originally this was going to be a fairly standard overview of the lenovo flex 14
two in one sponsored by lenovo thanks by the way and that would have been fine
because it's a really decent little piece of kit especially for just 550
bucks on amazon but then something unexpected happened our test results
came back and the little amd ryzen
processor in this thing absolutely shreds like after the first round we
just assumed that maybe windows updates were running in the background on our
intel comparison machine or something but no the ryzen 5 3500u looks like it
could potentially change the budget thin and light notebook landscape so let's
take a look at how it stacks up against its closest rival the intel core i5
8250u featuring of course the flex 14
two in one from our sponsor lenovo
now before you do anything with a flex 14 make sure it's up to date these ryzen
mobile processors are still pretty new and the last bios and chipset update
gave us i kid you not a 100 increase in
single threaded performance there seemed to be an issue where the
processor wasn't boosting except in multi-threaded tests so unsurprisingly
this fix made the flex 14 201 feel way
snappier now multi-threaded land is typically where ryzen shines but they
usually have the advantage of bringing more cores to the fight at a given price
point so we thought that four cores versus 4 cores might not be such an easy
victory we were wrong in blender or cinebench
the ryzen 5 3500u pulls out a head of the core i5 in every test by over 10
meaning that if you want to get better performance on your thin light machine
if you need to use it for photo editing video encoding or rendering here and
there you'll be choosing ryzen in cinebench single threaded intel does put
up a better fight hoping dearly that it can still hold on to this crown
which it did by a whole one point
come on team blue you're gonna have to do better than that and in some cases
they actually did in pc mark 10 intel pulls out their first convincing victory
with a 13 higher overall score in our tests which at first might seem like a
pretty solid win for team blue given that these are the kinds of tasks that
you'll be performing all the time like loading a word document opening a new
browser tab or filling out data in excel these are tasks that you really want to
feel snappy but the interesting thing is that our intel cpu reported consuming up
to 40 watts of power on occasion while our amd chip never broke 20. now i don't
want to say for sure that this will result in better battery life sometimes
getting a task done quickly with a nice jolt of power is more efficient overall
than taking longer and using less power but given that the flex 14 21 is rated
for eight hours of use on just a 43 watt hour battery it seems like going team
red worked out pretty well for them in this design
now it's time to test out the integrated gpu the vega 8 graphics processor in our
flex 14 21 promises to leave intel's onboard graphics in the dust to which i
will say it darn well better given that it steals
two gigs of your system memory well that
believe it or not is where yet another team red advantage comes into play
lenovo has an intel version that's similar to this device but at a higher
price and with 8 gigs versus 12 gigs of
ram so we actually still come out up on
the deal with 10 gigs of usable memory here back to the performance then those
8 graphics cores handle games at well ok
it's mostly low settings or maybe medium high if it's an older title so
it's not an amazing experience or anything but hey at least there is an
experience the 3500u delivers a crushing
40 improvement over the i5 8250 u on the
intel chip you're looking at ultra low to unplayable frame rates for new games
maybe low settings for older games and in most situations you're just not
gaming so yeah i mean if you plan on primarily gaming the flex 14 two in one
probably won't make your short list but if you want something that's super
portable and you want to be able to knock out a casual game of rocket league
while you're on the go hey at least you've got the option the final knockout
punch for the 3500u is actually something i just alluded to the price
the flex 14 21 sporting the ryzen 5 3500u
is 90 dollars less than the flex 14 two
in one with the i5 8250u now of course
amd's dominance in this regard probably won't last forever 10th gen intel chips
are making their way to the market and they do look rather promising with a big
boost especially in graphics performance but for the time being they've mostly
been featured in high-end notebooks so in the here and now then what the 3500u
and the flex 14 2-1 with it bring to the table that is so special is that they
hit that magical point of good enough performance for most people
at a price point that would have been difficult or impossible to hit before
without a deep discount or buying something second hand which i guess
brings us nicely to the flex 14 two-in-one a laptop that perfectly hits
good enough want a super stiff magnesium chassis
well you can get a thinkpad for that but the plastic chassis on the flex still
has a solid feel to it that i can respect as for i o with amd and at this
price point you're not getting any fancy thunderbolt 3 ports to plug all your
daisy change dongles into but it's good enough that that shouldn't matter two
usba's a type-c full-size hdmi along
with headphones and an sd card reader is about all you can expect in a thin and
light these days but one annoyance here is that when you store the included pen
it does make both of your type-a ports inaccessible and it makes the power
button hard to press but okay glass half full here at least
you're getting a pen included unlike on the intel model
and it's pretty decent too you can flip the flex 14 two and one over into tablet
mode for a pretty good note-taking experience or you can throw it into tent
mode for marking up some changes in a powerpoint or peck even doing some light
photo editing i wouldn't trust this panel to do color critical work but it's
1080p ips with touch so it hits that
good enough mark and that's something that only hit even the thousand dollar
price point a couple of years ago there are also a number of nice to have
features like the privacy shutter to easily disable the webcam and quick
charge so you can get 80 of your battery in just an hour so
overall then thank you amd intel has been quite good actually
at advancing the laptop market forward in the high-end segment these last
couple of years but it's really nice to see the budget segment finally getting
some real love too and again thanks to lenovo for sponsoring this video and
providing their flex 14 two and one for our mobile lightweight showdown today
so thanks for watching guys hope you enjoyed this video
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