Some flagship 2-in-1 designs are noticeably smaller and lighter, including the 13.3-inch HP Elite Dragonfly (2.2 pounds) and the 13.4-inch Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 (2.9 pounds). Also contributing are the laptop's capacious 52WHr battery and improvements unique to Renoir chips, like a redesigned power interface with three distinct states. But these also cost much more than the Flex 5—often around $1,500 for a decently powerful configuration. If you can stretch your budget by $100 or so, it's worth checking out one of the configurations sold at Lenovo.com, which are still excellent values and may be more readily available. It’s particularly telling that the Flex 5 is nearly twice as fast as the Core i5-equipped Yoga C740 at completing the video rendering trial. The Ctrl key is located to the left of the Fn key in the lower left corner, instead of the other way around. It’s particularly telling that the Flex 5 is nearly twice as fast as the Core i5-equipped Yoga C740 at completing the video rendering trial. Audio quality from the two 2-watt stereo speakers is adequate for Skype sessions. He got his start in technology journalism by reviewing the latest hard drives, keyboards, and much more for PCMag's sister site, Computer Shopper. It Depends on the App, Apple MacBook Pro 13-Inch (M1, Late 2020), Relatively heavy for a 14-inch ultraportable. Tom is PCMag's San Francisco-based news reporter. (See how we test laptops.). While the camera lacks IR sensors for face recognition, it does come with a built-in physical privacy shutter for additional peace of mind when you’re not using it. It stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost. The Flex 5 is no gaming laptop, mind you, but you could eke out some play at the lowest settings. That means the operating system can better communicate to the Ryzen 5 exactly how much power is required for a given task. Apple MacBook Pro vs. Microsoft Surface Laptop 3: Which 13-Inch Premium Laptop Is Tops? By going up a few tenths of an inch in thickness and a few ounces in weight, you’re saving a ton of money and still getting serious computing power to get your work done. A graduate of Middlebury College, Tom also has a master's journalism degree from New York University. Instead of face recognition to log in to your Windows account, you can use the keyboard-mounted fingerprint reader to avoid cumbersome passwords. The Flex 5 is therefore our new top pick in the crowded field of midrange 2-in-1 convertible laptops. Thanks to a brand-new AMD Ryzen processor, Lenovo's IdeaPad Flex 5 14 offers an extraordinary blend of performance and value for money, making it one of the best popularly priced 2-in-1 convertibles we've tested. The Flex 5's 360-degree hinge makes it more flexible than a conventional clamshell laptop. It stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost. Integrated pens are much smaller and less comfortable for long sketching sessions, but they're much less likely to be misplaced since they’re stored and recharged in a slot that's built into the notebook. Support for the latest Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) standard is absent, but it’s not a requirement for a laptop in this price range. PCMag is obsessed with culture and tech, offering smart, spirited coverage of the products and innovations that shape our connected lives and the digital trends that keep us talking. I had to turn the screen brightness up to the maximum level to view in a daylight-lit living room. The 802.11ac standard is plenty fast enough for most home wireless environments. The Flex 5 proves it's possible to offer performance acceptable for light gaming or occasional number-crunching and multimedia editing in a laptop that costs far less than category flagships like the Dell XPS 13 or the Apple MacBook Pro. By going up a few tenths of an inch in thickness and a few ounces in weight, you’re saving a ton of money and still getting serious computing power to get your work done. Whatever the case may be, it’s no joy when the camera decides it has an issue and won’t work properly. The Flex 5 is therefore our new top pick in the crowded field of midrange 2-in-1 convertible laptops. This $600 2-in-1 convertible laptop offers better computing performance than many competitors that cost more than twice as much. The pen, an optional extra, offers 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity and includes two customizable buttons. Other than the rather heavy chassis, the Flex 5’s only other noteworthy flaw is its screen, which suffers from a relatively dim backlight rated for just 250 nits of brightness. The Flex 5’s chassis may be on the chunky side, but it's not unattractive. Lenovo pioneered the 2-in-1 convertible laptop concept, and it offers a handful of such laptop models at all price ranges. It’s a timed test, and lower results are better. VIEW FLEX SERIES Lenovo uses a unique soft-touch plastic coating on the sides and the keyboard deck, which makes the laptop pleasing to hold. Lenovo pioneered the 2-in-1 convertible laptop concept, and it offers a handful of such laptop models at all price ranges. Side-mounted power buttons are easier to use when the laptop is propped up like an easel, but be careful not to accidentally press the button when you grasp the Flex 5 on its sides. In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video (the open-source Blender demo movie Tears of Steel) to a 1080p MP4 file. That rough doubling of scores, on both 3DMark tests, between the Flex 5 and the rest of this competitive field parallels what we saw on Superposition. The results of the 3DMark test confirm this. 2020 Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 14" FHD Full HD 1080p IPS 2-in-1 Touch Business Laptop + Active Pen (AMD 6-Core Ryzen 5 4500U, 16GB DDR4 RAM, 1TB PCIe SSD) Backlit, Windows 10 … A graduate of Middlebury College, Tom also has a master's journalism degree from New York University. Lenovo uses a unique soft-touch plastic coating on the sides and the keyboard deck, which makes the laptop pleasing to hold. While the Flex 5's 14-inch display could be brighter and it could stand to lose a few ounces, it's nevertheless a screaming-good value and an excellent mainstream laptop. The Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 14 punches far above its weight. Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video-editing trial, another tough, threaded workout that's highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads. It's a great leap forward for mobile computing. That's also true in content creation benchmarks like rendering a 3D image in Maxon’s Cinebench, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. For even more power, you can configure a Flex 5 with an eight-core Ryzen 7 4700U. The Flex 5’s chassis may be on the chunky side, but it's not unattractive. He got his start in technology journalism by reviewing the latest hard drives, keyboards, and much more for PCMag's sister site, Computer Shopper. We review products independently, but we may earn affiliate commissions from buying links on this page. This $600 2-in-1 convertible laptop offers better computing performance than many competitors that cost more than twice as much. This makes it a full-fledged digital stylus, unlike the integrated digital pens included with premium 2-in-1s like the Lenovo Yoga C940 and the Samsung Galaxy Book Flex. Above the Flex 5’s screen, there's an HD webcam with a fixed-focus lens that shoots 720p video. The right edge also hosts a full-size SD card reader and the Flex 5's power button. Now, let's be clear: The Flex 5's dim screen likely helps it achieve this excellent result, since brighter pixels consume more power. The Flex 5 lasted for more than 16 hours in our video rundown test, which involves looping a locally stored 720p video at 50 percent screen brightness with airplane mode turned on. You shouldn’t expect a $600 ultraportable laptop to have the graphics capabilities of a $2,000 gaming rig, nor the content creation capabilities of a $3,000 mobile workstation. With six dedicated processor cores (multi-threading is not possible on this chip's cores), the Ryzen 5 4500U benchmarks similarly to many Intel Core i7 CPUs in more expensive laptops. On the right edge, there are two USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A ports, a rarity on ultraportable laptops these days, and handy for connecting one of the vast number of devices that haven't yet moved to USB-C. The Graphite Gray color scheme of our review unit is also intriguing, making the laptop darker and moodier-looking than the mostly silver schemes of other Lenovo ultraportables. PCMag is obsessed with culture and tech, offering smart, spirited coverage of the products and innovations that shape our connected lives and the digital trends that keep us talking. With up to 10 th Gen Intel ® Core™ i7 or AMD Ryzen™ 7 processors and outstanding battery life, IdeaPad Flex laptops give you the power and confidence to achieve more, quickly and easily. If you'd rather stick with a lighter color, the Flex 5 is also available in Platinum Gray.
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