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The only i5 competitor here is the Asus VivoBook S14 (S433), with its 11th Generation Intel Core i5-1135G7 and 8GB of RAM—all the others have 16GB. These laptops all have Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics, so you won’t be using any as a dedicated gaming laptop. I won’t spend much time discussing the design as I covered much of that in my first impressions earlier this month. If you missed those, here are the main takeaways: Put another way: This isn’t your grandpa’s Pentium. It’s a peppy little processor that keeps things moving nicely in Chrome OS. Dare I say, this year’s Pentium in an entry-level Chromebook competes well against last year’s mid-range line? The newest chip is a Pentium processor but handily beats a Core i5 that’s two generations old. And it fares better against last year’s Core i3 mobile CPU as well.
With a Chromebook at this price, the display is usually where things get skimped on. For the Lenovo IdeaPad 5i Chromebook, this is partially the case. Lenovo has bundled in an adequate panel for the price, but with one notable short fall. If you’re familiar with last year’s slightly smaller model, you’ll see many familiar features. In fact, this isn’t a radical redesign although moving up from a 13.3-inch display to a 14-inch panel does give a little more room in the chassis. This time around there are larger speaker ports alongside the keyboard, for example. These house 2W speakers are tuned with Waves MaxxAudio. The sound quality isn’t bad and the loudness is high for a laptop of this size and price. The speakers are way better than what you would expect from a laptop in this price range. It helps a lot that they are faced upwards, and apart from the fact that they are impressively loud, they also deliver a sound stage that is both wide and fairly balanced with okay bass response, considering their size. They can't compete with a good pair of speakers or headphones, but they will do just fine for watching YouTube videos or a TV show as long as loud and dramatic sound isn't the main focus. These devices, powered by the latest 11th Generation Intel® CoreTM processors, provide long-term reliability and high performance in various designs. Whether you're working from home or in a large office, we have everything you need.
The Lenovo IdeaPad 5 is a solid, affordable school laptop
The laptop reviewed here belongs to a sensible middle ground of Lenovo 2-in-1s that bear the Flex moniker. They're available in multiple screen sizes from 11 to 15 inches, but the 14-inch IdeaPad Flex 5i is arguably the sweetest spot. It's not bulky, which means you can hold the laptop in one hand and rotate the screen or tap on it with your other hand. But it has enough screen real estate to make movie watching and spreadsheet editing possible on a cramped airplane tray table. (Photo: Molly Flores) As noted, the two hinges offer little play, and the laptop swings easily from closed position through 360 degrees to tablet mode (with the display facing up and the keyboard beneath). The thin bezels framing the display help it seem roomy. The laptop also features a larger ventilation grille on the bottom compared to the 2021 model.
For comparison purposes, I ran the same benchmarks on last year’s Flex 5 Chromebook with its 10th-generation Core i3. And mainly to see the progress Intel has made over the last few silicon iterations, I included my daily driver. That’s the Acer Chromebook Spin 13 with an 8th-generation Core i5 paired with 16 GB of memory.
Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). The Lenovo Flex 5i was disappointing on the battery rundown test, coming in last with 10 hours and 36 minutes. Not that 10-plus hours is terrible, but the longer the better. All the others lasted for between 12 and 13 hours, with the Yoga 7i coming in just one minute shy of 14 hours.
All tests were run on the latest Chrome OS 92 Stable Channel, with hyper-threading enabled, and in Guest Mode on a freshly booted machine. All flags were set to the default settings, save for the hyper-threading option. The Ideapad 5 laptops are light and easy to carry around. You can get away with a 14-inch screen if you don't need a larger one, so long as you're fine with that size. There are a variety of options for the 5 Series: 13.3" QHD (2560 x 1600) display and IPS (2560 x 1600) display, both of which are capable of streaming HD content. You would be surprised at what you get, Lenovo offers the most luxurious display you'll ever see on a budget-friendly. Beautiful colors and wide viewing angles are just some of the benefits of IPS panels, which also offer lightning-fast response times and minimal input lag. A more efficient power supply, faster pixel switching, and improved image processing have made IPS popular for gaming monitors. Windows On the Go Again, this is a super simple test but installing development tools and testing how long it takes to compile code is likely beyond the scope of most Chromebook users. Should you buy the Lenovo IdeaPad 5i Chromebook? I also have to admit: Even though it doesn’t appear on the specs, I really like the LED battery indicator. A portable Pentium powerhouseI can genuinely say that the battery life on Lenovo’s IdeaPad 5i Gen 6 is superb and will be able to get you through multiple days of usage from one charge. Keep in mind that everyone’s battery usage will vary depending on what users are doing. Price I've been a computer-tech writer and editor for several decades, and a photographer who writes about photo techniques and equipment for over a decade. My first job in the tech press was as a writer for Compute! magazine, where we used Commodore 64s from Circuit City as word processors. I next became the editor of Computer Dealer, offering advice to computer retailers, then moved on to Personal Computing as an executive editor, where I developed the magazine's benchmark suite. I held several positions at the massive Computer Shopper magazine before becoming editor in chief. While at Computer Shopper (owned by CNET Networks at the time), I edited bi-annual issues of Technology Review as a joint project with Fortune magazine. The IdeaPad 5 Series laptops are equipped with Intel's 11th generation processors or even the Ryzen 4000/5000 series with up to 8 Cores. Compared to their predecessors, these have improved performance and battery life. The 11th Generation Intel® CoreTM i5-1135G7 processor in the Lenovo IdeaPad 5 Series combines careful design, and quality touches with more than adequate hardware. Impressive display with four-mode convertible laptops You could make the case that Lenovo might have done better with a larger battery than the 52.5Wh one it used, even at a modest weight gain. The slightly more power-hungry processor in the Acer Spin 5 didn’t prevent the system from scoring right in the middle on battery life, at 12 hours and 38 minutes. The optional digital pen support gives you a new way to record your thoughts and ideas while on the go. Get the most from your PC with the Lenovo Ideapad 5 Series laptops. It will keep up with you all day long with its long battery life of rapid charging, and low thermal design power (TDP) of 30W.
Performance from the 11th Gen Core i5 CPU is perfectly adequate for performing basic productivity tasks or streaming web videos. I never experienced even a hint of sluggishness while browsing with multiple tabs open or installing apps over the course of several days of testing. The generous 16GB of memory likely helps significantly in this regard; it's the same capacity we typically see in 2-in-1 laptops that cost twice as much. I suppose that depends on how you view entry-level and mid-range Chromebooks. However, a Celeron or Pentium has long been considered on the low end of that scale. The Flex 5i case feels solid, with practically no give in the top half, since that’s held firm by the aluminum frame and the glass of the display. The bottom half is made of a combination of polycarbonate and glass fiber (for stiffening). While it feels sturdy, there is a slight flex at the center of the keyboard, if you press your thumbs there.There is just one problem – the charger uses USB-C, meaning that when you're charging you don’t have an available USB-C port. Charging over USB-C is a good thing, but in this case, we would rather have a traditional charging port — or even better — another USB-C port. If you’re in the market for a higher-end Chromebook, want a 2-in-1 device, or desire a touchscreen, this isn’t the Chromebook for you. Anyone else on a limited budget should definitely consider the Lenovo IdeaPad 5i Chromebook, although I’d recommend waiting for a sale. To give you an idea of how the 11th-generation Pentium Gold inside the IdeaPad 5i Chromebook, I ran a suite of benchmarks.
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