Lenovo Ideapad 500 Review

Designed for productivity over portability, the 15.6-inch Lenovo Ideapad 500 features a 6th Generation Intel Core i7 processor, a 15.6-inch 1080p display and a discrete AMD graphics card. Lenovo’s laptop also features Ethernet port, a DVD-RW drive and an Intel RealSense 3D camera. While the Ideapad has enough performance for multitasking and casual gaming, similarly priced competitors offer better performance, longer battery life and more-colorful displays.

Image Source: Laptop Mag

Image Source: Laptop Mag

Design

Ideapad 500 comes in white color with silver accents. The keyboard deck has a solid feel, with no bending or creaking. Even though the lid is white, it still picked up fingerprints after only a day of testing.

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Measuring 0.97 inches in thickness and weighing 5.2 pounds, the Ideapad 500 is thicker and heavier than the Toshiba Satellite Radius 15 P55W (0.79 inches, 4.96 pounds), while being lighter and about as thick as the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 (1 inch, 5.9 pounds). It’s about as thick and just as heavy as the HP 15t Touch (0.96 inches, 5.2 pounds).

Image Source: Inet

Image Source: Inet

On the left side of the Ideapad 500, there are VGA, Ethernet, HDMI and dual USB 3.0 ports. And on the notebook’s right edge, you’ll find its Kensington lock port, DVD-RW drive, SD memory reader, USB 2.0 port and headphone jack.

Keyboard and Touch Pad

The Ideapad 500 has a bouncy and responsive keys. The Ideapad’s keys have a solid 1.65 millimeters of travel and require a strong 62 grams of force to actuate. We hope to find between 1.5 and 2 mm of travel in notebook keyboards.

Image Source: Lenovo.com

Image Source: Lenovo.com

The Ideapad’s touch-pad is a speedy and accurate joy to use. As you will traced your finger around the touch-pad in fast and wild movements, it kept pace with your gestures. The touch-pad also accurately registered two-finger gestures, including scrolling, pinching and zooming.

Display

The Ideapad 500’s 15.6-inch display come with a resolution of 1920 * 1080 pixels. We found that the screen’s colors washed out and muted, though details came through clearly while watching any HD video.

Image Source: Laptoping

Image Source: Laptoping

The Ideapad’s display produces 216 nits of brightness. Which means it is brighter than the HP 15t Touch (162 nits) but lighter than the Satellite Radius 15 (263 nits), the average mainstream notebook (249 nits) and the Inspiron 15 (222 nits). Making matters worse, the screen’s colors started washing out when we moved more than 40 degrees to the left or right.

The Ideapad’s display is also less color-accurate in comparison to its competitors, with a Delta-E score of 4.6 (a score of 0 is perfect). That may beat the average for mainstream notebook displays (5.7), but the Satellite Radius (0.8), HP 15t Touch (3.91) and Inspiron 15 (0.4) all are far away much better than Ideapad 500.

Graphics and Audio

The Lenovo Ideapad 500 features AMD Radeon R7 graphics chip. The Ideapad 500 is good for casual-to-regular game lovers. The notebook notched a score of 76,761 on the 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited gaming benchmark, which is greater than the average notebook (73,478), HP 15t Touch (31,921) and the Satellite Radius (55,355). The Inspiron 15 7000 (105,046) earned a higher score.

The Ideapad 500 features a powerful JBL speakers that does a phenomenal job of blasting tunes, filling a large conference room with sound, but the notebook’s default sound settings are not optimal.

Performance

The Lenovo Ideapad 500 is powered by a 6th Generation Intel Core i7-6500U processor that comes with 8 GB of RAM and AMD Radeon R7 discrete graphic card. With this graphic card, Ideapad doesn’t beat all of its competitors, but it has enough muscle for serious multitasking and casual gaming. The notebook experiences zero lag while switching between Google Chrome tabs with 12 tabs open.

On GeekBench 3, which measures overall performance, the Ideapad scored 6,128, which beats the Core i3-4005U-powered HP 15t Touch (3,420) and Core i5-5200U-powered Satellite Radius (5,489). However, that score is below those of the Core i5-6300HQ-powered Inspiron 15 (8,800) and average mainstream laptop (8,936).

The file transfer speed of Ideapad 500 for transferring 4.97 GB of multimedia files on its 1 TB, 5,400 rpm hard-drive was clocked at 37.42 Mbps. This speed is faster than the 750 GB, 5,400 rpm drive in the 15t Touch (25.6 Mbps), but slower than the 1 TB, 5,400 rpm hard drive in the Inspiron 15 (34.62 Mbps) and the 750 GB, 5,400 rpm hard drive in the Satellite Radius (39.15 Mbps).e

As per the heat test of Laptop Mag, the Ideapad’s chassis stayed cool to the touch. After streaming a full-screen HD video, the touch-pad measured 82.5 degrees Fahrenheit. The space between the G and H keys registered 81.5 degrees, and we recorded a temperature of 86 degrees on the notebook’s underside. All measurements were below our 95-degree threshold for comfort.

Battery Life

On the Laptop Mag Battery Test, which involves continuous surfing over Wi-Fi at 100 nits, Lenovo’s laptop lasted a mere 3 hours and 43 minutes. That’s a shorter than the Inspiron 15 (6:45), HP 15t Touch (5:24), Satellite Radius (5:14) and average laptop (5:50). If you turn the brightness up all the way or play games rather than just surf the Web on the Ideapad 500, expect its time to be much lower.

Verdict

The 15.6-inch Lenovo Ideapad 500 price starts from $500 (approx Rs 34,000) to $900 (approx Rs 60,000).

The Lenovo Ideapad 500 has enough performance for solid multitasking, a great responsive keyboard to enable your productivity and Intel RealSense, which offers a few interesting capabilities now, with more possible in the future. The only drawback of the laptop is its short battery life that will hugely impact the demand of laptop.

Source: Laptop Mag