LENOVO Z500 -59-393000 WHITE

LENOVO  Z500 -59-393000 WHITE

Specifications

As first impressions go, the Lenovo IdeaPad Z500 Touch won’t exactly set your heart aflame. The combination of a large form factor and a shoulder-straining weight put it at odds with a world that is currently defined by portability. However, there are a number of tricks up this laptop’s sleeve that make it far more interesting and versatile a system than you might initially expect.

First up, it’s worth noting that this isn’t an outing for Intel’s recently released new processor family, namely Intel fourth-generation core architecture. The Core i7-3632QM may be from the third-generation family, also known as the Ivy Bridge family, but it still packs an impressive punch into its tiny footprint.

Buying Guide

This quad-core chip has a core frequency of 2.2GHz but has a thermal envelope of just 35W. It’s a good chip, despite being last-gen, in other words.

The big surprise here though, especially given the IdeaPad’s rather sober-looking styling, is the fact that it packs a discrete graphics unit inside its sizeable chassis. This isn’t a half-hearted inclusion on Lenovo’s part either, with the GeForce GT 740M hailing from the most recent Nvidia family. This GPU has 2GB of DDR3 RAM to call its own, houses 384 unified shaders and has a core operating frequency of 980MHz.

Lenovo has paired this graphics core with a 1366 x 768 pixel screen, which you may think is a little coarse given the prominence of 1080p displays these days, but actually for gamers it’s a wise move, as we’ll see shortly.

The vertical viewing angles on this screen aren’t brilliant, but it’s fine when viewed normally, and the horizontal angles are just fine. And you’ll want to get a good viewing angle when you are using this machine, because the other big news on the screen front is the fact that this is a touch-panel display. It is responsive and works really well too.

The rest of the specification is fairly straightforward, with a sizeable 1TB 5,400rpm hard drive as standard and the added space offered up by the chassis enabling Lenovo to squeeze an optical drive in there as well. The keyboard is roomy and responsive, although it does feel a little spongy on the right-hand side. The touchpad is sizeable and comfortable to use as well.

On the connectivity front you’ll find support for wired and wireless networking, three USB ports, a memory card slot alongside VGA and HDMI outputs. In other words, there’s pretty much everything you could want from a modern laptop.

Performance

You might also like…

Despite the modest price tag, the performance offered by the Lenovo IdeaPad Z500 Touch is impressive. The main driving force behind this performance is the Intel Core i7-3632QM processor at the heart of the machine. This may add an extra £100/US$200 to the price of the machine over the base Core i5-3230M version, but in light of the performance garnered from the system, seems like money well spent.

Because this is a four-core chip running at 2.2GHz that boasts multi-threading it offers up a total of eight threads – which means it is especially great if the software you’re using supports multi-threading. Thankfully more and more software developers are doing just that, so it should help keep this machine at the top of the performance pile moving forward.

When it comes to gaming performance, there’s a lot to like here as well. Admittedly you won’t be playing all of the latest games at the very highest settings, because the GeForce GT 740M doesn’t quite have enough silicon to do that, but knock down those settings only a little and you can easily hit smooth frame rates.

This is ably highlighted by both Sleeping Dogs and Bioshock Infinite, which are pretty if a little sluggish at the very highest settings, but are transformed by simply dropping down to medium presets. Indeed when it comes to Sleepings Dogs you could easily up the settings a lot more to enjoy better visuals while still maintaining smooth performance.

This is a good mainstream graphics subsystem in other words, and well paired to the relatively low-resolution screen.

There are a couple of areas that aren’t so impressive though, and the first has to be the battery life. Three hours of battery life while playing back HD video may have been acceptable a couple of years ago, but we expect a lot from our machines in these post-Ultrabook times. Not that this machine is particularly portable, weighing in as it does at 2.7kg (5.95lbs).

The other area for concern is the drive performance. Admittedly we wouldn’t expect to see an SSD included in the specification for this much cash, but that doesn’t stop us missing it when it’s not there.

This is compounded by the fact that Lenovo has used a 5,400rpm hard drive, and by Windows 8’s propensity to feel sluggish when you first start using it – it does speed up a little later, but the initial impression is never amazing.

Verdict

You might also like…

Despite our initial impressions, which are bound to throw anyone looking at the machine without knowing who or what it is actually aimed at, a lot of careful thought has gone into piecing the Lenovo IdeaPad Z500 Touch together.

It may not make all that much sense on paper, but in practice you’ll find yourself seamlessly playing games, tabbing out to prod your way through Windows and then turning the system to more mundane tasks without stopping for breath.

That’s not to say that it’s the perfect machine for everyone, since there are a few annoyances here and there, but it’s definitely worth considering if you’re in the market for a 15.6-inch laptop and you fancy playing games from time to time.