly lit environments—including offices—might reduce its visibility.
The panel is a total HD (one,920-past-1,080-pixel) IPS impact screen, which supports inputs from the Lenovo Digital Pen. The pen, an optional extra, offers 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity and includes two customizable buttons. This makes it a full-fledged digital stylus, different the integrated digital pens included with premium 2-in-1s like the Lenovo Yoga C940 and the Samsung Galaxy Volume Flex. Integrated pens are much smaller and less comfortable for long sketching sessions, just they're much less likely to be misplaced since they're stored and recharged in a slot that's congenital into the notebook.
Above the Flex five'southward screen, at that place's an HD webcam with a fixed-focus lens that shoots 720p video. Image quality appeared quite noisy and occasionally washed out in my testing, although that'due south par for the course for laptop webcams. While the photographic camera lacks IR sensors for confront recognition, it does come with a built-in physical privacy shutter for additional peace of heed when you're non using it. Instead of face recognition to log in to your Windows business relationship, you tin apply the keyboard-mounted fingerprint reader to avoid cumbersome passwords.
The backlit keyboard offers remarkably stable fundamental switches, making for a comfortable and satisfying typing experience. It's derived from Lenovo's flagship ThinkPad keyboards, with a few subtle differences. The Ctrl cardinal is located to the left of the Fn key in the lower left corner, instead of the other mode around. The up and down arrow keys are half-height, while the left and right pointer keys are full-summit. The touchpad is a scrap strong for my liking, simply it still tracks accurately.
Audio quality from the two two-watt stereo speakers is adequate for Skype sessions. The big speaker grilles flank the keyboard, which means sound tin can be a bit misdirected and muffled when you're using the Flex v in "A"-frame or tablet orientation with the keyboard deck facing away from y'all.
Lenovo includes a one-year warranty with the Flex 5, with mail-in (rather than onsite) service to fix issues.
Computing Muscle Is the Flex v'southward Key Forcefulness
It's not often that computing performance is one of the key strengths of an ultraportable laptop, especially one at a moderate price. Even the most expensive ones typically have enough oomph to become through basic tasks similar web browsing, only they rarely are up for circuitous tasks similar 3D gaming or rendering videos. Thanks to its Ryzen five processor and Radeon graphics, the Flex 5 is an exception. Near of its similarly priced competitors utilize Intel Core i3 or Cadre i5 CPUs, including the Asus VivoBook S15, the Lenovo Yoga C640, and the Lenovo Yoga C740. The Microsoft Surface Go 2, a detachable hybrid tablet, uses an fifty-fifty less-powerful Intel Core m3. Let's look at its functioning against those; I've outlined their base specs below...
These competitors are simply no match for the Flex 5 when information technology comes to our benchmark tests, which cover basic tasks like productivity and web browsing, as well as gaming and multimedia content creation. For a bird's-eye view of everyday performance, consider the results of the PCMark examination. PCMark ten assesses part-centric tasks such equally word processing, spreadsheet jockeying, web browsing, and videoconferencing, while PCMark viii ranks the speed of the laptops' storage subsystems.
It'due south reasonable to expect comparable results on the storage criterion, since all of the systems use similar SSDs, but it's immediately clear from the PCMark 10 results that the Flex v is in a different league.
That's too truthful in content cosmos benchmarks like rendering a 3D image in Maxon'south Cinebench, which is fully threaded to make apply of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to return a complex image.
Cinebench is often a adept predictor of our Handbrake video-editing trial, some other tough, threaded conditioning that'south highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads. In it, we put a stopwatch on exam systems as they transcode a standard 12-infinitesimal clip of 4K video (the open up-source Blender demo movie Tears of Steel) to a 1080p MP4 file. Information technology'due south a timed exam, and lower results are meliorate.
In add-on to the fact that the Ryzen v in the Flex 5 has more than cores than most of the CPUs in the other laptops, its base clock speed is higher, which as well contributes to its advantages here. Information technology's particularly telling that the Flex 5 is nearly twice as fast as the Core i5-equipped Yoga C740 at completing the video rendering trial. (See how we test laptops.)
When it comes to prototype editing in Adobe Photoshop, the Flex 5's advantage isn't every bit cracking. In fact, with the exception of the Core m3-powered Surface Go two, the results of all the laptops are grouped closely together on this exam. It stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it tin also take reward of nearly GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, and then systems with powerful graphics fries or cards may see a heave.
While the Radeon graphics may not exist a distinguishing gene in running Adobe Photoshop, the Flex 5'south graphics prowess is immediately apparent on our game simulations. A score of about 40 frames per second in the Unigine Superposition examination at 720p resolution and low quality settings suggest you tin can fifty-fifty wait to play intensive 3D games, as long as y'all turn the quality and resolution settings fashion down. That's clearly not possible with the integrated graphics capabilities of the Core i5 and Core i3 chips represented here. The Flex 5 is no gaming laptop, listen you, but y'all could eke out some play at the lowest settings.
The results of the 3DMark test confirm this. Like Superposition, 3DMark renders and pans through detailed 3D scenes and measures how the system copes. Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Burn down Strike is more demanding and fabricated for high-stop PCs to strut their stuff.
That rough doubling of scores, on both 3DMark tests, between the Flex five and the residual of this competitive field parallels what we saw on Superposition.
Flex 5 Offers All-Day Bombardment Life
Yous might wait that a half dozen-core Ryzen 5 would accept a larger negative effect on battery life than, say, the dual-cadre Core m3 in the Surface Go 2. While that's technically truthful, AMD and Lenovo accept evidently succeeded in ensuring that the effect is minimal. The Flex 5 lasted for more than than xvi hours in our video rundown examination, which involves looping a locally stored 720p video at 50 percent screen brightness with aeroplane mode turned on.
Now, let's be clear: The Flex v's dim screen probable helps it achieve this fantabulous consequence, since brighter pixels consume more power. Besides contributing are the laptop's capacious 52WHr battery and improvements unique to Renoir chips, like a redesigned power interface with 3 distinct states. That means the operating system can meliorate communicate to the Ryzen 5 exactly how much power is required for a given task.
Excellent Value, Powerful Operation
You shouldn't expect a $600 ultraportable laptop to have the graphics capabilities of a $two,000 gaming rig, nor the content creation capabilities of a $3,000 mobile workstation. Merely until recently, there hasn't been a centre ground, every bit the legions of Core i3 and Core i5 ultraportables priced in the $500 range have shown.
The Flex 5 proves it'south possible to offer performance acceptable for light gaming or occasional number-crunching and multimedia editing in a laptop that costs far less than category flagships like the Dell XPS 13 or the Apple MacBook Pro. While the chassis could be a bit lighter and the screen a flake brighter, the capabilities of the Ryzen v processor outweigh these deficiencies. The Flex five is therefore our new tiptop pick in the crowded field of midrange 2-in-1 convertible laptops.
Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 14
Cons
The Lesser Line
Thank you to a make-new AMD Ryzen processor, Lenovo'south IdeaPad Flex 5 14 offers an boggling blend of performance and value for money, making information technology i of the best popularly priced 2-in-1 convertibles we've tested.
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Source: https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/lenovo-ideapad-flex-5-14