For years, Lenovo has been one of the brand in the market who built a name for itself to manufacture high-end performance at a great price range. Lenovo mainly targets those peoples who look for a good performance laptop under a concise budget. Lenovo Ideapad 530S is one of its kind who follows this trend.
Lenovo Ideapad was launched back in June 2018 and for that time it has been one of the premium laptops from Lenovo having good specifications and performance. It has a lightweight design weighing just 1.5Kg. It is a great match for students as well as for a person with daily office works as it carries good specifications with a dedicated Nvidia GPU just at Rs 80,000. But what about its performance after using it a couple of months? Is it really a reliable laptop after a few months of usage? We will review it today to find out!
Design and Display
Lenovo Ideapad looks like a premium laptop as it has a very slim design with just 16.4mm in thickness. Also, it comes with an aluminum body finish which doesn’t easily attracts smudges and making it easier to keep it clean. However, it has poor build quality as far as at this price range where you get some tough laptops. It comes in three different color options – Mineral Grey, Copper, Liquid Blue, and Onyx Black. Overall, the edges around the lid, trackpad, and fingerprint scanner are curvy and smooth.
Apart from this, Lenovo has made good use of the spaces around the deck and is loaded with different connectivity ports including a charging port, HDMI, Gen 1 USB Type-C (USB 3.1) port, two USB 3.0 ports, a headphone/ microphone combo socket, a full-sized SD card slot. At last, there’s a Novo pinhole button to activate Lenovo’s software recovery tool. In addition to the connectivity ports, there’s a couple of LED lights situated on the side for power and charging status. Below the hood, the stereo speakers are placed which delivers good sounds.
Furthermore, Lenovo has packed this laptop with a well-furnished keyboard with backlit keys and comfortable key spacing. It works great after months of usage with almost no sign of malfunction. There’s also a fingerprint scanner placed just right-down the keyboard. However, after a couple of months, the fingerprint scanner works only once or so in a while. However, the most frustrating thing which we came across in this laptop is its trackpad. For the initial periods it works great but after a couple of months of usage it started creating problems and didn’t perform well.
As for its display is concerned, the display of Lenovo Ideapad 530S has a narrow bezel on three out of four sides. At the top of the display, there placed an HD Webcam for video calling. It features a 14-inch FullHD IPS display with a good contrast making every single small icon on the display look vibrant and sharp. However, the brightness of the screen is not satisfactory and can be improved. Meanwhile, the lid can be folded up to 180-degrees to let you adjust in your comfortable angle.
Specifications and Software
As mentioned above, this Ideapad 530S is one among the premium laptops by Lenovo and so it packs high-end specifications. The Ideapad 530S comes with a quad-core, multi-threaded Intel Core i5-8250U CPU which is coupled with an Nvidia GeForce MX150 GPU with 2GB of dedicated GDDR5 memory. In addition, it comes with 8GB of DDR4 RAM and a 512GB PCIe SSD for smooth and blazing performance. It has only one RAM stick which means you can expand its RAM anymore. Apart from this, this laptop has Wi-Fi 802.11ac with 2×2 MIMO antennas, Bluetooth 4.1, and a 4-cell battery.
At the software end, Ideapad 530S ships with Windows 10 Home along with some pre-installed apps from Microsoft as well as from Lenovo. Also, You also get a full license for Microsoft Office Home and Student 2016 and a trial version of McAfee Livesafe.
Performance and Battery Life
As this is a long term review of Lenovo Ideapad 530S, we will focus not on its initial condition. We have used this Ideapad 530S as our primary for a couple of months and really loved its compact size and performance. It delivered great performance even after some heavy usage. The Ideapad 530S doesn’t get too hot with regular use and runs pretty silently too.
The Ideapad 530S uses a Samsung PCIe SSD, which delivers very good read and write bandwidth. For office purpose, its a great laptop which delivers enough performance to carry out all your daily works efficiently. While for gamers, Lenovo has packed this laptop with Nvidia GeForce MX150 GPU with 2GB of dedicated GDDR5 memory.
In addition, it has 8GB of DDR4 RAM which makes this laptop easily handle some high-end games. We have played the Rise of the Tomb Raider, we were able to average above 30fps at the Medium and High graphics settings. In this long time span, we have tried playing a couple of more games on this laptop and got no significant performance issues in it.
In the power department, Ideapad 530S carries 4-cell Lithium-Ion battery which company claims to deliver 8 hours of battery life but realistically, it only manages to deliver 3-4 hours of backup of months of usage and about 5-hours of backup at the initial stage. Our usage mainly involved using Chrome, a couple of hours of YouTube and some hours of typing on MS Word. It really doesn’t last for a day on continuous usage. However, it comes with fast charging support which delivers hours of runtime on 15-minutes of charging in a sleep time which is quite good.
Verdict
The Lenovo Ideapad is one of the best premium laptops by Lenovo which features great performance and a slim body. However, after a couple of months of usage, it really doesn’t prove to be reliable though as claimed by the company. However, if you are looking for normal usage laptops for daily usage with a good performance, you can go for it.
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Talha Ali is your tech generalist, covering a wide spectrum of topics within the ever-evolving world of technology. With a curiosity for the latest innovations, industry trends, and breakthroughs. Whether it’s hardware, software, emerging technologies, or the intersection of tech with daily life, Talha’s articles provide readers with a well-rounded perspective on the dynamic landscape of the tech industry.
