Just how unexpected it was for my not cheap at all laptop from 2014 to have non-upgradable RAM for some reason, which is doubly odd, since it's one of very few modern-day laptops running two SSDs in a RAID configuration for better performance (and both can be swapped out), among other unusual features.
I put a 16gb stick in my last-gen one of these (had 4gb soldered onboard stock) and it flies. Been my daily driver for a year now. Anything intel 11th gen or newer is pretty quick for most things with the memory bottleneck out of the way
Dawid reviewed this without even telling us which Celery processor it has. I looked it up. N4020 2c2t. It is actually weaker than some Core 2 Duo CPUs.
@@fightkostka Win 11 home is like 100 bucks, so the laptop has a 40 bucks premium over it (let's be real, windows S after S is deactivated is definitely not pro, lol)
I was thinking the same thing - see how far back you have to go to get a Thinkpad T-series or P-series for the same money. I think if you can get a used P50 with the discrete GPU for the same money it’ll walk all over this laptop, even with a decade old CPU.
Or get a $100 N100 micro pc (about 3x the power of the N4500 CPU) with 8GB RAM/256GB drive...lots of USB 3, multiple/4K display outputs wifi+wired...not a laptop of course, but the total volume is smaller. Runs normal Win11 fine, and even does fine with older/casual games; makes a great DDR/emulator/whatever machine.
FSR shifted even more load on to the CPU, which was already being pegged at 100% and GPU was waiting on it, since it was rendering the game at lower res than the display resolution, and that's why it ran even slower. 😂
That's not how games work, FSR or resolution do not have any impact on the CPU load (with a few exceptions that change LOD with resolution). They just alleviate the GPU load which, if your CPU is fast enough, could make your game run faster, but never slower.
This is not entirely true. The CPU is still delivering the frames as slow as before, but now you have the latency of the GPU reconstructing every frame the CPU sends. Usually you get higher FPS because the game is running at a lower resolution but since you are CPU limited, lower res or not you still have to wait for this process: Slow ass CPU makes a frame -> GPU renders frame -> GPU Upscales frame -> repeat. Without FSR it's Slow ass CPU makes a frame -> GPU renders frame -> wait for next CPU frame and repeat.
1:49 every warning has its story. Maybe someone has actually unscrewed the bottom by accident, took out the bios battery by accident and then swallowed it by accident. Highly unlikely, but someone must’ve done it…
It's like the "this is not a toy" warning on bags. When children swallow those button cells batteries they get extremely sick and can die, so possibly we'll see this warning on more things in the future if a new law got passed.... Even though it's internal and the risk to a child that would swallow it is practically 0.
@@volvo09 The most likely scenario, at least in my opinion, and I'm not even a parent, is that some numb nuts had opened that computer, possibly even removed the battery, had to go to the bathroom, stop the dog from eating poo or answer the door, while they in fact should have had the kid under supervision so it wouldn't eat the battery. Also, the biggest risk is not really that the kid will be able to swallow it, it works perfectly as a lid over the tube to the lungs. If you don't believe me, look for those round small things you can buy to see if it is dangerous for your kid.
@@volvo09 Exactly and sadly its not a sticker for children............................. Just points out how screwed humanity is when adults have to be reminded not to eat batteries
I believe most laptops, desktops, and motherboards already have a warning on the packaging that there is a lithium coin cell inside, it’s just usually not that prominent. This feels kinda like somewhere in a foreign factory someone said “Remember, the US market requires a coin cell warning” and someone else not usually involved with products exported to the US went “I can do that.”
It is scary how much is shared between that $140 Lenovo Ideapad and my $500 Lenovo Ideapad. Same cheap plastic, same cheap keyboard, same bad hinge, I think the motherboard is even the same (or very very similar).
I have the Ideapad 1 with the 12th gen i3 and 8gb of ram and I paid 260 USD after taxes. Lenovo uses this case for multiple laptops as well as a couple of Chromebooks.
I'm actualy shocked it has expendable storage and RAM, i expected it to be a tiny board with everything soldered down attached to a souped up phone battery.
Pretty surprising to me too. I have a Flex 5 and it is soldered RAM. Good thing I got 16GB, although I knew it was soldered when I bought it. If I get to a point I'm still using it and need 32GB, I know how to solder RAM chips. But I honestly can't imagine what I'd use it for where I would actually need 32GB. I don't keep a million tabs open on my laptops like I do with a desktop. I'm not going to be editing UHD video on it. Maybe if I get into doing a particularly complex CAD design...
FR. My phone can do AI image enhancement in just a few seconds and it is hardly the most powerful one on the market. This laptop would probably do it in...never. It also cost about 2.5x as much as this craptop so.... Better off with a 10 year old Lenovo business laptop than this POS. And the used laptop will probably cost less too. You just wanna make sure it is Haswell or newer or no 24H2. The Celery processor is weaker than some Core 2 Duos. But trying to run Windows 11, lol. And failing miserably.
Whaaaa - an actual upgradeable notebook... And it only cost $140??? Whoa!!! I don't care how well or not it games, it's a big hats off to Lenovo for thinking long term with this notebook!
I would guess that gaming (and general) performance would be massively improved by adding in a proper SSD and moving Windows from the eMMC storage to that SSD. While the CPU is terrible, it's the storage that is primarily holding this device back.
@@no1DdCI have an 11th gen intel version of this laptop with an NVME and 20gb RAM installed and can confirm it runs way way better than shown in this video. It ran just like this video before I made the upgrades.
I'm just impressed though it's more upgradebale then heck many higher end notebooks on the market - too many being compromised because of idotic moves such as memory and/or SSD being soldered directly on (etc). This entry level notebook makes me want to ask why aren't the higher end models upgradeable (and serviceable) like this entry level one.
@@nukedathlonman Three reasons, two of them sort of justified and one of them rather dirty. The first is packaging: Connectors take up space, soldering chips directly to the board is more space-efficient, which is why you won't find a smartphone with upgradeable storage, ever. Secondly, there can be performance-benefits to having especially RAM integrated directly into the SoC, since it allows for direct access to a unified pool of RAM (see: what Apple is doing). Thirdly however - and that's often the reason - it allows for greater profits, since the manufacturer can dictate prices for RAM and storage at the time of purchase and doesn't have to compete with third party upgrades later down the line. This also forces users to buy the machine a second time if they find out that they need more memory and/or storage. This cheap laptop isn't impacted by any of this. The manufacturer is saving some money by having the default storage and memory soldered to the device, but since additional connectors don't take up much of the available space (the same chassis is also used for much more powerful hardware that needs more room) and don't cost much, it makes sense to add them to the device, especially since both RAM and storage are incredibly limited here that it's a matter of keeping the device usable in the long run, which is important, since this is the kind of laptop that primarily sells in developing countries where people can't just get a new one after a couple of years.
3:35 you're absolutely correct, this is such an underrated and overlooked thing. A great example of this is Lenovo's own Yoga 9i. for the first 160 degrees or so, the hinge is pretty soft making the one handed open possible, but as you rotate it further it suddenly gets a bit stiffer to make tablet mode and tent mode work better. It's not soft because it's flimsy and cheap, it's soft because it was specifically designed and engineered to be just the exact amount of soft to allow one handed opening.
I'm wondering if FidelityFX made things worse because the limiting factor was the CPU, not the GPU, so decreasing the render resolution didn't do anything because it wasn't what was limiting performance, and the extra processing for fidelityFX was actually putting *more* work on an already swamped CPU. Either that or the CPU and iGPU were just busy fighting each other for access to the tiny amount of (presumably) very slow memory
The one hand open test is also a test of the weight of the laptop. Some laptops have solid hinges but fail this test because the main body of the computer is so light that the hinge just takes the whole thing with. This is most common with cheaper laptops. Personally, so long as it stays in place I'm fine with the hinge.
What I can't stand are cheap laptops that have a heavier display than base, so when it's on a lap it always wants to tip over without you holding it down 😡 Tablets with portable keyboards are the worst at that.
@@volvo09 Definitely. LCD panels have gotten pretty lightweight these days. It can't be that hard to make the system more balanced. Even just adding some metal weights would help. It's a terrible practice to pass a cheap product off as premium, but a decent way to make an affordable product more stable.
As a person who at some point used an HP elitepad 900 (intel atom z2760, 2gb of lpddr2💀) and a Toshiba nb510 (intel atom n2600) as primary gaming devices, I can certainly say that this thing is built for gaming.
@@TheJohn8765 this is not even iris igpu, it is intel f***king HD which is way worse than iris, just imagine how bad the cpu that cannot keep up with such a slow igpu on games that isnt normally cpu bound
Dawid - I beg you - start doing a "Alternatively this is what I found on Amazon/marketplace/craigslist/whatever - for the same price/cheaper" - and then compare the two. 99.9% of everyone buying these laptops would be better off with a trashed used "real" laptop... This crap is little more than an Aliexpress Awinner tablet with a keyboard!
About the die without thermal paste. That die is the chipset (Not the iGPU, some people think that, the iGPU is IN the CPU die). It doesn't have thermal on purpose, the chipset die usually doesn't get hot so using thermal paste and making contact with the heatsink is only going to raise the temperature of the chipset due to the CPUs temperature rising which isn't great for the chipset.
12:27 of course fidelity fx make it worse, the CPU bottlenecks the GPU 10 times over, adding fidelity fx makes the cpu having to work more on those 5 frames, making it even worse lol
If you just need a laptop for work typing, or school note taking then it's a great price.... But that CPU is extremely underpowered. It's going to bog down and run like poo on the web, especially without an ad blocker to stop scripts and crap. The screen resolution is also very low, so windows elements take up more screen space and it would suck to work on spreadsheets with that display.
I have a 5625U, and after adding a second 8gb RAM stick the iGPU plays stuff like Deep Rock Galactic smoothly. Low settings though. Cost ~USD $575, 2 years ago new. No second SSD slot. You have to change the one it came with if you want more storage. Though it has a full SD card slot.
@@familhagaudir8561 depending on the apu version, dual channel add between 30 and 50% more performance depending in the scenario. My thinkpad has only a older 3500u but with 24gb of RAM has more fps in 1080p ultra than Intel igpu uhd620 with 720p medium 🤣 (test based on Skyrim leggendary edition)
@@familhagaudir8561 I got a 5825U personally. I got it used for $240 on eBay and it’s perfect. Great for light gaming and all the web browsing I need it to do.
The fact that it's literally cheaper to buy this entire laptop and take its Windows activation license than buying a Windows license at full price is completely insane
Hey Dawid, running any type of upscaling technology (like fidelityFX) will actually shift more load onto the CPU to help reduce the burden on struggling GPUs, so in the case of this already being pinned at 100% CPU usage with no headroom, thats why you got the worse performance :)
Germany has always had pretty high electronics prices, even by European standards. It's also important to add that US prices never include sales tax, unlike more civilized parts of the world, partly because it's wildly different depending on the location - and even nonexistent in some places.
There is a similarly looking lenovo laptop, that i got from best buy, with an i3-1215u, 8gb ddr4, 256gb ssd. I would be happy if Dawid reviews that too.
My girlfriend bought the 4-year-ago version of this Lenovo laptop (Ideapad 330) since it was under $200 back then. It was hard-drive based and painfully slow with Windows 10 so she abandoned it and I bought her a decent Dell to replace it. But now I had a horrible laptop that I figured I'd see what it took to make it usable...and after an SSD swap, maxing the memory and installing Fedora Linux, it is now a fine email and TH-cam laptop that I use every day. The 330 has the 10-key and a much wider screen which, while not particularly fantastic, I love the extra real estate and muted colors. The keyboard has begun to fail, though (press a key and nothing happens without banging on it)...so I would definitely steer people clear from this low-dollar laptop as it takes lots of effort and sacrifices in usability to make it at all functional.
I got a no-brand Alibaba laptop for travelling. €300, 1tb SSD, N5095 celeron, 32gb RAM. I play modded New Vegas and Oblivion at 60fps, and with the discounted Ge Force Now, raytraced Cyberpunk. Basically its the best travel tool i could gave gotten. My poor 6900xt at home will be crying tears of dust
Modern KDE and modern Gnome would be pretty bad on that CPU and with only 4gb of ram too. But, XFCE would be pretty good, especially after dropping in another 4gb of ram for dual channel mode.
Honestly, for the price it seems pretty good. The S mode may limit usability when it comes to gaming, but this laptop was never intended for it in the first place. S mode does, however, work just fine for office tasks, as most of them can be done via web-apps anyway. And when you need a native office work related app, it's very likely available in the Microsoft store.
This is a manufactured ewaste. Even for that price, that is abysmal compared to some cheap refurbished laptop from eBay. This would maybe perform better with Linux but that's the only thing This laptop has going for it.
I have an Ideapad Slim 3 laptop and, for my needs, which are mainly writing, making music and some retro gaming, it's more than Enough, for me. I wouldn't consider a $500 laptop e-waste, as not anyone can afford a Macbook or a gaming laptop. And, not everyone games on a laptop. For heavy gaming, I still think a proper custom built Desktop is definitely 10x times better than a laptop.
A while back I picked up an older SKU of this laptop (same processor) for a chunky discount- purely as a backup. Gaming was indeed horrendous, so the only thing I actually played on it was Heroes of Might and Magic 3 - a game released in 1999 😅
Must be something similar to the "this bag is not a toy, keep away from children" warning. I noticed new button cells in the store say they have a bitterant on them to keep children from investing them, so maybe we'll be seeing more of these warning stickers about button cells.
The AMD iGPU takes up to half of the avaliable RAM for graphics. I can guess if he checked the Performance tab of the Task Managed, he would have a total of 5GB that the integrated graphics can use. BIOS dosen't let you set that upper limit higher on my Lenovo laptop.
I miss the opening theme. :( edit: I wonder how much dropping in 16 GB of decent RAM and an NVME (assuming things can be fiddled in the BIOS to turn that into the boot drive) would help? :)
6:34 The die doesn't require thermal paste on it, because it is the PCH (Platform Controller Hub, AKA the chipset) of the laptop, not the CPU, iGPU or dGPU (which won't exist at this price anyway).
I really appreciate your vids Dawid, but as a late millenial, in the '90 and early '00, we were running games at 20-30fps. In fact, we were always trying and fightning to get 20-30. Disabling antivirus or enabling apps feature like "quit gamespy when launching the game" were giving us 1fps. Putting the windows color in 256 colors instead of 16bit were giving another 1fps. Tweaking games .ini , overclocking, tweaking swap...there was immense efforts put into upgrading our gaming experience without investing any money. I feel like gathering optimization tips from the community and then testing them to see if there can be an fps gain, would make a great followup video!
Hi Dawid, I would consider putting thermal paste between the heatplate and the keyboard frame, just along the heatpipe. Maybe a few degrees less than already reasonable temps would enable a different stage of turboboost.
Intel N series Celerons should be illegal for Laptops, they are rubbish. The new minimum core count should be 6 cores of at least 4GHz speed and no less than 40W TDP. It's no wonder they didn't bother with a fan in that 5W steaming pile.
I spent 50$ on a chromebook out of a pawn shop, turned out to be a really nice laptop. Acer with a 11th gen i3, 8gb of RAM, 64gb eMMC storage tho. SOF audio so windows is tricky, but works great under linux. It's got a strange resolution at 1366x912 (683:456) but it's actually pretty nice. Runs some games pretty nice too. Wish it was a lot easier to re-purpose rotated out chromebooks. Some you can't even get past the locked down boot process, I got lucky with a model I could install coreboot on. Bunch of decent e-waste sitting there locked to chromeos.
At this point I'm subscribed just to hear what increasing ridiculous metaphor and/or simile Dawid will craft to describe the experience of shopping for computer stuff on the internet.
"It's got a pretty complete IO!" I remember my Compaq 1070 (note: this has nothing to do with nVidia) from ca. 1996. $4000, came with a full-sized joystick port, serial port, printer port, etc. Of course that was before the Earth cooled, so... 🤣
I got a HP 11 inch laptop recently for my daughter for college. N4120 with FOUR cores! What a beast! It seems to run Windows just fine, left it in S mode. Sadly no RAM upgrade is possible so it’s stuck with 4 gigs, but it’ll do.
With such devices it would be interesting to see whether old but good games would run. Specific example: The first part of Stalker. On my current system it runs at an average of 400 fps. Sometimes it goes up to 1800 fps. No joke, it would be interesting to know whether the old classics would actually run on it.
I've been watching his content for a while & compared to his early videos, his native Namibian accent is less pronounced, meaning he has been perfecting his English pronunciation.
I bought one of those for about $120 last year on Black Friday. Came with WIndows 11 in S Mode. CPU usage was at 100% at boot. Installed Linux on it and it works great.
Man I'm really digging that case on its side, hopefully heavy GPUs will drive us back to horizontal towers. $210 seems about right considering what's included and bequiet's quality
That is a decent laptop man. You can use it to view your emails and even write replies, much wow. Also I'm sure it has more ports than a macbook air. Imagine you can connect a usb type a flash drive without needing an adapter that costs almost as much as that laptop. That thing also has some storage, you can just use it as an external storage which probably costs as much. It also has a camera and microphone wow, and even a display. That's some serious value there bro.
I just got the AMD Ryzen 7 5700U version of this line of laptops, which is quite a bit more expensive (okay, like double the price) but still pretty cheap. Now that is a much more sporty and capable low power machine that really surprised me. It even runs some games fairly well if you don't have great expectations. But then also cool and quiet. At least it's actually useable without giving you a stroke.
Back in 2019 or 20 I purchased one of those lenovo 14" laptops with a n4000 in it specifically for tuning cars. It does that really well since the tuning software could run on a Tandy 1000 from 1673. The main point I want to make is that I paid only $99 usd for that laptop 4 or 5 years ago. It's honestly really sad that these celeron CPU's are still being used to ruin our lives today.
7 years ago I bought a nice little Acer laptop with a similar spec. Still a 6 watt Celeron, but a slightly older quad core N3450 (with about the same multicore passmark score roughly 1900, but half the single core number), 4GB of RAM, and for a couple years I couldn't even upgrade Windows due to the lack of space on the 32GB eMMc drive. I do have a 128GB USB 3.0 drive for it to hold photos/music/games and it WILL play some games, but nothing recent. GTA San Andreas, Driver: Parallel Lines, American Truck Simulator all ran, but only GTA:SA ran well. I still use that laptop today when I go out of town just to organize my music collections on my phone and play TH-cam videos. It has a 1920x1080 screen and the speakers are okay, but the MOST ridiculous part about it is the fake HDMI port. I thought I could hook it up to a hotel TV to play TH-cam videos, but no! The port will accept a plug but it isn't connected to anything inside the motherboard. Sure do wish it had upgradable RAM like this one, I'd have bumped it to 8GB a LONG time ago. Same for the storage, even a 128GB m.2 would be several orders of magnitude better.
I bought a previous generation of one of these and slapped linux mint on it, which runs circles around windows. Fine little machine for light web browsing and SSH into other machines.
My dad asked me to get a cheap laptop for his friend, and I found a version of this laptop (looks exactly the same) at Microcenter for $200, but with an i3, 8 GB of RAM and a bit more storage. I ended up grabbing an open box one for myself ($150) and plasticky built and bad monitor aside it was not too bad. The kids can play Minecraft and Roblox on it, and I was able to run Rocket League as well (it wasn't great FPS, but just playable enough), so not too bad for an iGPU. Overall for $200 you can do worse, but I imagine the i3 is a massive improvement over the celeron.
Loved where Lenovo is going these days. It’s built to a point lol. But all their laptops are sturdy which is nice. Can you get your hands on a legion 7” tab?
Brilliant. This laptop changes CS2 into turn based strategy game.
🤣🤣🤣GREAT!
i did not know you could turn an fps into an rts but a turn based rts at that
Advanced Wars: Counter Strike
@@PearloryxCounter Strike: Modern Warfare 2
at less than 1fps this is actually true lmao
having seen too many cheap 4GB laptops, upgradable RAM is unexpected
Just how unexpected it was for my not cheap at all laptop from 2014 to have non-upgradable RAM for some reason, which is doubly odd, since it's one of very few modern-day laptops running two SSDs in a RAID configuration for better performance (and both can be swapped out), among other unusual features.
I put a 16gb stick in my last-gen one of these (had 4gb soldered onboard stock) and it flies. Been my daily driver for a year now. Anything intel 11th gen or newer is pretty quick for most things with the memory bottleneck out of the way
Dawid reviewed this without even telling us which Celery processor it has. I looked it up. N4020 2c2t. It is actually weaker than some Core 2 Duo CPUs.
I have not yet seen a laptop that doesn't have upgradable RAM.
@@Lurch-Botno wonder why it is terrible, its slower than near 2 decade old cpu,
The most useful thing about it is that it has a windows license
basically buying windows at discount with free laptop
@@fightkostka Win 11 home is like 100 bucks, so the laptop has a 40 bucks premium over it (let's be real, windows S after S is deactivated is definitely not pro, lol)
windows is literally free nowadays
The license is embedded into the mobo
@ you can read it out and use it on other devices
"Mum I want a laptop for Christmas". You know there's going to be a kid that wakes up with this on Christmas morning and tries to game. 😂😂😂
Lol sad
I'm so glad my parents knew enough to not fall into the cheap PC trap.
@@brookerobertson2951 it’ll play almost any 2D game, so it’s got that going for it
@@Safurnname a modern 2D game a kid would try to play.
@@RusticRonnie flappy bird, chess, minecraft
I'd love if you could buy a $140 laptop on the used market and see how it stacks up against this.
$40 laptop would probably beat it lol
I was thinking the same thing - see how far back you have to go to get a Thinkpad T-series or P-series for the same money. I think if you can get a used P50 with the discrete GPU for the same money it’ll walk all over this laptop, even with a decade old CPU.
Or get a $100 N100 micro pc (about 3x the power of the N4500 CPU) with 8GB RAM/256GB drive...lots of USB 3, multiple/4K display outputs wifi+wired...not a laptop of course, but the total volume is smaller. Runs normal Win11 fine, and even does fine with older/casual games; makes a great DDR/emulator/whatever machine.
I feel like he hasn't bought a used computer in a while ...
You can find a dell precision with 8th gen i7s and 4k displays or a thinkpad for a thinner laptop
FSR shifted even more load on to the CPU, which was already being pegged at 100% and GPU was waiting on it, since it was rendering the game at lower res than the display resolution, and that's why it ran even slower. 😂
That's not how games work, FSR or resolution do not have any impact on the CPU load (with a few exceptions that change LOD with resolution). They just alleviate the GPU load which, if your CPU is fast enough, could make your game run faster, but never slower.
This is not entirely true. The CPU is still delivering the frames as slow as before, but now you have the latency of the GPU reconstructing every frame the CPU sends. Usually you get higher FPS because the game is running at a lower resolution but since you are CPU limited, lower res or not you still have to wait for this process: Slow ass CPU makes a frame -> GPU renders frame -> GPU Upscales frame -> repeat. Without FSR it's Slow ass CPU makes a frame -> GPU renders frame -> wait for next CPU frame and repeat.
Should’ve offset that by running at 16k ultra
@@DefinitelyNotPedro thanks for the clarification 🤔
This
1:49 every warning has its story. Maybe someone has actually unscrewed the bottom by accident, took out the bios battery by accident and then swallowed it by accident. Highly unlikely, but someone must’ve done it…
It's like the "this is not a toy" warning on bags.
When children swallow those button cells batteries they get extremely sick and can die, so possibly we'll see this warning on more things in the future if a new law got passed.... Even though it's internal and the risk to a child that would swallow it is practically 0.
@@volvo09 The most likely scenario, at least in my opinion, and I'm not even a parent, is that some numb nuts had opened that computer, possibly even removed the battery, had to go to the bathroom, stop the dog from eating poo or answer the door, while they in fact should have had the kid under supervision so it wouldn't eat the battery.
Also, the biggest risk is not really that the kid will be able to swallow it, it works perfectly as a lid over the tube to the lungs. If you don't believe me, look for those round small things you can buy to see if it is dangerous for your kid.
@@volvo09 Exactly and sadly its not a sticker for children............................. Just points out how screwed humanity is when adults have to be reminded not to eat batteries
I believe most laptops, desktops, and motherboards already have a warning on the packaging that there is a lithium coin cell inside, it’s just usually not that prominent.
This feels kinda like somewhere in a foreign factory someone said “Remember, the US market requires a coin cell warning” and someone else not usually involved with products exported to the US went “I can do that.”
Every safety warning/rule is written in blood
It is scary how much is shared between that $140 Lenovo Ideapad and my $500 Lenovo Ideapad. Same cheap plastic, same cheap keyboard, same bad hinge, I think the motherboard is even the same (or very very similar).
Don't forget the terrible screen!
I have the Ideapad 1 with the 12th gen i3 and 8gb of ram and I paid 260 USD after taxes. Lenovo uses this case for multiple laptops as well as a couple of Chromebooks.
At least when you go to 700€ Yoga it feels like it could be metal. That is surprisingly nice. Not that it can game either.
@@bena2.0 I hate 1366x768 screens, especially with terrible color quality. They should have disappeared 10 years ago but are still hanging around
The laptop i have is also veryyy similar but it is metal and is an oled screen with r7 7530u is 700$
I'm actualy shocked it has expendable storage and RAM, i expected it to be a tiny board with everything soldered down attached to a souped up phone battery.
Pretty surprising to me too. I have a Flex 5 and it is soldered RAM. Good thing I got 16GB, although I knew it was soldered when I bought it. If I get to a point I'm still using it and need 32GB, I know how to solder RAM chips. But I honestly can't imagine what I'd use it for where I would actually need 32GB. I don't keep a million tabs open on my laptops like I do with a desktop. I'm not going to be editing UHD video on it. Maybe if I get into doing a particularly complex CAD design...
That's Lenovo for ya.
it's a cheap lenovo for you. but even then i was surpise that they still provide some kind of upgradability to their cheap laptop lineup
14:53 😂 “I think we’re supposed to be in a house here”
gyat
that McAfee ad after switching out of s mode was hilarious lol
It's like you unlocked your door and opened it. Then McAfee jumps out in front of the door and it's like. "HEY GUY WHATCHA DOING"
Even my cell phone has more Spec than this laptop, Dark times for people who have this.
Smartphone you can buy for same 140 has better performance then THIS. Oh god.
FR. My phone can do AI image enhancement in just a few seconds and it is hardly the most powerful one on the market. This laptop would probably do it in...never.
It also cost about 2.5x as much as this craptop so....
Better off with a 10 year old Lenovo business laptop than this POS. And the used laptop will probably cost less too. You just wanna make sure it is Haswell or newer or no 24H2.
The Celery processor is weaker than some Core 2 Duos. But trying to run Windows 11, lol. And failing miserably.
Yeah my Galaxy S24 Ultra would absolutely demolish this thing. And my phone has 12gb ram haha
@@XuroX. My phone has a 2020 midrange chip (a rebranded version of a 2019 chip) and its GPU alone is more powerful than this entire laptop.
I have this. And it's too much awful. But its all i got rn. So, gotta compensate
Man I love these type of videos
why
still better than my laptop
edit: for those who are wondering, i have a i5 5200u, hd 5500 and 4gb ram
yeah the igpu is so much better than mine
dude ?
What is ur laptop?
Try linux :)
Then buy it idk
I used to game on an i3 4030u Dell laptop. It was crazy being able to bring a computer to it's knees with runescape
This is basically a Chromebook tortured and gaslighted into being a Windows laptop.
Lmao
They do this too often. Could've been win10, but MSoft is about to stop free support for it.
I think you missed the most important benchmark for this machine: Facebook.
Whaaaa - an actual upgradeable notebook... And it only cost $140??? Whoa!!! I don't care how well or not it games, it's a big hats off to Lenovo for thinking long term with this notebook!
I would guess that gaming (and general) performance would be massively improved by adding in a proper SSD and moving Windows from the eMMC storage to that SSD. While the CPU is terrible, it's the storage that is primarily holding this device back.
@@no1DdCI have an 11th gen intel version of this laptop with an NVME and 20gb RAM installed and can confirm it runs way way better than shown in this video. It ran just like this video before I made the upgrades.
I'm just impressed though it's more upgradebale then heck many higher end notebooks on the market - too many being compromised because of idotic moves such as memory and/or SSD being soldered directly on (etc). This entry level notebook makes me want to ask why aren't the higher end models upgradeable (and serviceable) like this entry level one.
@@nukedathlonman Three reasons, two of them sort of justified and one of them rather dirty.
The first is packaging: Connectors take up space, soldering chips directly to the board is more space-efficient, which is why you won't find a smartphone with upgradeable storage, ever.
Secondly, there can be performance-benefits to having especially RAM integrated directly into the SoC, since it allows for direct access to a unified pool of RAM (see: what Apple is doing).
Thirdly however - and that's often the reason - it allows for greater profits, since the manufacturer can dictate prices for RAM and storage at the time of purchase and doesn't have to compete with third party upgrades later down the line. This also forces users to buy the machine a second time if they find out that they need more memory and/or storage.
This cheap laptop isn't impacted by any of this. The manufacturer is saving some money by having the default storage and memory soldered to the device, but since additional connectors don't take up much of the available space (the same chassis is also used for much more powerful hardware that needs more room) and don't cost much, it makes sense to add them to the device, especially since both RAM and storage are incredibly limited here that it's a matter of keeping the device usable in the long run, which is important, since this is the kind of laptop that primarily sells in developing countries where people can't just get a new one after a couple of years.
I would rather buy an old ThinkPad
It’s basically a thin client in laptop form, this could be really useful for the price under the right circumstances!
Nobody : i will buy this 140 dollar laptop cause i need laptop
David : 140 dollar laptop , gaaaaaaaming
My thinkpad T500 could run circles around that celeron, and it's a core 2 duo from the vista days lol
That says more about these cheap Celerons then it does about a core 2 duo. T series laptops are still solid work horse machines in my book. 👍
Maybe a a few C2Ds would outperform this but not by a lot, unless it is my X6800 running at 4.5GHz.
3:35 you're absolutely correct, this is such an underrated and overlooked thing. A great example of this is Lenovo's own Yoga 9i. for the first 160 degrees or so, the hinge is pretty soft making the one handed open possible, but as you rotate it further it suddenly gets a bit stiffer to make tablet mode and tent mode work better. It's not soft because it's flimsy and cheap, it's soft because it was specifically designed and engineered to be just the exact amount of soft to allow one handed opening.
I'm wondering if FidelityFX made things worse because the limiting factor was the CPU, not the GPU, so decreasing the render resolution didn't do anything because it wasn't what was limiting performance, and the extra processing for fidelityFX was actually putting *more* work on an already swamped CPU. Either that or the CPU and iGPU were just busy fighting each other for access to the tiny amount of (presumably) very slow memory
That's exactly that
Fidelity FX relieves the GPU at cost of CPU, so it's ideal to solve a GPU bottleneck, it only makes a CPU bottleneck worse lol
The one hand open test is also a test of the weight of the laptop. Some laptops have solid hinges but fail this test because the main body of the computer is so light that the hinge just takes the whole thing with. This is most common with cheaper laptops. Personally, so long as it stays in place I'm fine with the hinge.
What I can't stand are cheap laptops that have a heavier display than base, so when it's on a lap it always wants to tip over without you holding it down 😡
Tablets with portable keyboards are the worst at that.
@@volvo09 Definitely. LCD panels have gotten pretty lightweight these days. It can't be that hard to make the system more balanced. Even just adding some metal weights would help. It's a terrible practice to pass a cheap product off as premium, but a decent way to make an affordable product more stable.
As a person who at some point used an HP elitepad 900 (intel atom z2760, 2gb of lpddr2💀) and a Toshiba nb510 (intel atom n2600) as primary gaming devices, I can certainly say that this thing is built for gaming.
1:40 what is that song?
I can tell dawid will put definitely gpu on that
Because of that free m.2 port
I assume he still has the GPU adapter from the modded AIO... I can't imagine that thing supports anything higher than PCI Gen 3 though.
Even if you can the cpu itself cannot keep up with its own igpu, let alone faster gpu
@@mrbobgamingmemes9558 Yah, if the Iris graphics is waiting for the CPU, you're going to have a bad time with any upgrade.
@@TheJohn8765 this is not even iris igpu, it is intel f***king HD which is way worse than iris, just imagine how bad the cpu that cannot keep up with such a slow igpu on games that isnt normally cpu bound
Dawid - I beg you - start doing a "Alternatively this is what I found on Amazon/marketplace/craigslist/whatever - for the same price/cheaper" - and then compare the two. 99.9% of everyone buying these laptops would be better off with a trashed used "real" laptop... This crap is little more than an Aliexpress Awinner tablet with a keyboard!
About the die without thermal paste. That die is the chipset (Not the iGPU, some people think that, the iGPU is IN the CPU die). It doesn't have thermal on purpose, the chipset die usually doesn't get hot so using thermal paste and making contact with the heatsink is only going to raise the temperature of the chipset due to the CPUs temperature rising which isn't great for the chipset.
"Am I also dead? We're going to have to wait a moment to see" - hilarious 🤣
12:27 of course fidelity fx make it worse, the CPU bottlenecks the GPU 10 times over, adding fidelity fx makes the cpu having to work more on those 5 frames, making it even worse lol
In the next episode, Dawid is going to try to game on a 5$ USB-cable (Type-A).
This is actually an amazing laptop for the price. Having anything upgradeable on a laptop at this price point is so good.
If you just need a laptop for work typing, or school note taking then it's a great price....
But that CPU is extremely underpowered. It's going to bog down and run like poo on the web, especially without an ad blocker to stop scripts and crap.
The screen resolution is also very low, so windows elements take up more screen space and it would suck to work on spreadsheets with that display.
I am pretty sure it is not sold as a game laptop, at least not by Lenovo. But the store itself might, at least if it's Amazon lol.
@@sykoteddyIt is the same chassis that was used for The Ideapad Gaming 3 line of laptops
@@real_rsaNoob13 What does this comment have to do with anything I wrote?
@sykoteddy Just a fun fact 😂😂😂
7:23 This is the reason I SUBSCRIBED to this channel
Me too. Meeeeeee too
Now try a $140 used laptop and compare them. I’ve seen Thinkpads with Ryzen 5 4650Us in them for around the same price
here used thinkpad with ryzen 5 4650u cost much more than the intel version with i5 1020u
I have a 5625U, and after adding a second 8gb RAM stick the iGPU plays stuff like Deep Rock Galactic smoothly. Low settings though.
Cost ~USD $575, 2 years ago new.
No second SSD slot. You have to change the one it came with if you want more storage. Though it has a full SD card slot.
@@familhagaudir8561 depending on the apu version, dual channel add between 30 and 50% more performance depending in the scenario. My thinkpad has only a older 3500u but with 24gb of RAM has more fps in 1080p ultra than Intel igpu uhd620 with 720p medium 🤣 (test based on Skyrim leggendary edition)
@@familhagaudir8561 I got a 5825U personally. I got it used for $240 on eBay and it’s perfect. Great for light gaming and all the web browsing I need it to do.
The fact that it's literally cheaper to buy this entire laptop and take its Windows activation license than buying a Windows license at full price is completely insane
Hey Dawid, running any type of upscaling technology (like fidelityFX) will actually shift more load onto the CPU to help reduce the burden on struggling GPUs, so in the case of this already being pinned at 100% CPU usage with no headroom, thats why you got the worse performance :)
Fun fact, this Laptop is 320 USD in Germany…
Yikes. I paid 260 USD after tax for my ideapad 1 with the 12th gen i3 and 8 gigs of ram and a 256gb Nvme.
Probably just put at for a few weeks 320 so it can legally be called being put on sale at 240 with "lowest price in the past 30 days 320" tbf.
Germany has always had pretty high electronics prices, even by European standards.
It's also important to add that US prices never include sales tax, unlike more civilized parts of the world, partly because it's wildly different depending on the location - and even nonexistent in some places.
320$ ? , i found used core i5 8th quad core laptop for 250$ , and i live on country who are notorious for expensive laptop
For $100 more you would get an AMD Ryzen 5 laptop, with a good Radeon iGPU.
There is a similarly looking lenovo laptop, that i got from best buy, with an i3-1215u, 8gb ddr4, 256gb ssd. I would be happy if Dawid reviews that too.
I think I have the same machine. The Ideapad 1 has been a solid machine after retiring my daily driver Lenovo n585 dual core laptop of 12 years 😂
@@rmcdudmk212 1215u and alder lake was such a jump it goes on par with the 1185g7. I have both and its pretty amazing how good that I3 is.
I had the same specs and mine was a used Ideapad Flex 5 14IAU7 :D
Omg, i think this is the model of the laptops at my school
At least it has an 12 gen i3 and SSD it is going to run much faster than this
My girlfriend bought the 4-year-ago version of this Lenovo laptop (Ideapad 330) since it was under $200 back then. It was hard-drive based and painfully slow with Windows 10 so she abandoned it and I bought her a decent Dell to replace it. But now I had a horrible laptop that I figured I'd see what it took to make it usable...and after an SSD swap, maxing the memory and installing Fedora Linux, it is now a fine email and TH-cam laptop that I use every day. The 330 has the 10-key and a much wider screen which, while not particularly fantastic, I love the extra real estate and muted colors. The keyboard has begun to fail, though (press a key and nothing happens without banging on it)...so I would definitely steer people clear from this low-dollar laptop as it takes lots of effort and sacrifices in usability to make it at all functional.
We should get an older high end laptop vs this one and see what’s better
I got a no-brand Alibaba laptop for travelling. €300, 1tb SSD, N5095 celeron, 32gb RAM.
I play modded New Vegas and Oblivion at 60fps, and with the discounted Ge Force Now, raytraced Cyberpunk.
Basically its the best travel tool i could gave gotten.
My poor 6900xt at home will be crying tears of dust
When a laptop uses up 50% of its CPU just running Windows, you know what needs to be done...
🐧
Modern KDE and modern Gnome would be pretty bad on that CPU and with only 4gb of ram too. But, XFCE would be pretty good, especially after dropping in another 4gb of ram for dual channel mode.
this channel never gets old
Honestly, for the price it seems pretty good. The S mode may limit usability when it comes to gaming, but this laptop was never intended for it in the first place. S mode does, however, work just fine for office tasks, as most of them can be done via web-apps anyway. And when you need a native office work related app, it's very likely available in the Microsoft store.
You can turn S mode off. I had the same problem with my ideapad 1. Once I shut it off the problem was fixed.
Web apps 🤮
This is a manufactured ewaste. Even for that price, that is abysmal compared to some cheap refurbished laptop from eBay. This would maybe perform better with Linux but that's the only thing This laptop has going for it.
I have an Ideapad Slim 3 laptop and, for my needs, which are mainly writing, making music and some retro gaming, it's more than Enough, for me.
I wouldn't consider a $500 laptop e-waste, as not anyone can afford a Macbook or a gaming laptop. And, not everyone games on a laptop.
For heavy gaming, I still think a proper custom built Desktop is definitely 10x times better than a laptop.
No, at this price secondhand if the only good choice
it's always a good day when dawid uploads
No intro in this one, kinda missed the muzak and the CPU fingering. 🤣
A while back I picked up an older SKU of this laptop (same processor) for a chunky discount- purely as a backup.
Gaming was indeed horrendous, so the only thing I actually played on it was Heroes of Might and Magic 3 - a game released in 1999 😅
10:09 0% gpu usage 😂
6:40 As per usual with most modern laptops, the chip that doesn't have thermal paste on it is the Chipset
Yeah. They run cool, oftentimes it will run hotter with thermal paste as it draws the heat from the cpu into the die as well.
The heatsink doesn't stick to that die so yeah, it isn't supposed to have thermal paste.
for that warning to be that size, there must been something behind
Must be something similar to the "this bag is not a toy, keep away from children" warning.
I noticed new button cells in the store say they have a bitterant on them to keep children from investing them, so maybe we'll be seeing more of these warning stickers about button cells.
thinking there might be some way to allocate more of the extra RAM you installed to the graphics to get doom eternal running.
The AMD iGPU takes up to half of the avaliable RAM for graphics. I can guess if he checked the Performance tab of the Task Managed, he would have a total of 5GB that the integrated graphics can use.
BIOS dosen't let you set that upper limit higher on my Lenovo laptop.
That went well!! LOL! 5 fps in csgo is BAD.
At 5 fps your basically watching a low res gif of the game you just tried to play 😂
At least there's 1 game it can 60 fps Stardew Valley
The human eye can't see past 1fps so you're good
Wonder how long it would take to get a kill in a game, haha
@@powerfulshammy honestly I don't think it would be able to get 60fps in stardew valley
Great video Dawid 🙂
I miss the opening theme. :(
edit: I wonder how much dropping in 16 GB of decent RAM and an NVME (assuming things can be fiddled in the BIOS to turn that into the boot drive) would help? :)
One of the best narrated videos in a while. I was laughing the entire time
Now install linux on it and see how much better it works without the O.S. taking up 40% of the CPU/Ram.
I have the exact laptop and windows was so bad I finally gave up and installed Ubuntu its still not very fast but it’s slightly more usable now
Try something else other than Ubuntu. It's pretty resource-heavy these days
6:34 The die doesn't require thermal paste on it, because it is the PCH (Platform Controller Hub, AKA the chipset) of the laptop, not the CPU, iGPU or dGPU (which won't exist at this price anyway).
I really appreciate your vids Dawid, but as a late millenial, in the '90 and early '00, we were running games at 20-30fps. In fact, we were always trying and fightning to get 20-30. Disabling antivirus or enabling apps feature like "quit gamespy when launching the game" were giving us 1fps. Putting the windows color in 256 colors instead of 16bit were giving another 1fps. Tweaking games .ini , overclocking, tweaking swap...there was immense efforts put into upgrading our gaming experience without investing any money. I feel like gathering optimization tips from the community and then testing them to see if there can be an fps gain, would make a great followup video!
The ancient knowledge, from an age of darkness...
Hi Dawid, I would consider putting thermal paste between the heatplate and the keyboard frame, just along the heatpipe. Maybe a few degrees less than already reasonable temps would enable a different stage of turboboost.
would be cool to see how a lightweight linux distro compares to the win11 installation on this hardware
It will probably even succeed in running Cyberpunk =)
Excellent videos
Intel N series Celerons should be illegal for Laptops, they are rubbish. The new minimum core count should be 6 cores of at least 4GHz speed and no less than 40W TDP. It's no wonder they didn't bother with a fan in that 5W steaming pile.
Dawid you're a legend
I spent 50$ on a chromebook out of a pawn shop, turned out to be a really nice laptop. Acer with a 11th gen i3, 8gb of RAM, 64gb eMMC storage tho. SOF audio so windows is tricky, but works great under linux. It's got a strange resolution at 1366x912 (683:456) but it's actually pretty nice. Runs some games pretty nice too.
Wish it was a lot easier to re-purpose rotated out chromebooks. Some you can't even get past the locked down boot process, I got lucky with a model I could install coreboot on. Bunch of decent e-waste sitting there locked to chromeos.
the bquiet case from the add is really really cool
Put an SSD in it
Yeah, and install windows in there, with some swapsies file I can see the CPU bottleneck becoming way less of a problem lol
And another stick of RAM would get it from wheelchair to crutches.
@@janezverbic2093 there is probably only one ram slot
@@potatoes5829 He said you can drop in an additional stick of RAM. If you cant its on him.:)
Nah theres 2@@potatoes5829
You need to review that case Dawid :P regardless of whether you do or not... I wants one!
But can it run doom?
It can yeah! Not the new ones though
At this point I'm subscribed just to hear what increasing ridiculous metaphor and/or simile Dawid will craft to describe the experience of shopping for computer stuff on the internet.
When he compared the keyboard to Joker 2 😂
"It's got a pretty complete IO!" I remember my Compaq 1070 (note: this has nothing to do with nVidia) from ca. 1996. $4000, came with a full-sized joystick port, serial port, printer port, etc. Of course that was before the Earth cooled, so... 🤣
I got a HP 11 inch laptop recently for my daughter for college. N4120 with FOUR cores! What a beast! It seems to run Windows just fine, left it in S mode. Sadly no RAM upgrade is possible so it’s stuck with 4 gigs, but it’ll do.
Loving the 15+ min videos
With such devices it would be interesting to see whether old but good games would run.
Specific example: The first part of Stalker.
On my current system it runs at an average of 400 fps. Sometimes it goes up to 1800 fps.
No joke, it would be interesting to know whether the old classics would actually run on it.
I've been watching his content for a while & compared to his early videos, his native Namibian accent is less pronounced, meaning he has been perfecting his English pronunciation.
I bought one of those for about $120 last year on Black Friday. Came with WIndows 11 in S Mode. CPU usage was at 100% at boot. Installed Linux on it and it works great.
Man I'm really digging that case on its side, hopefully heavy GPUs will drive us back to horizontal towers.
$210 seems about right considering what's included and bequiet's quality
It’s a beauty
I have one of those laptops with a i3 11th gen, It sucks rlly badly but still works. Usually they are 720p screens.
Between Dawid and Linus, I swear we've seen these kinds of videos like 100 times before
😆😆 The universe heat death joke had me.
That is a decent laptop man. You can use it to view your emails and even write replies, much wow. Also I'm sure it has more ports than a macbook air. Imagine you can connect a usb type a flash drive without needing an adapter that costs almost as much as that laptop. That thing also has some storage, you can just use it as an external storage which probably costs as much. It also has a camera and microphone wow, and even a display. That's some serious value there bro.
it's an Ideapad 3 style chassis, i use one, besides the TN display, the laptop is awesome ❤
Another great episode of "But can it run HL2?" These actually are fun.
Intel N100 is now the new budget champion. Do NOT buy a laptop if it has lower tier chip than this.
I just got the AMD Ryzen 7 5700U version of this line of laptops, which is quite a bit more expensive (okay, like double the price) but still pretty cheap. Now that is a much more sporty and capable low power machine that really surprised me. It even runs some games fairly well if you don't have great expectations. But then also cool and quiet. At least it's actually useable without giving you a stroke.
13:47 Not running dude, limping😅.
Back in 2019 or 20 I purchased one of those lenovo 14" laptops with a n4000 in it specifically for tuning cars. It does that really well since the tuning software could run on a Tandy 1000 from 1673. The main point I want to make is that I paid only $99 usd for that laptop 4 or 5 years ago. It's honestly really sad that these celeron CPU's are still being used to ruin our lives today.
That webcam is surprisingly good! Way better than the one in my 1000 dollar gaming laptop from Lenovo.
I see Dawid, i click, me happy, I like
7 years ago I bought a nice little Acer laptop with a similar spec. Still a 6 watt Celeron, but a slightly older quad core N3450 (with about the same multicore passmark score roughly 1900, but half the single core number), 4GB of RAM, and for a couple years I couldn't even upgrade Windows due to the lack of space on the 32GB eMMc drive. I do have a 128GB USB 3.0 drive for it to hold photos/music/games and it WILL play some games, but nothing recent. GTA San Andreas, Driver: Parallel Lines, American Truck Simulator all ran, but only GTA:SA ran well. I still use that laptop today when I go out of town just to organize my music collections on my phone and play TH-cam videos. It has a 1920x1080 screen and the speakers are okay, but the MOST ridiculous part about it is the fake HDMI port. I thought I could hook it up to a hotel TV to play TH-cam videos, but no! The port will accept a plug but it isn't connected to anything inside the motherboard. Sure do wish it had upgradable RAM like this one, I'd have bumped it to 8GB a LONG time ago. Same for the storage, even a 128GB m.2 would be several orders of magnitude better.
truly one of the laptops from a certain point in time
I bought a previous generation of one of these and slapped linux mint on it, which runs circles around windows. Fine little machine for light web browsing and SSH into other machines.
Wow, a heatsheat. That saves some weight. Ultra portable.
I understood your pain with the brand new fresh laptop update 😆
You should play Minecraft to get the performance because alot of people play it and have an idea how it runs and performs.
My dad asked me to get a cheap laptop for his friend, and I found a version of this laptop (looks exactly the same) at Microcenter for $200, but with an i3, 8 GB of RAM and a bit more storage. I ended up grabbing an open box one for myself ($150) and plasticky built and bad monitor aside it was not too bad. The kids can play Minecraft and Roblox on it, and I was able to run Rocket League as well (it wasn't great FPS, but just playable enough), so not too bad for an iGPU. Overall for $200 you can do worse, but I imagine the i3 is a massive improvement over the celeron.
feels like the hinge test is passed only is laptops have their bottom part heavy enough
Fresh Dawid on this - the day of black fridays!!! cheya
FidelityFX uses the CPU to do the AI upscaling stuff. If you have a CPU that is pinned at 100% usage, FidelityFX will just put MORE demand on the CPU.
Loved where Lenovo is going these days. It’s built to a point lol. But all their laptops are sturdy which is nice. Can you get your hands on a legion 7” tab?