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originally this was going to be a fairly standard overview of the lenovo flex 14

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two in one sponsored by lenovo thanks by the way and that would have been fine

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because it's a really decent little piece of kit especially for just 550

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bucks on amazon but then something unexpected happened our test results

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came back and the little amd ryzen

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processor in this thing absolutely shreds like after the first round we

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just assumed that maybe windows updates were running in the background on our

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intel comparison machine or something but no the ryzen 5 3500u looks like it

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could potentially change the budget thin and light notebook landscape so let's

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take a look at how it stacks up against its closest rival the intel core i5

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8250u featuring of course the flex 14

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two in one from our sponsor lenovo

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now before you do anything with a flex 14 make sure it's up to date these ryzen

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mobile processors are still pretty new and the last bios and chipset update

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gave us i kid you not a 100 increase in

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single threaded performance there seemed to be an issue where the

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processor wasn't boosting except in multi-threaded tests so unsurprisingly

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this fix made the flex 14 201 feel way

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snappier now multi-threaded land is typically where ryzen shines but they

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usually have the advantage of bringing more cores to the fight at a given price

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point so we thought that four cores versus 4 cores might not be such an easy

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victory we were wrong in blender or cinebench

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the ryzen 5 3500u pulls out a head of the core i5 in every test by over 10

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meaning that if you want to get better performance on your thin light machine

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if you need to use it for photo editing video encoding or rendering here and

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there you'll be choosing ryzen in cinebench single threaded intel does put

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up a better fight hoping dearly that it can still hold on to this crown

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which it did by a whole one point

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come on team blue you're gonna have to do better than that and in some cases

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they actually did in pc mark 10 intel pulls out their first convincing victory

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with a 13 higher overall score in our tests which at first might seem like a

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pretty solid win for team blue given that these are the kinds of tasks that

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you'll be performing all the time like loading a word document opening a new

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browser tab or filling out data in excel these are tasks that you really want to

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feel snappy but the interesting thing is that our intel cpu reported consuming up

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to 40 watts of power on occasion while our amd chip never broke 20. now i don't

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want to say for sure that this will result in better battery life sometimes

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getting a task done quickly with a nice jolt of power is more efficient overall

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than taking longer and using less power but given that the flex 14 21 is rated

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for eight hours of use on just a 43 watt hour battery it seems like going team

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red worked out pretty well for them in this design

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now it's time to test out the integrated gpu the vega 8 graphics processor in our

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flex 14 21 promises to leave intel's onboard graphics in the dust to which i

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will say it darn well better given that it steals

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two gigs of your system memory well that

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believe it or not is where yet another team red advantage comes into play

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lenovo has an intel version that's similar to this device but at a higher

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price and with 8 gigs versus 12 gigs of

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ram so we actually still come out up on

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the deal with 10 gigs of usable memory here back to the performance then those

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8 graphics cores handle games at well ok

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it's mostly low settings or maybe medium high if it's an older title so

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it's not an amazing experience or anything but hey at least there is an

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experience the 3500u delivers a crushing

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40 improvement over the i5 8250 u on the

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intel chip you're looking at ultra low to unplayable frame rates for new games

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maybe low settings for older games and in most situations you're just not

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gaming so yeah i mean if you plan on primarily gaming the flex 14 two in one

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probably won't make your short list but if you want something that's super

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portable and you want to be able to knock out a casual game of rocket league

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while you're on the go hey at least you've got the option the final knockout

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punch for the 3500u is actually something i just alluded to the price

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the flex 14 21 sporting the ryzen 5 3500u

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is 90 dollars less than the flex 14 two

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in one with the i5 8250u now of course

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amd's dominance in this regard probably won't last forever 10th gen intel chips

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are making their way to the market and they do look rather promising with a big

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boost especially in graphics performance but for the time being they've mostly

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been featured in high-end notebooks so in the here and now then what the 3500u

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and the flex 14 2-1 with it bring to the table that is so special is that they

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hit that magical point of good enough performance for most people

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at a price point that would have been difficult or impossible to hit before

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without a deep discount or buying something second hand which i guess

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brings us nicely to the flex 14 two-in-one a laptop that perfectly hits

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good enough want a super stiff magnesium chassis

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well you can get a thinkpad for that but the plastic chassis on the flex still

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has a solid feel to it that i can respect as for i o with amd and at this

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price point you're not getting any fancy thunderbolt 3 ports to plug all your

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daisy change dongles into but it's good enough that that shouldn't matter two

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usba's a type-c full-size hdmi along

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with headphones and an sd card reader is about all you can expect in a thin and

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light these days but one annoyance here is that when you store the included pen

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it does make both of your type-a ports inaccessible and it makes the power

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button hard to press but okay glass half full here at least

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you're getting a pen included unlike on the intel model

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and it's pretty decent too you can flip the flex 14 two and one over into tablet

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mode for a pretty good note-taking experience or you can throw it into tent

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mode for marking up some changes in a powerpoint or peck even doing some light

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photo editing i wouldn't trust this panel to do color critical work but it's

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1080p ips with touch so it hits that

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good enough mark and that's something that only hit even the thousand dollar

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price point a couple of years ago there are also a number of nice to have

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features like the privacy shutter to easily disable the webcam and quick

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charge so you can get 80 of your battery in just an hour so

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overall then thank you amd intel has been quite good actually

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at advancing the laptop market forward in the high-end segment these last

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couple of years but it's really nice to see the budget segment finally getting

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some real love too and again thanks to lenovo for sponsoring this video and

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providing their flex 14 two and one for our mobile lightweight showdown today

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so thanks for watching guys hope you enjoyed this video

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you thought i wasn't gonna do it didn't you lttstore.com