Review Lenovo IdeaPad Pro 5i review: Meteor Lake dazzles on performance and endurance

[Admin]

Lenovo’s IdeaPad Pro 5i isn’t perfect, but it is a well-rounded entry in the ultraportable space.

Lenovo IdeaPad Pro 5i review: Meteor Lake dazzles on performance and endurance : Read more

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

Did I miss the part where the CPU has a max draw of 115w!? Hmmmm

 

[salgado18]

Let me know when they fit an 84 Wh battery inside a Ryzen notebook, and then we'll talk about endurance. It's easy to say it lasts longer when it has a bigger battery.

 

[ikjadoon]

I think the DCI-P3 and sRGB columns & data have been flipped:

 

[kaalus]

It's one ugly laptop.

 

[Bikki]

Battery test with movie loop is pretty pointless, it only test the fixed funtion video block on the cpu. Lets use something more diverse that inclues both performace score and run time. My suggestion is to run puget bench or cinebench loop, then multiply the score with run time, divided by battery wh. So we have something akin to efficiency benchmark.

 

[Prachu]

About storage upgradeability, why didn't you mention that this laptop has a second, full sized free M.2 SSD slot where you can put whatever you want?

 

[rtoaht]

Battery test with movie loop is pretty pointless, it only test the fixed funtion video block on the cpu. Lets use something more diverse that inclues both performace score and run time. My suggestion is to run puget bench or cinebench loop, then multiply the score with run time, divided by battery wh. So we have something akin to efficiency benchmark.

I understand the point you’re trying to make. But think about this. Is Cinebench loop a realistic workload for potential average users of this laptop? Nobody will use this laptop dedicated for Cinebench all day. Video playback could actually be a bit more realistic but obviously not the only thing people will use it for. Other realistic use cases could be web browsing, video editing (not rendering), editing Microsoft office apps, and playing games for battery life tests. Other than these, I personally care about battery life in sleep mode. I typically keep my laptop in sleep mode 24/7 because I always have multiple windows open and I don’t want to lose my workflow by shutting my laptop down. But not sure if others commonly do it too.

 

[ikjadoon]

Battery test with movie loop is pretty pointless, it only test the fixed funtion video block on the cpu. Lets use something more diverse that inclues both performace score and run time. My suggestion is to run puget bench or cinebench loop, then multiply the score with run time, divided by battery wh. So we have something akin to efficiency benchmark.

I understand the point you’re trying to make. But think about this. Is Cinebench loop a realistic workload for potential average users of this laptop? Nobody will use this laptop dedicated for Cinebench all day. Video playback could actually be a bit more realistic but obviously not the only thing people will use it for. Other realistic use cases could be web browsing, video editing (not rendering), editing Microsoft office apps, and playing games for battery life tests. Other than these, I personally care about battery life in sleep mode. I typically keep my laptop in sleep mode 24/7 because I always have multiple windows open and I don’t want to lose my workflow by shutting my laptop down. But not sure if others commonly do it too.

I agree here that Tom's Hardware's battery life testing is not ideal, but I might not also go too far in the other direction of Cinebench. Though I do like the idea of normalizing for battery capacity.

What I'd ideally love is similar to rtoaht:

1. On the network, have cached copies of modern websites (YouTube, news, etc.). So many benches like PCMark's battery life test use like 10kb websites made in 2002, with zero network usage to boot.
2. Run a few desktop applications (portable copies to keep versions the same between reviews): office, Teams / Zoom, and then some file transfers (USB, upload online, whatever).
3. Loop that until it dies at some X brightness & Z volume.

The key notes:

1. Laptop battery life is not just the CPU, but the entire system: display, storage, RAM, CPU, GPU, fans, etc. So the test should be broad, not one thing like video viewing (TH today) nor 3D rendering (Cinebench)
2. We need to control a lot of software versions: the OS is tough, but everything else should be doable.
3. Web usage is so critical to thin and light laptop battery life. Without honest to goodness web usage, I just can't trust any battery life review anymore.