This is an all-plastic laptop, but has a fairly rigid build, not like metal, but far less flex on the screen than my 5 year old Acer Aspire which needed many replacements due to flexing including a cracked screen, hinges, and back cover. This has 8 GB memory. This has and older GTX 1650. This has a 120hz display (unheard of at this price point) This has 256SSD m.2. It has a backlit Keyboard. It has an amazing processor: AMD Ryzen 5.
Here's the deal. You can get similarly priced laptops that have more storage and RAM, touchscreen, etc... but you will trade down the pieces that future-proof this machine. I can walk into Walmart and get a similarly priced Pentium, i3 or a similarly priced i5 with more RAM or storage or maybe a touchscreen (if that’s important to you), but no dedicated graphics, no backlit keyboard, or expansion slots for ram or SSD. However, I can always buy more RAM or hard drive later when the price will actually be lower. I can NOT come back later and upgrade the CPU, add slots to increase the RAM, and all of a sudden make my keyboard visible in the dark when I want to work late at night sometime. I can't later upgrade the screen to 120hz as this one has. And, the GPU at this price range is perfectly adequate (Although not as future-proof). The Battery has a LOT to be desired and could be a deal breaker. I can get 5 to 6 hours if optimized back (all but battery-saver mode). My old Acer had 12 hour battery, but the screen was a significant tradeoff.
Some people are saying only 6 GB RAM. That is because of the new way Ryzen processors use dedicated RAM instead of shared RAM. There is 8, it is just that old processors shared the RAM with the system. Now the new processors are dedicating part of the RAM to the processor permanently. It isn't too much different than before, but does change the way the RAM is handled and displays for availability for Windows.
My system is gaming fine right now with the existing setup, but I'm not a power user. I'll wait until I can't live with the performance and then I'll go buy more RAM and SSD when it comes down lower in price, because I can. Beware of machines that downgrade built in pieces to give you more memory and hard-drive, but will be outdated in 4-7 years instead of 7-10+ years depending on what you plan to do with the machine. Those are not good tradeoffs. Lenovo seems to have hit a sweet spot in this price range with its optimal upgradeability and good built in features for for the price you pay.
If you need a power machine, this is not it. This is a good midrange machine that will allow you to do a diverse amount of tasks without lagging out or crashing, and should last a long time with the specs it has.
| Standing screen display size | 15.6 |
|---|---|
| Screen Resolution | 1920x1080 |
| Max Screen Resolution | 1920 x 1080 Pixels |
| Processor | 3.3 GHz ryzen_5 |
| RAM | 8 DDR4 |
| Memory Speed | 3200 MHz |
| Hard Drive | SSD |
| Graphics Coprocessor | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 |
| Chipset Brand | NVIDIA |
| Card Description | Dedicated |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 8 GB |
| Wireless Type | 802.11ac |
| Number of USB 3.0 Ports | 2 |
| Average Battery Life (in hours) | 8 Hours |
