Jun 20, 2016 06:58 AM
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Hot on the heels of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, at its heart the Lenovo IdeaPad S300 features a brand new Ivy Bridge version of the mid-range Core i5 processor, which kicks out a decent 1.7GHz, making it perform admirably in most tasks.
Although the 4GB of memory is a little on the low side, Windows 7 happily runs on this, and with that processor calling the shots, the Lenovo IdeaPad S300 can handle most things thrown at it.
You can happily have multiple browser tabs open, as well as an HD movie running in the background and a word document in another window for good measure. The Cinebench benchmarking software gave the Lenovo IdeaPad S300 a lower than usual score for this kind of hardware, but the real-life results prove that numbers don't always add up.While all laptops featuring Ivy Bridge Core i5 processors come with integrated HD 4000 graphics - as does the Lenovo IdeaPad S300, naturally - Lenovo has seen fit to also add an AMD Radeon HD 7450 graphics card with 1GB of video RAM.
This deals with the more demanding tasks when you want it, while the more battery-friendly HD 4000 integrated graphics takes over when you want to conserve juice.
The Lenovo IdeaPad S300 intelligently switches between the two graphics avenues when needed, although handily you can manually adjust it if need be.It's likely that the regular mechanical drive found under the hood is contributing to this poor battery life, or it could just be down to a small capacity battery. Lenovo claims five hours from the Lenovo IdeaPad S300, which is probably not far off the truth under mixed use.
