Another Great AMD Laptop: The Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 14

Published on July 3, 2020
Image Credit: [Lenovo]

AMD is absolutely killing it with Ryzen. AMD’s latest Ryzen iteration, the Ryzen 4000 series, is the kind of thing that gives Intel nightmares. They are lower cost, more power-efficient, and much more powerful than their Intel counterparts.

The Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 14 is the latest Ryzen-powered budget laptop to show up on the market. This laptop is powered by a Ryzen 5 4500U. This CPU has 6 cores that run at 2.3Ghz and share 8MB of L3 cache. The Ryzen 5 4500U is built on a 7nm FinFET process and has SMT (Simultaneous Multi-Threading) disabled. Sorry folks, you won’t find 12 threads here. The laptop comes preconfigured with 16GB of RAM and only costs $600. With those specs alone, it would be really hard to find a better value for the money.

Design

Unlike a lot of more expensive metal-clad laptops, the IdeaPad Flex 5 features an all-plastic design. Lenovo explained that on the top side it’s ‘normal’ plastic, and the bottom side is ‘sturdy PC/ABC’. The IdeaPad Flex 5 won’t be as rigid as a unibody MacBook Pro or even the $600 Lenovo Yoga C640. But what it will have, is much more performance than both of those computers. Sure, the keyboard deck, lid, and chassis bottom may have a bit of flex, but it’s not terrible. It’s a totally manageable amount of flex.

The Flex 5’s isn’t the thinnest laptop you can get. At 0.82 inches, it’s rather thick. And its weight of 3.3 pounds is definitely considered ‘heavy’ by today’s standards. These are the kind of limitations that you can expect towards the lower end of the pricing spectrum. If you compare those numbers to that of the Yoga C640 which comes in at 0.67 inches thick and 2.98 pounds, and also the HP Spectre x360 13 which squeezes in at 0.67 inches and 2.88 pounds, you can see a clear difference. The Flex 5’s display bezel isn’t the smallest we have seen either, especially at the bottom and top.

Featured Image Credit: [Lenovo]

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