Lenovo IdeaPad 3 14 Inch FHD Laptop - (AMD Athlon Gold, 4 GB RAM, 128 GB SSD, Windows 10 S Mode) - Platinum Grey

Product Information

The measured maximum brightness of 246 nits in the middle of the screen and 224 nits as an average for the whole area, with a maximum deviation of 12%. The Correlated Color Temperature on a white screen is 6050K – slightly warmer than the optimal for the sRGB standard of 6500K, which is not bad. Installing our Health-Guard profile not only eliminates PWM but also reduces the harmful Blue Light emissions while keeping the colors of the screen perceptually accurate. If you’re not familiar with the Blue light, the TL;DR version is – emissions that negatively affect your eyes, skin, and your whole body. You can find more information about that in our dedicated article on Blue Light. Gloss level measurement

Turning to the ports, the IdeaPad 3 14 features a good selection. On its right side, you’ll find an SD card slot and a USB 2.0 port. And no – this unit does not have a fan, which means that it is going to be completely silent all the time. We were impressed by the way Lenovo utilized the space cut for the fan assembly, by creating a heat spreader of the same shape and size. The IdeaPad 3 14's colors were generally average, par the course for most budget laptops, though it was a little worse than the competition (and a lot worse than the Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 13's great AMOLED panel). Screen brightness, on the other hand, fared a lot better. If it can't be colorful, it should at least be bright. Our next trials are CPU-intensive multimedia workflows, which aren’t the sort of tasks at all suited to a budget laptop. Still, it’s nice to see that the IdeaPad 1 14 isn’t far behind the Core i3-equipped Modern 14 when it comes to rendering a 3D image in Cinebench and converting a 4K video to 1080p in Handbrake. One plus I noted during all of these tests: The laptop’s cooling fan was barely audible, suggesting that the machine expertly handles the heat its components generate under heavy loads. The final trial in our benchmark gauntlet consists of display brightness and color tests. Using Datacolor's SpyderX Elite calibrator and its software tools, we measure display performance, screen-brightness output levels, and measure gamut settings for the three most relevant color spaces for laptop users: the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 standards.

Verdict: It's a Tough Field at This Price 

With CPU performance in mind, we switch to the Cinebench R23 benchmark, a multi-core test meant to exercise all of a processor's cores and threads. The Ryzen 5 5500U's six cores come in handy here, as the IdeaPad 3 14 easily bests its competition. The Lenovo IdeaPad 3 has an Intel Core-series processor, one more powerful than the typical Windows 10 S laptop. So why is Windows 10 S even here? The laptop has limited RAM and storage, and the restricted software is a heads-up of who it’s meant for. You should expect reasonable battery life, though, and here the IdeaPad 1 14 won’t let you down. It lasted for 12 hours away from the power outlet on our video rundown test, which involves playing a 720p video file at 50% screen brightness with Wi-Fi turned off.

We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and add up the total (lower times are better). The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters.

Testing the IdeaPad 1 14: Just Getting Work Done

It performs the basics just fine, thanks to an unusually deep and responsive keyboard and near-silent running. However, the screen is poor and its battery doesn’t get quite close enough to all-day use. But is it still a good value laptop? Turn the laptop upside down, to see two speaker cutouts, as well as a ventilation grill. This model has no fan, so there is practically no heat exhaust. However, if you get an option that is actively cooled, it will dissipate the heat through a vent in between the base and the lid. When put to use, the IdeaPad 3 14 is one of the better budget laptops I’ve handled. The keyboard is comfortable, with just enough give to make key presses satisfying. The touchpad is responsive, and there's even a fingerprint reader integrated into the power button. Unfortunately, the speakers, located under the touchpad, aren’t great. They aren’t very loud and give off a hollow sound. You’re better off using headphones or an external speaker. Lenovo is a master of affordable laptops. While the IdeaPad 1 15 might seem like a drop in the ocean of the company’s portfolio, we have a feeling it has a main role in the future sales numbers. If we look at Lenovo’s laptops as Game of Thrones characters, the IdeaPad 1 15 will be Bran Stark. It knows that it has to compete with the likes of John Snow (Legion 5), or Daenerys Targaryen (IdeaPad 3) to be the king (or queen), and occupy Sales Landing.

Next is Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. How about Photoshop? It will run OK for the basics, but 4GB RAM is not enough if you want to start working on big layered images. Photoshop is a RAM hog, and when it runs out you will start to see significant slow-down and potentially some crashes. Build quality is fair, if no better than the norm. The keyboard surround will flex a little under the pressure of hard typing, if not enough to ruin the experience, and the inside of the IdeaPad 3 looks a little too much of a mish-mash.

You should also keep in mind that the build quality of the IdeaPad 1 (15″, 2022) is not fantastic. The plastic body panels flex, but to be frank, we expected the situation to be worse than that. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a Storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the laptop's boot drive. This score is also a proprietary numeric score; again, higher numbers are better. All of the systems with SSDs perform quite well on this test; the Asus Laptop L410 has a slower eMMC drive that couldn’t even complete the PCMark 8 test. The IdeaPad 3 14 did well, tapping out after 10 hours and 32 minutes. A valiant effort—but still coming up short when compared with the Asus VivoBook S14, the HP Pavilion x360 15, and the Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 13. Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video editing benchmark, in which we put a stopwatch on systems as they transcode a brief movie from 4K resolution down to 1080p. It, too, is a tough test for multi-core, multi-threaded CPUs; lower times are better.

You don’t get a graphics card, just the integrated graphics that is part of the Core i3 processor. There was little point in subjecting the Lenovo IdeaPad 3 to our usual gaming tests, but I did try out Skyrim to see if it would run.

Verdict: It's a Tough Field at This Price\u00a0

According to PC Mark 10’s battery tests, it lasts for five hours and 28 minutes of basic office productivity work. Using it to write a document outdoors, which all but mandates maximum display brightness, and it lasts around six hours. That may seem impressive until you remember the screen itself is pretty dim.