Here are the best laptops you can buy check out our roundup of the best laptops as well as gaming if you need a dedicated gaming rig, as well as our picks for the best budget laptop if you're on a tight budget.
Lenovo Ideapad S145 AMD A6-9225 15.6-inch HD Thin and Light Laptop
Now last year when you probably saw a couple of Lenovo laptops and
that includes PID pad 330 this one and the IdeaPad S145 with a metal lid on top
of it. However, this year when you shop on Amazon or Flipkart you're bound to
see another model on sale and that's the IdeaPad s1 45 let's see how this new the laptop did in our review shall we well sadly everyday performance of our review the net was woefully bad but I can more than confidently chalk that up to the low
ram and the sluggish hard drive inside the laptop took well over minutes the cold
boot to the Windows desktop and be fully ready for work the Start menu took
over 6 seconds to pop up on an average Dever constant stutters and window
freezes while using everyday applications like Chrome File Explore and OneNote
even one application at a time maximizing a window would sometimes take up to
five whole seconds to happen and the contents inside would get stretched and
distorted in the process foreground would often sputter and stahma in summary
then the IdeaPad s 145 3 is an unbearably sluggish device if use it in the same
bundled 4gb and hard drugs and figuration as the review in it I highly
recommend you purchase a variant with a GB ROM minimum and a solid-state drive
if you plan to use this laptop for every day work well what if you already
bought and it if you already bought from the same configuration as our review
unit consider upgrading the RAM to 8gb and replacing the hard drive with a SATA
3 solid-state drive the 290 GB unit shouldn't cost you over five thousand
rupees anyway these two updates will go a long way in improving the FD
performance of this laptop what about the battery on everyday tests where the screen is set to 70% brightness and Bluetooth and Wi-Fi enabled laptop lost 42%
of its full charge in roughly two hours charging from 36% to about 95 took
roughly one to half hours during the tests multiple instances of chrome OneNote
file explorer was open alongside WhatsApp for PC in summary then the battery
inside the IdeaPad s1, 6 appears to be an ideal companion for fairly long
stretches of continuous operation away from the wall socket expect up to three
and half hours of continuous use on this laptop let's move on to the display
the IdeaPad s145 features a 15.6-inch display with full HD resolution and two
hundred twenty minutes of maximum brightness according to Lenovo the screen is
capable of covering 45% of an unspecified color space in reality however colors
on the screen of your totally washed out leaving the white of the backlight to
burn through brightly, in addition, the matte finish on the screen creates a
grainy effect on the screen thereby making the overall viewing experience even
worse tilting the display even by a few degrees renders text on the screen
unreadable in summary the IdeaPad s145s display isn't a great one for video
focused work but that said it'll do the job for all the boring spreadsheets and
documents you throw at it the idea 5s 1:45 has most of its ports on the left
side of its body which should prove convenient for by kind of mouse users on
the left is a proprietary round pen power port for charging a full-size HDMI
port a USB a port a couple of USB 3.1 ports as well on the right side all we
see are full-size SD card reader and the 3.5 mm audio jack for headsets
understandably the laptop skips the USBC port and fingerprint scanner let's
move on to the keyboard the IdeaPad s1 45 keyboard is not particularly
comfortable but it's not particularly uncomfortable either the entire keyboard
island and individual key caps are mainly convex in shape and they bulge
upwards right at the center, this is the exact opposite of that laptop
manufacturers usually do to offer a more comfortable driving experience on the plus side though the Numpad section includes dedicated keys for media playback
if anything I wish the key to a backlit but that's too much to ask for a laptop
in this price range because it's not a Windows 10 recognized precision unit the touchpad is sluggish and I mean in tracking the movement of the pointer across
the screen the acceleration of the pointer to ladies with the direction of the
fingertip movement making for an unpleasant touchpad experience overall
surprisingly the click buttons under the touchpad clean plastic surface have a
great feel all things considered you're better off getting yourself a mouse
along with the laptop okay then let's move on to the building design the
IdeaPad s1 45 uses plastic in its construction in a manner that's similar to
last year's IdeaPad 330 the laptops top cover and keyboard island have a glossy
plastic finish but the my lead brush design in plain silver not only does this
lens the device a toyish look but also makes it less grippy in the user's hands
especially while taking it out of a backpack in a hurry luckily the keycaps
screen bezels and other elements use a darker shade for some added contrast
opening and closing the lid from one side reveals quite a bit of flex on the
lid surface the same is observed on the keyboard island when the keys are
pressed down hard on the plus side however the laptops lid opens out to a
maximum of 180 degrees what's more the laptops power brake is now integrated
with the wall clock making the entire charging kit more portable and appealing
all things considered, the IdeaPad s1 45 looks and feels decent for a laptop of
it's price range although a matte finish all around would have been better
appreciated for reasons of grip and overall appearance well then all things considered
I think the new Lenovo IdeaPad s1 45 is not a bad choice by any means now if
you're buying this laptop you have to and have to get it with at least 8gb RAM
and a solid-state drive if you want to use it for everyday work that said if
you have the patience of a monk you must be ok with 4gb RAM and a 1tb hard
drive
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The 14 inch 3 notebook from HP a 1.7 kilo very nice looking
laptop it's an Intel Core i5 processor with 4 gb of ram and 256 gig SSD solid
state 740 drive now this is quite a nice looking laptop it's in a beautiful
champagne gold it does come in other colors as well but let's take a look at
the actual notebook in more detail and see how it so I was quite excited when
this one 15 arrived to review I think
this laptop is a beautiful looking
laptop is 1.7 kilos it really doesn't
feel 1.7 kilos and so it's quite light
in the hands and the other thing is that
this is absolutely packed full of
features so we have multiple USB 3 and
connectivity on the left-hand side here and a single USB standard 2 on the
right-hand side now the USB 4 3 will
allow for really high-speed data
transfer so again you know if you've got
a lot of photos or videos that you want
to move around onto external hard drives
or if you're just looking to back off
your laptop on a regular basis it's
going to save you time and effort on the back of that so he also has all have an HDMI out so this will allow you to connect this to a separate monitor or if you want you can view maybe your photos or your videos off your laptop but on that other monitor
that you may have so we also as well
have an Ethernet port on the left hand
side this will allow you to connect things like your networks and maybe
you might be in the office or if you've
got home network that's using cable then
great so it also as well comes with
AC standard Wi-Fi in it already inbuilt
now this allows for high speed data transfer
using the wireless service and again that's gonna really give you that next
generation of connectivity so no major worries about anything slowing down
or anything like that so really great
from HP there we also have a power cable
on this left hand side and we also as well have a VGA so 54 if you want it
connected to another monitor by a VGA you can on the right hand side here we've
got as I say we've got a USB slot here is a USB 2 and we've 58 also as well got
an SD card slot here that's really really hungry so if you're using say a
digital camera or a go 350 probes like that you can plug in your SD card in its
there and download your images very quickly so that's enough of the outside so let's
take a look at the 65 inside so as we open it up we have a beautiful looking
screen here sorry inches is an anti-glare screen so it we're not having to worry
about I mean I've got whites coming from many different directions and I can
still see this screen perfectly fine we also as well see a really beautiful
keyboard here it's nicely set down there's no distractions so this keyboard is
not backlit I think it would have been nice with a backlit on it and I think about what it
has been a real nice advantage but I don't think it causes many issues so the really nice thing about having the i5 processor from Intel and this is the eighth generation running at 1.6: with a 3.2 gig burst on it this just really
allows you to do a lot of multitasking so take for example if you're working on
a large document or you might be doing some video processing or you might be
just watching a Netflix video and something you want to do something else so
just allows you to be able to do lots of different things at 91 at the same time
without the PC running slow so it's a really nice benefit to have this high
fiving built into this so the other nice thing that comes inside 95 this is the
SSDs and this is the solid-state drive pretty much a replacement for the old
versions of hard drives that could be quite slow but also as well quite noisy
and if you move your laptop around I'll put it down heavily and they were
subject to possible issues such as crashes or possible damage now the great
thing with the SSDs is the solid-state so we know that moving this around or
you know if it was to be dropped we don't have any worries about loss of data
so we're getting a really nice benefit and also as well it makes it really
really speedy so I'm really fast to boot up and really fast to process any
files that you're working on so this keyboard is a beautiful keyboard it's
lovely and set out nicely it's got a
mechanical feel to it and again really low profile on the actual keys I quite
like it hidden Steve feels very very easy to type on and I can get through
quite a lot of documents just type it on this so the trackpad is really nice
it's a quite a wide trackpad compared to all the trackpads out there is really nice it's nicely placed but also as
well it's got some solid keys on them in it's a ball top sense tip so I could
do multi-touch I can use two fingers to swipe up and down I can move things
around but also as well having the buttons at the bottom are really handy to
have so I can use my fingers and also as well use them buttons at the same time
so it's all set on this plastic Bank that looks like a brushed metal and it's really nice it sets
off the whole piece very nicely and again it blows up into the screen so all in
all it just looks so nice also it's all further up at the top we have a HD
webcam err so again if you're using it things like sky or looking to
videoconference with your friends family or even at work maybe with something
like Skype for business this is going to allow you to be able to have them
really high-definition calls but also as well have that really nice way of
being able to take photos and videos on the fly so put together the HD graphics that are on the
screen the HD web camera but also as well the high quality sound that comes
from the speakers you're getting an 240 all-in-one package that really really
will give you the best experience when it comes to using a PC so this laptop is
440 based on Windows 10 from Microsoft and again that's packed full of features
that are going to integrate into all these wonderful Hardware functions that
have brought to this notebook and again we have things like voice control we
have application stores we have loads of different applications that work with
this also as well we've got integrations into multiple peripherals accessories
such as Wi-Fi printing or different things like Xbox games and so on so let me
show you a few little things like about this laptop and the first one is is
that it's got inbuilt poise control so Microsoft bring a voice control service
called Cortana now if we open that up 550 what's the weather like today it's
kind of snowing at the moment it is 660 definitely zero degrees and it is a bit cloudy so open Netflix I do fancy just sitting back and watching the video
so as you can see here I can do some really nice little things I'm not having
to click around a lot so it's really nice the fact that I can have some voice
control service on my laptop and automate some of my different functions
instead of having to click around various things so the thing that I like about
this HD graphics and this beautiful looking screen it's just that I can sit there and I can consume I can watch
videos I can type I can create graphics without any worry I can sit there I can
check my emails I can look at photos and they're really nice things that I'm
getting that crystal clarity and I think what HP had brought into this laptop is just it looks extraordinary is
such a lovely laptop to use so partner up all of this hardware that HP brought to the table along with
Microsoft and Windows 10 you're basically getting a package that's giving you
such a lovely future proof laptop that's really going to last quite a long time
also as well give you lots and lots of hours of enjoyment so I've tested a lot of laptops in the past I've
looked at various ones from all the different vendors but also as well
different sizes different weights different thinness I have to say this one's won a little space in my heart is a lovely laptop it's really lightweight for
what it is it comes with lots of different features in it it's a mid-range laptop but also as well it's very
powerful I've found I've been able to run multiple applications such as
Premiere Pro from Adobe with the word with PowerPoint also as well watching Netflix in the background without any problems whatsoever I've been able to
render videos quite quickly on these compared to other laptops that I've tested
in the past but also as well the fact that it comes with all these wonderful features such as USB 3 Wi-Fi connectivity in the AC grade we've got Ethernet
we've got HDMI out we've also as well got an SD card slot in there what else are you going to need so whether
you're at school college university whether you're a home worker or an office
worker or if you're just 080 somebody who's at home and wants to watch some box
sets or look at your 00:09:55,450 photos this laptop is really going to fit
everybody's needs it's a high 760 powered laptop with really long battery range
but also as always the 470 crystal-clear graphics on it is just absolutely
perfect for consuming and creating.
Acer Aspire 3 Thin A315-54 15.6-inch Full HD Thin and Light Notebook
what's the best punch wait back with it in the video and
today I'm going to unbox a very budget oriented Acer laptop so without further
ado let's get started so I won't be making a very long review of this laptop as
this is a very basic one and I will just show you briefly about the setup and
basic use the Mark II was 22 proline rupees but I bought it for a piece 15 990
opening the box we get the laptop itself with a lot of documentation we are
provided with the Chandra power cable and power adapter which has the reading
of 19 volts and two-point three seven amps now let's move over to the laptop
itself now my first impression by just holding it would be not bad plastic
material is looking good now the model number. Acer Aspire a three one five three
one out of the box it's looking too good for the price it comes with some kind
of Linux OS known as endless if I talk about the configuration, it comes with
2gb ddr3 RAM 26 0Intel Celeron and three three five zero processors 500 gigs
hard disk and inbuilt Intel HD graphics its appearance truly looks like brushed metal but it isn't the whole body is made up of plastic but of a good quality let me start with the
trackpad it looks awesome but is above average 34 I mean multi-finger gestures
are not that accurate but you can surely tap anywhere just like MacBook trackpads the keyboard also has an above-average
satisfaction typing on this is not so bad travel distance is okay and
overall 40 it is good to the left we have the lock along with HDMI port USB 3.0
and an SD card slot you'll find the air vents at back and on to the right you
will have the power port along with two LEDs for power and hard disk processors
two more USB 2.0 ports are given and a 3.5 mm headphone port there is a camera
which you can probably ignore as it is a VGA camera with mic and led the screen
you get is just a 15.6 inch HD screen no 119 Full HD as you can probably expect
in this price range the screen can open up to an angle of 180 degrees but the
viewing angles aren't that great okay enough of the overview let's boot this up
from that key on the keyboard 329, the endless waste was pre-installed which I
didn't like as most of the things weren't working properly for example not even QD
was working so I decided to get rid of it by inserting my Windows bootable USB
it was recognized by computer but as expected 00:02:52,590 dot exe file was
unreadable so I restarted the computer and went into Boot Options by pressing
f2 key to my shock my pen drive wasn't recognized 6by it I tried a lot of
methods but nothing was working after a lot of researching googling I get to
know that I have to set supervisor password first I set the password one two
three there and save the changes after that step it akin wasn't working again
searching many forums I tried one more thing I formatted my pen drive and again
made it bootable with the software Rufus I'll put the software link in the
description after installing it on my second computer I selected my Pendrive
and this time I use GPT partition scheme instead of MBR and file system fat32
next, I selected my Windows version that is Windows 10 and started the process
now when I inserted the pen drive in this asset laptop and opened the boot
option with the help of f12 key I found my Pendrive found it this laptop
recognized the bootable USB which has used this GPT scheme method it demanded
the driver so I install all the drivers including the Wi-Fi driver sound driver
etc it's a 64-bit computer with Intel Celeron n3 3 5 0 which is clocked at one
point one zero gigahertz that's a caged processor for day-to-day usage well the
web surfing ms-office multimedia was running fine on it I would say overall
it's a good laptop for journalists of life for office work and watching
multimedia content but don't do any gaming stuff on it I will never recommend
that to make it a little smooth I would recommend a 4gb stick to sum it up in a
single-line this laptop is made of strictly to do office work and general
multimedia content up to 1080 P this laptop justifies its price all the
required ports are there the way thin design the build quality and the screen
of 15.6 inches is decent the battery backup I caught was between 4 to 115 4.5
hours which was decent there are many laptops in this price 117 range and if
you are in the need of a decent laptop for journal work this would be good enough.
Lenovo Ideapad L340 Intel Core I5 8th Gen 15.6-inch FHD Laptop
Dell Inspiron Core i5 8th Gen 13.3- inch FHD Thin & Light Laptop
Dell 2 Inspiron s is
a 15.6 inch 5000 series Inspiron just bought it yesterday from Costco for 650
dollars and I think it's a pretty solid deal
Costco does give you a built-in four-year warranty so you can get the
pill up top for the same price from Dell comm 9 but it's kind of a no-brainer
if you got a Costco card to go to Costco because for that same price for that
warranty definitely a good deal so I'll go ahead and dive right into first
impressions 130 it's got pretty decent build quality means isn't Inspiron 5000
series they 390 also have a 3000 and 7000 series so it's in the mid-range you
don't get a full metal build it is all plastic but as far as plastic goes it's
definitely pretty sturdy it's not on the flip seaside by any means the screen
doesn't have too much bend to it especially the actual body itself does seem
nice and sturdy it's not gonna you know wobble around on you too much it's a design like a lot of the other it sprung laptops is meant to be kind of like
clean professional looking but also nice at the same time and one thing that's
pretty cool is that it does have a fingerprint sensor that doubles as a power button you got to hold it
for a second turn the laptop on pulling your lock and you can just go ahead tap
your finger on that and it'll read your fingerprint the trackpad is 36 pretty
solid I've seen them trackpads a lot worse than this and seen trackpads maybe
just a little bit better but it's definitely nothing that can complain about it
just have what would I click to it be pressed 42 down there but it's fairly
responsive to your finger I really don't have any complaints there although the
one complaint is that the backlight could be a little bit better the lights are
a little bit dim and you can actually see some of the hardware that connects
the key to the frame of the laptop beyond the backlight so that when you're in
when you're in kind of like a lit room like this the backlight actually makes
it he's hard to read because it makes them pretty much the same color as the
actual rest of the key when you're in low-light it probably looks fine but I
think that could have done a little bit of a better job with a backlight but
that's not really too big of a complaint right there it's not the slimmest
laptop but it's also not the thickest I think it's perfectly reasonable I
really have any complaints about that size it's still plenty portable and it's
heavy either it's definitely fairly 66 light so it's pretty transportable for
what it is I do like that it has these phantoms action ports back here where
it's got some up here and some under here because some laptops have one large
hinge that goes all the way over here and so the Phantom section just goes
straight to the hinge and doesn't really go anywhere but with the hinge is here
and here you got plenty of good ejection 76 for the CPU fan and I will say that
this laptop runs super quiet it's not loud at all especially with that 15 watt
CPU doesn't make very much he doesn't get 80 very much power and overall it's
just I 81 can barely hear most of the time the fans do definitely speed up a
little bit you can definitely hear them when it's under load when we were doing
more heavy stuff but just idling here you know I'm 290 not 1% CPU usage and I
can't even hear the laptop because I've use laptops where they just scream like a jet engine no
matter what they're doing this thankfully does not do that. A lot as far as
ports go you do have a fairly small
charger port on the side right I think it's the same size as that 500 they'll
XPS laptop series I could be wrong about that though it's smaller than you know
your other Dell laptops like your G 3s and things like that so I can't use my
same charger on my laptop on this laptop but that's not a big deal it's got
HDMI a compact Ethernet port it's gonna be gigabit of course a couple of USB
threes super-speeds combination headphone and microphone jack port which is
nice to have and then on the other side we've got USB 2.0 had an SD card slot
so other laptops at a higher price point they'll come with USB C which is
pretty neat you'd be able to plug that into like your Dell WD dock that I made
a video on for additional 540 displays and things like that 459 it also plug in
other USB C devices like you know Google pixel your buds things like that which
you don't get on this thing but that's that's okay for the price point if you
want something like that you probably more of a professional user but another
benefit of USB sees that you can usually plug it displays as long as it Sports
DisplayPort or wonderful I believe it is actually it's not a big deal you've
got this HDMI port it should 750 support a 4k display no issue which means that
ultimately you're only gonna be able to plug it in one external did 210 supply
to this laptop in total but chances are you're gonna be perfectly okay with
that so it's got a 15.6 inch 1080p display this particular model is 590
touchscreen not all of this model come with the touch screen display but it's
nice to have here especially for the
price point and I will say the screen 450 looks fine there's nothing
stellar to it it's not bad looking it's not fantastic looking either I guess
but it looks perfectly fine I have no complaints about it okay so if respects
it's got Intel i7 85 to 65 you know it's a 4 core 8 thread CPU nothing
groundbreaking right there it is a 1.8 gigahertz base clock speed which is
definitely more on the modest side but that's good in one way because of it
doesn't use up very much power comparatively speaking but it can also boost all
the way up to 4.6 gigahertz so it has lots of power when you need it to but it
doesn't chew up electricity just Iowan that's a 14 nanometer 15-watt TDP CPU I
know integrates their TDP is a little bit low but a 15 watts basically what
that means that doesn't make very much heat and it doesn't consume very much
power which is definitely good and if absolutely seen that to be the case using the laptop which I'll get into in a minute so it did only come with eight
gigabytes of RAM that's a 1/8 gigabyte chip I had a 4-gigabyte chip lying
around with my Dell G through your laptop from a couple months ago that I went
ahead and just threw in there and so now has 12 gigs it might have caused the
rammed 840 underclock little bit to 24 megahertz or excuse me 24 hundred
megahertz instead of 20 666. It's definitely good to have the extra
four gigs around eight gigs are fine for like use you know what 183 browsing unless you have you know chrome tabs
open it's fine but gigs would be more preferable so it's doesn't cost very
much to buy load effects, Duran, to throw it in yourselfI'm taking the case off
the bottom is a little bit of a process you have a number of screws on the
bottom and our tabs that snap in the top bit to the bottom bit but it's very
common that's not by any means but you definitely want to take it apart more
times than you have to but it's not too big of a deal if here you forgot to buy
a bit of extra ram or another the hard disk you can go ahead and throw that in
without too much trouble it does have a 2.5 inch hard drive bay that you can't
put a hard diskinto and some of the configurations for similar prices and do
have a hard disk pre-installed taking apart I didn't notice it actually has a fairly
small motherboard which is kind of cool I've never seen a motherboard that
small bodes well to the fact that it probably doesn't have a lot of circuitry
and doesn't use up very much power so it's a very efficient laptop but the SSD
is a gigabyte m2 intel updated SSD and
nothing honestly just flies I'm super
happy with it I've never seen as a Stevie this fast and a
consumer-grade laptop before because it
wasn't too long ago that you know people
would buy a brand new laptop for let's
say even a thousand dollars and it would
come with a spinning hard drive and
those days are thankfully over because
this SSD 599 absolutely just it just it flies doing a speed test here with
crystal disk mark it gets about fifteen hundred megabytes per second read and 600 right that's pretty
stellar it does use Intel obtain again which uses caching so if you were to
write a ton of data at once you wouldn't see these speeds be sustained for very
long but for average use this is SuperDuper fast you know you know your your typical see that SSD would maybe do
its 550 550 but this is so that's it's just blazing I can even tell you just
using the laptop it just it flies it also comes with Intel HD graphics 620
that's pretty modest built-in graphics chances are if you're buying this laptop
you're not looking to do a lot of gaming on it so that's fine I'm not gonna
bother with benchmarks you can probably run Minecraft on it but you're not
going to be able to run a triple-a titles which is perfectly reasonable for
this price point so the battery life is pretty solid right now I am on 95% and
it says I have 8 hours and 42 minutes remaining usually don't get quite as good
as what Windows tries to predict that you get I'm willing to bet it gets at
least 5 hours or so of light use which is definitely pretty good and again that
ties back into these low power consumptions you definitely pretty impressed
with the amount of power and tell
pageants the CPA without chewing up power now here's the charger it's absolutely tiny I was not expecting it to be this small but I definitely enjoy that the cable comes with it has a grounding cable built-in
keep that in mind it's not super long
you can easily get a longer one of these guys though much much trouble what the charger is it's tiny it's portable definitely pretty great to have and of
course a connector on the end there's pretty small as well so that's actually
about it for this video if this were a
gaming laptop I'd be doing benchmarks right now but that's not really
necessary I mean it's a solid because of a great laptop I'm actually super
duper impressed by this it's fast it's reasonable price point 590 it's not loud
it's not hot it's designed well it's compact and I'm honest I'm super happy
with it, I would definitely absolutely recommend us again my only gripe is the
backlight not being as good as it could be but considering that's my only gripe I think this laptop is pretty solid.
Lenovo Ideapad L340 Intel Core I5 8th Gen 15.6-inch FHD Laptop
The Lenovo IdeaPad L340 has been such a highly requested
gaming laptop on the channel that I bought one just to review for you all, so
let’s get into the details and find out if it lives up to the hype in this
review. Starting with the specs, mine has the Intel i5-9300H CPU, Nvidia GTX
1650 graphics, and 539 8gb of memory in a single channel as the L340 only has one
memory slot. For storage, I’ve 6 got a 256gb M.2 NVMe SSD, and a 15.6” 1080p
60Hz screen. For network connectivity, it’s got gigabit ethernet, 802.11ac WiFi
and Bluetooth 5. The plastic lid has a brushed silver finish with a subtle blue
Lenovo logo towards the side, while the interior has the same material and
smooth texture. There were no sharp corners or edges anywhere, and considering
the plastic build it didn’t come off as cheap feeling. The starting weight of
the L340 is listed at 2.2kg, and mine was around 100g less without 880 a 2.5
inch drive installed. With the 135-watt power brick and cables for charging
this rises to just over 2.6kg. The dimensions of the laptop are 36.3cm in
width, 25.4cm in-depth, and around 2.4cm thick.
There are smaller laptops, though it’s not too chunky looking, and I
measured the screen bezels at around 1cm on the sides. 19 01:31,869 --> 01:37,909
The 15.6” 1080p 60Hz IPS screen has a matte finish, good viewing angles, and no
G-Sync. I’ve measured the color gamut using the Spyder 5 Pro, and my results
returned 64% of sRGB, 46% of NTSC and 49% of AdobeRGB. At 100% brightness in
the center, I measured nits with a 940:1 contrast ratio, so lower brightness and
color gamut compared to most 340 machines I’ve tested, which is to be expected
in a gaming laptop at this price point. It looked alright to me, a little dim,
but otherwise ok for gaming. Backlight bleed seemed alright in my unit, but
this will vary between laptops and panels. There was more screen flex than
expected considering how thick it is, and that the hinge runs along 27 most of
the width of the body. I could almost open it up with one finger, and it did
feel a little back heavy, but no problems using it on my lap. The top above the
screen is still fairly thick, so plenty of room for the 720p camera. The camera
and microphone look and sound about average, though it looks a little dark, but you can change the brightness settings through the Lenovo Vantage software. The
keyboard in my unit only has blue backlighting, and it lights up everything
including secondary key functions. The brightness can be controlled in two
different levels or turned off completely by pressing the function and space
bar. I wasn’t a fan of the smaller arrow keys, however, I did like typing on the
keyboard. The key presses weren’t mushy, here’s how it sounds to give you an
idea of what to expect. There wasn’t as much keyboard flex as I was expecting
considering the plastic build, it seemed pretty sturdy all things considered.
The touchpad uses ELAN drivers, was smooth and worked well enough. It clicks
down anywhere with left and right clicks down the bottom, though the usual two-finger click anywhere for right-click works too. The touchpad felt a little
loose, that’s the best I can describe if you tap it sort of moves a little
and makes this noise which isn’t the actual click. Fingerprints showed up
fairly easily on the plastic interior, though as a smooth surface I found it
easy to clean. On the left from the back, there’s the power input, gigabit
ethernet, HDMI 2.0 output, 47 two USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A ports, 3.5mm audio combo
jack, and USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-C port, 480 no Thunderbolt 3 here. On the right
there’s no I/O at all, so no possibility of cables getting in the way of your
mouse hand if you’re right-handed, just the Kensington lock at the back. 51 On
the back, there’s nothing at all, just smooth plastic, and it’s a similar deal
on the front as well. Underneath is pretty clean looking, with just some blue
air intake vents towards the back above the fans. The bottom panel can be
easily removed by unscrewing 11 Phillips head screws. Once inside from left to right, there’s the 2.5-inch drive
bay, the single M.2 slot for storage, WiFi card just below it, battery below
that, and single memory slot towards the right. While my 256gb M.2 drive is
short, you can install a regular-sized one instead, just removing the mounting
bracket. While there does appear to be a space for a 2.5-inch drive, my L340
didn’t actually come with the cable necessary to connect a drive to the
motherboard, and there’s nothing to properly mount it provided either. You need
to first remove the M.2 drive, under this is the spot to connect the cable to
attach a 2.5-inch drive. My Y540 did come with such a cable, so I tried using
that one instead, but I wasn’t able to get it to work so not sure if there is a
difference between the cables. 66 I contacted Lenovo support asking how to get
this, they said they’d send me a quote. 10 days later I got a quote for $200
AUD before tax, so about $135 USD, however, I’m not sure how this would vary by
region. Just to get the cable, bracket, and screws they want me to spend 20% of
the total cost of the machine, no thanks. If you plan on adding a drive later
based on this I’d recommend just buying it with a hard drive, to begin with, as
I could have got it with a 1TB hard drive installed for less than this. The
speakers are towards the front left and right corners, they sounded ok, average
for laptop, not too tinny sounding however at the max volume they didn’t get that
loud and the latency on results wasn’t looking good. Powering the laptop is a
3 cell 45 Watt-hour battery. I’ve tested it with the screen brightness at 50%,
background apps disabled, and keyboard lighting off. While streaming YouTube
videos it lasted for 5 hours and 25 minutes, much longer than I expected for a
battery of this size, and it was using the Intel integrated graphics due to
Nvidia Optimus. While playing the Witcher 3 with medium settings and Nvidia’s
battery boost set to 30 FPS the battery lasted for 1 hour and 28 minutes in
total, however after the first 53 minutes with 23% charge remaining the frame
rate dipped to 3 FPS and was no longer usable. The watt power brick that Lenovo
includes with the L340 seemed to be adequate for these specs, I didn’t see any
battery drain during any of my testings. Let’s move onto the thermal testing.
Air comes in from the bottom of the machine and is exhausted out of the vent
below the screen on the right hand side. There are a couple of heat pipes shared
between the processor and graphics along with two fans. Unlike higher tier
options like Lenovo’s Y540, there is no option to disable hybrid 580 mode and
fan speeds couldn’t be adjusted either, there was basically no options in the
Lenovo Vantage software that could be used to increase performance or cooling,
stock settings are all you get. Thermal testing was completed at an ambient
room temperature of 21 degrees Celsius, so expect different results in different
environments. I’ve got the results at idle down the bottom, and the
temperatures are looking fine there. The rest of the results are from combined
CPU and GPU workloads, and are meant to represent worst-case scenarios as I ran
them for extended periods of time. The gaming results towards the upper half of
the graph were tested by playing Watch
Dogs 2, as I find it to use a good combination of processor and
graphics. The stress test results shown on the lower half of the graph are from
running the Aida64 CPU stress test with only the stress CPU option checked, and
the Heaven GPU benchmark at max settings at the same time to fully load the
system. In almost all tests regardless of workload, the CPU wasn’t passing 85
degrees Celsius worst case, however, it was achieving this by power limit
throttling, but we’ll see how clock speeds were affected in the next graph.
Undervolting the CPU wasn’t enough to lower temperatures, and under stress test, the cooling pad didn’t help lower the CPU temperature either, only a slight
improvement while gaming. 229 The only thermal throttling taking place was on
the GPU, which was happening any time the average hit 74 degrees Celsius, so we were
only really able to remove this with the cooling pad in use. These are the
average clock speeds for the same tests just shown. Basically, there was power
limit throttling on the CPU in every test. This is why we see a boost to CPU
clock speed with the undervolt applied, however something interesting happened
when using the cooling pad. Although we weren’t thermal throttling, there was a
nice improvement to the clock speed with the cooling pad applied and this was
due to the power limits being set. Just
before we move on I’ll note that we saw some clock speed improvements to the
GPU with the cooling pad as this was able to remove the thermal throttling on
the graphics. These are the average TDP values reported by hardware info during
these same tests. I found that the laptop would dynamically change the power
limits by 0.5 watts at a time, it seemed to do this based on temperature to
prevent it getting too hot. As we saw before
the temperatures were well under control, however performance was down
due to these lower power limits. I think this is why we see higher power limits
and clock speeds with the cooling pad. It’s able to maintain the same
temperatures while boosting power limits, so while there was no CPU thermal
throttling additional cooling does seem to help, and as we saw previously the cooling
pad again helped remove GPU thermal throttling. These are the clock speeds
while under a CPU only workload, as there’s no GPU testing taking place at the
same time we’re seeing better performance, with the undervolt able to take us
to the full 4GHz all core turbo boost speed of the i5-9300H in this workload.
At stock full performance was not hit due to power limit throttling, even in a
CPU only workload we’re capped to a 35 watt TDP and I couldn’t raise this with
Intel XTU. This is why we see lower temperatures with the undervolt in place,
we’re able to hit the 4GHz clock speed with less power and run cooler as a
result. To demonstrate CPU only performance I’ve got some Cinebench CPU
benchmarks. This is my first test with the 9300H so I don’t have anything to
compare against, however it’s still around 1000 points below the 9750H, partly
due to having two less cores, 280 but also due to the 35 watt power limit. As
for the external temperatures where you’ll actually be putting your hands, at
idle it was around the normal 30 degrees Celsius. While under combined CPU and
GPU stress test the keyboard was a bit warm but not too bad, however we can see
the hot point up the back where the air is exhausting onto the screen. While
gaming the results are similar, again hot up the back where we’re hitting 60 at
the air exhaust below the screen. As for the fan noise produced by the laptop,
I’ll let you have a listen to some of these tests. At idle it was almost
completely silent, the fan was only just audible. There wasn’t much difference
while gaming or under stress test, in any case, the fan was noticeably quieter
compared to most of the gaming laptops I usually test. Overall the Lenovo L340
ran fine in terms of CPU temperatures, those were well under control, however, it
was easy to hit thermal throttling on the GPU, however, this didn’t seem to
negatively affect clock speed too much. As we saw the performance of both the CPU
GPU could be improved with better cooling, in this case using a cooling pad.
You heard earlier how quiet the fans run, this really seems to be the main
limitation holding things back. If they just gave us the option to boost the
fan speed to a maximum or something then we would probably see better performance
as this allows higher power limits, but I suppose this does at least mean the
machine will run on the quieter side which I know many people prefer even at the expense of some
performance. Next, let’s take a look at some gaming benchmarks. I’ve tested
these games with the latest Nvidia drivers and Windows updates at the time of
testing. Battlefield 5 was tested in campaign mode rather than multiplayer.
Medium settings played alright and was able to reach 60 FPS averages, however, the 1% lows were a fair bit below this, showing the occasional stuttering that I
noticed regardless of setting level. Legends were tested with either all
settings at maximum or all settings on the lowest possible values, as it
doesn’t have predefined setting presets. It felt a bit choppy at max settings,
and it was possible to improve the average FPS by around 32% simply by setting
everything to a minimum. Shadow of the Tomb Raider was tested with the built-in
benchmark, the results from this test were again on the lower side, however, the lowest settings was still able to average 165 above 60 FPS in this test. The
Division 2 was tested using the built-in benchmark. Medium settings were just
below FPS, so another title where you’d most likely want to sit around low to
medium for a decent frame rate. Fortnite was tested with the replay feature. As
a less demanding title, even maxed out at epic settings was working well enough, with around 70 FPS averages being
reached, however, we could more than double this at low settings if needed.
Overwatch is another well-optimized game and was tested in the practice range.
Epic settings still played well for me,
as the 1% low was around the refresh rate of the display, while over 100 FPS
was achieved at lower levels was tested using the Ulletical FPS benchmark, and
is a less demanding esports title that runs on basically anything. Even with
all settings maxed out 100 FPS averages were still reached in this test. Rainbow Six Siege was tested with the built-in
benchmark. At ultra settings, the results aren’t looking that bad here, with 80
FPS for the average and still around 60 for the 1% low result. Assassin’s Creed
Odyssey was tested with the built-in benchmark, and straight away I can tell
you this is the worst result I’ve seen in this test at ultra-high settings. No
matter though, we’re not expecting top of the line performance with these
specs. The results at high settings and below are at least playable, as this
game doesn’t need super high FPS to
enjoy. Dota 2 was tested playing in the middle lane with an average amount of
action going on, and as a game that runs on basically any modern hardware, it
was still playing well at ultra settings with above 80 FPS, while higher frame rates were possible at lower setting
levels. Watch Dogs 2 is a resource-heavy game that still plays fine for me with
a solid 30 FPS, however, this was not possible at ultra settings. Very high
settings played ok, and then there wasn’t really too much of a difference performance-wise stepping down to
high. It was a little choppy due to the
lower than 30 FPS 1% low, much more playable at low settings. The Witcher 3 was
playing alright at high settings, where I was still able to average above 60 FPS, and the dips in performance
weren’t too noticeable, definitely more stuttering at ultra settings, as illustrated by the much lower 1% low
result. If you’re after more gaming benchmarks check the card in the top right
corner where I’ve,360 tested 20 games on the L340. Let’s also take a look at
how this config of the Lenovo L340 compares with other laptops to see how it stacks up, use these results as
a rough guide only as they were tested at different times with different drivers In
Battlefield 5 I’ve got the L340 highlighted in red near similarly specced
machines. As the only 1650 laptop I’ve
tested recently it’s down the bottom, however, it is also worth remembering that the L340 is the only
laptop on this graph that was tested in a single channel. I did fully plan on installing dual-channel memory, but only found out after opening it up that it has one slot, so this wasn’t
possible. Here are the results from Far
Cry 5 with ultra settings in the built-in benchmark. Again 207 for the same reasons just explained the L340
is coming in at last place. Not only that but as a CPU heavy game the 9300H is probably
giving us a little lower performance when compared against the 9750H, I still need to
compare those in a future video though. These are the results from Shadow of
the Tomb Raider with the built-in benchmark at the highest settings. Once more the
Lenovo L340 is in the last place out of these laptops tested, but it’s important to
note that it is also the cheapest of these machines, so you get what you pay
for. When compared to other machines,
the L340 doesn’t look too good. It’s worth keeping in mind that the comparisons we just looked at
are with maximum setting levels. As we saw earlier, the L340 is definitely capable of
playing modern games with good frame rates at low to medium settings, just don’t expect
miracles at high or above. It does, of course, depend on the title, but we’re limited by the
single-channel memory as the L340 doesn’t 219
provide the option of dual-channel and the fact that they only seem to
sell it with memory 220 running at
DDR4-2400. I don’t think that the i5-9300H CPU or GTX 1650 graphics are bad options in a laptop, we’re just not able
to get the full performance out of this particular machine, and as we saw earlier, the performance was further kneecapped by GPU thermal throttling and CPU power limits at 35 watts. Now for the benchmarking tools, I’ve tested
Heaven, Valley, and Superposition from Unigine, as well as Firestrike, Timespy and VRMark from
3DMark, just pause the video if you want a detailed look at these results. I’ve used Crystal Disk Mark to test the
storage and the 256gb M.2 NVMe SSD was getting 228 decent reads and ok write speeds, but this
was the cheapest disk option available, you can select different drives when buying. It’s
also worth mentioning my particular drive 230
is only PCIe 3 by 2, so still better than SATA but not like the usual
PCIe 3 by 4 options you get. For updated pricing check the links in the
description, as prices will change over time. . My exact configuration isn’t listed here,
so if we customize it to the specs I’ve tested here we’re looking at around with the current sale, that
will vary but Lenovo regularly have sales. With all of that in mind let’s
summarise the good and the bad aspects of the Lenovo IdeaPad L340 gaming laptop. The main issue I have with this laptop is that
it only has one memory slot, so it’s not possible to gain the benefits of dual-channel memory. Additionally, it only
seems to run at DDR4-2400, this is the
speed they advertise it at and the stick mine came with is capable of
DDR4-2666, so it seems to be limited. While I did only get 8gb of memory, 16gb
could help a bit but I wouldn’t expect anywhere near the improvement we’d have
from a dual-channel configuration. As we saw this lowered the overall
performance of the machine, granted I was also testing with an i5 CPU and GTX 1650 graphics which
are also lower than most other machines I’ve recently tested. In the end, though it is still capable of playing games
at low to medium settings just fine, with higher settings possible depending on
the game. While you can order the machine with a 2.5” drive installed, I would
have liked to have seen the cable required to add one later included in the
box. In terms of thermals, it didn’t get too hot, however GPU thermal throttling
was hit, the CPU was ok though but this
was due to power limitations. Both of these seem to be due to the result of the fans being so quiet,
there’s no way for us to boost the fan speed and as a result, we are losing
performance. This does mean the machine runs much quieter compared to most gaming laptops I’ve tested,
but it does come at that cost. Overall the build quality of the machine was
decent despite being primarily plastic, the screen wasn’t too bad despite the
lower color gamut, at least for gaming. It was a little dim and only seems to
be available with a 60Hz option. I liked using the keyboard, small arrow keys
aside, the touchpad was ok but a bit loose feeling and I wasn’t a fan of the ELAN drivers. Despite the smaller
battery, we're getting decent battery life, likely due to the lower-powered
specs. While the price makes the L340
look attractive, I’d look for other options with the same specs that have the option of dual-channel a memory so that you have an upgrade path. With that said though, especially for the configuration I got at the price,
it’s a decent entry-level budget-friendly gaming laptop that is still capable of playing modern games.
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