Lenovo IdeaPad 3i 15 (2022) Evaluation

You will not to find the Lenovo IdeaPad 3i at the pc maker’s website online. The funds pc, to not be at a loss for words with the IdeaPad Gaming 3, is a client fashion bought at retail—Amazon lists it for $649.99 marked all the way down to $529.99 at this writing, and we’ve got observed costs starting from $480 to $620—with a fifteen.6-inch, complete HD display and an Intel Core i5 processor. Like different economic system fashions, it isn’t particularly robust or thrilling, however the IdeaPad 3i supplies first rate efficiency and lines (akin to a 512GB as an alternative of a skimpy 256GB solid-state force) as an online- or homework-ready desktop choice. It does not give us the fun or that additional pinch of price that earns an Editors’ Selection award, however this reasonably priced pc merits an overly first rate score.


The Design: Most commonly Generic Grey 

Do not search for a swish aluminum or magnesium chassis right here: The IdeaPad 3i is a slab of Arctic Grey ABS plastic measuring 0.78 by means of 14.1 by means of 9.3 inches (HWD) and weighing 3.6 kilos. That makes it a tad trimmer than the comparably priced Acer Aspire 5 we lately reviewed (0.71 by means of 14.3 by means of 9.9 inches, 3.88 kilos), despite the fact that no 15.6-inch pc qualifies as an easy-to-carry ultraportable. Construct high quality is honest, despite the fact that you can really feel substantial flex should you grab the display corners or mash the keyboard. 

Lenovo IdeaPad 3i lid


(Credit score: Kyle Cobian)

Formally indexed as fashion 15IAU7 and product quantity 82RK0017US, our take a look at unit combines a twelfth Era Core i5-1235U processor (two Efficiency cores, 8 Environment friendly cores, 12 threads) with 8GB of DDR4 reminiscence and a 512GB PCIe SSD. Curiously, it comes with Home windows 11 Professional as an alternative of maximum client machines’ Win 11 House. Wi-Fi 6 (no longer Wi-Fi 6E) and Bluetooth take care of wi-fi connections. 

Bordered by means of thick(ish) bezels is a 1,920-by-1,080-pixel, non-touch display. The webcam lacks face reputation, however the energy button doubles as a fingerprint reader, so you’ll be able to skip typing passwords with Home windows Hi. Preinstalled Lenovo Vantage instrument contains device checkups and updates, a selection of energy or cooling modes (we used “excessive efficiency” mode for benchmarking), Wi-Fi safety, blue gentle relief, and $29.99 annual device optimization and $49.99 annual safety subscriptions. A McAfee LiveSafe trial is the one bloatware. 

Lenovo IdeaPad 3i left ports


(Credit score: Kyle Cobian)

The pc’s left aspect holds two USB 3.2 ports (one Kind-A and one Kind-C), an HDMI observe port, an audio jack, and the facility plug. An SD card slot and a USB 2.0 port are at the proper. A sliding shutter prevents webcam spying. 

Lenovo IdeaPad 3i right ports


(Credit score: Kyle Cobian)


The whole thing You Want, Not anything You Do not 

Like some more expensive notebooks, the IdeaPad 3i activates whilst you open its lid moderately than ready so that you can press the facility button. The webcam has predictably soft-focus 720p solution, however it captures moderately well-lit and colourful pictures with out an excessive amount of static. 

Sound from the bottom-mounted audio system is muted and hole even at peak quantity, as though somebody threw a blanket over the pc. You’ll be able to make out overlapping tracks, however you’re going to listen no bass to talk of. Dolby Audio instrument options track, film, sport, voice presets, and an equalizer—none of which makes a lot distinction.

Lenovo IdeaPad 3i keyboard


(Credit score: Kyle Cobian)

A dimly backlit keyboard supplies a numeric keypad with media keep an eye on keys above it, in addition to the standard top-row serve as keys for quantity, brightness, and plane mode. The Get away and Delete keys are small, and the cursor arrow keys are within the awkward row moderately than inverted-T association we dislike, with half-height up and down arrows stacked between full-size left and proper. 

You will not to find devoted House, Finish, Web page Up, and Web page Down keys, however you’ll be able to both pair the cursor arrows with the Fn key or use those at the quantity pad with Num Lock became off. The keyboard has a shallow however quite snappy typing really feel, no longer too loud with first rate comments. The buttonless touchpad is not very giant, however it glides and faucets easily, with a fairly stiff click on. 

Lenovo IdeaPad 3i front view


(Credit score: Kyle Cobian)

Lenovo charges the 1080p IPS show at 300 nits of brightness. It seems to be a bit dimmer than that, despite the fact that it in reality exams upper in our Datacolor SpyderX Elite dimension under. However it’s not too darkish to paintings conveniently.

Colours at the display are a bit washed out however reasonably wealthy and properly saturated. Distinction and viewing angles are first rate, and white backgrounds are effectively white as an alternative of dingy, helped by means of the power to tilt the display way back to you prefer. Bits and bobs are sufficiently sharp, with out a pixelation across the edges of letters.


Trying out the IdeaPad 3i: No Ugly Surprises

For our benchmark comparisons, we pitted the Lenovo towards no longer handiest the AMD-powered Acer Aspire 5 however a super-cheap 15.6-inch pc, the Dell Inspiron 15 3000. The 14.1-inch Gateway Extremely Narrow is comparably supplied, whilst the HP Pc 17 has each a bigger display and a somewhat higher value ($649.99 as examined). You’ll be able to see their elementary specifications under.

Productiveness Checks 

UL’s PCMark 10 is our major benchmark, which simulates a lot of real-world productiveness and content-creation workflows to measure general efficiency for office-centric duties akin to phrase processing, spreadsheeting, internet surfing, and videoconferencing. We additionally run PCMark 10’s Complete Machine Pressure take a look at to evaluate the burden time and throughput of a pc’s garage. 

3 additional benchmarks concentration at the CPU, the usage of all to be had cores and threads, to fee a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 makes use of that corporate’s Cinema 4D engine to render a fancy scene, whilst Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Professional simulates standard apps starting from PDF rendering and speech reputation to device finding out. In the end, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to transform a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p solution (decrease instances are higher). 

Our ultimate productiveness take a look at is Puget Programs’ PugetBench for Photoshop, which makes use of the Ingenious Cloud model 22 of Adobe’s well-known symbol editor to fee a PC’s efficiency for content material advent and multimedia packages. It is an automatic extension that executes a lot of common and GPU-accelerated Photoshop duties starting from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving a picture to making use of mask, gradient fills, and filters.

Lenovo’s IdeaPad 3i simply clears a 4,000-point ranking in PCMark 10, indicating clean crusing for elementary productiveness workplace apps, like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. The pc additionally does lovely properly in our CPU exams, despite the fact that no person will mistake it for a video-editing or dataset-crunching workstation. Whilst this IdeaPad could also be the quickest of the 3 entrants to finish our Photoshop workout, it is obviously constructed extra for on a regular basis productiveness than virtual content material advent.

Graphics Checks 

We take a look at Home windows PCs’ graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, Night time Raid (extra modest, appropriate for laptops with built-in graphics) and Time Undercover agent (extra not easy, appropriate for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). 

Moreover, we run two exams from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses each low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like symbol rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Automotive Chase exams, rendered offscreen to deal with other show resolutions, workout graphics and compute shaders the usage of the OpenGL programming interface and {hardware} tessellation respectively. The extra frames according to 2nd (fps), the simpler.

Technically, the IdeaPad’s Core i5-1235U CPU has Intel’s present Iris Xe built-in graphics, however they are detuned or dialed again to the purpose the place they serve as because the chipmaker’s older UHD Graphics—in different phrases, gentle years from the efficiency of a gaming pc’s discrete GPU. The Lenovo is not the worst performer right here, however all of those notebooks are strictly for solitaire gaming or video streaming moderately than fast paced shoot-’em-ups. 

Battery and Show Checks 

We take a look at laptops’ battery existence by means of enjoying a in the neighborhood saved 720p video document (the open-source Blender film Tears of Metal(Opens in a brand new window)) with show brightness at 50% and audio quantity at 100%. We make sure that the battery is absolutely charged prior to the take a look at, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting became off. 

For colour and brightness checking out, we use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite observe calibration sensor and its Home windows instrument to measure a pc display’s colour saturation—what proportion of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 colour gamuts or palettes the show can display—and its 50% and top brightness in nits (candelas according to sq. meter). 

As we stated, the Lenovo is likely one of the few laptops to check brighter than it seems to be in our show research, however we will gladly take it over the likes of the Acer or Gateway. Its battery existence could also be nice for its magnificence, despite the fact that it joins its funds friends in appearing dismal colour protection—symbol editors or desktop publishers needn’t practice right here. 

Lenovo IdeaPad 3i right angle


(Credit score: Kyle Cobian)


Verdict: Now not A lot to Whinge About for the Worth

We take a look at many laptops which are extra spectacular than the Lenovo IdeaPad 3i, however all of them value much more (and also you could possibly to find it for even lower than its $529.99 Amazon value at press time). It does not have any obtrusive flaws, and whilst its display and keyboard won’t pride you, they don’t seem to be as disappointing as many funds fashions. Put it this fashion: The Lenovo IdeaPad 3i is an under-$600 Home windows pc that does not make us imagine a Chromebook as an alternative.

Lenovo IdeaPad 3i 15 (2022)

The Backside Line

In case you are in search of a full-size, low-priced funds pc, you have to do so much worse than Lenovo’s 15.6-inch IdeaPad 3i.

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