Lenovo IdeaPad 5 / 5500U review

In this review we want to present you the new Lenovo IdeaPad 5 with a new Ryzen 5500U Mobile-APU.
The new 5500U is not a Zen 3 processor, it is still based on the „old“ Zen 2+ (like 4500U) process/uarch, but it still comes with some changes which makes it slightly better compared to its predecessor the 4500U.
In this review we will compare some of its features/options to our „Lenovo ThinkPad L15“ and „Acer Aspire 5“ laptops.

Let´s start with an overview and system Info of the laptop:

• Lenovo IdeaPad 5
• Ryzen R5 5500U (Lucienne) (6 cores / 12 threads)
• 16 GB DDR4 / 3200 MHz (22-22-22-52)
• Vega 7 / 7 CU @ 1800 MHz
• 512 GB Samsung NVME 4x
• 1x USB-C (with PD and Displayport 1.4), 2x USB-A 3.0, 1x HDMI 1.4b, sd-card-reader and an headphone jacket
• keyboard with backlight (2x options)
• Display B140HAN04.E (60Hz, non-glare display with Freesync)
• Alu-body
• Dolby Audio Stereo
• Wifi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1
• 56.5Wh battery

The biggest difference to the old 4500U is the enabled hyper-threading and the slightly bigger and also higher clocking Vega 7 (instead of the 4500U Vega 6)

The first touch of the laptop:

The laptop has an aluminum body which does not bend at all. It looks very good and is very solid. The keyboard has a good touch too and has a backlight which can be switched in 3 modes (full-light, dimmed and off). It is not as bright as our Acer Aspire 5 keyboard, but you can easily see it at day/night and it has a more blue light instead of the clear white (Acer Aspire 5).

The body is very hard to open up (still good stabilty) for maintenance/configuration, but if you are fine with the Samsung 512 GB NVME, then there is no need to open it up since the dual-channel RAM is fully onboard and can´t be expanded.

The display is a B140HAN04.E, which supports freesync with the pre-installed AMD driver (Ver. 20.40.22.01-*-Lenovo)
The viewing angle of the display is very good and it is also (for a rather „affordable“ consumer laptop) bright enough to work outside with the matte-display.

The Dolby Audio Stereo system really suprised us, the sound is very good (especially for a small 14″ laptop) and you can easily hear the difference between right/left sound.
Due to the low-profile nature of the laptop the sub/low-frequencies could be a bit better, but since this soundsystem is better than 95% of all the laptops i heared, in my opinion this won´t be a downside at all.

Game Benchmarks

Info: All tests where performed on the bios setting „intelligent cooling“!

Game (Aspire 5 vs Ideapad 5)	4500U	5500U
3dmark Firestrike (link)	2361 pts.	3006 pts.
Deus Ex MD	33,3	38,1
Rise of the Tomb Raider	42,91	49,11
Strange Brigade	30	35
The Division 2	24	34
The Witcher 3	23	28

Game infos (Windows gamemode on):
Deus Ex MD / 720p – low – DX 12
ROTR / 1080p – low – DX12
Strange Brigade / 1080p – low – DX12
The Division 2 / 1080p – low – DX12
The Witcher 3 / 1080p – low – DX11

Special and CPU benchmarks

We also made some special tests and included infos which most of our fans and user asked for (Website + Youtube)

Heatmap and batterie test

Heatmap after 15min of gaming/cinebench

Cinebench R20 – Batterymode performance test
We now show you the difference and STAPM (powerlimit) of the laptop when using the different battery-power-modes.

Energysaving	More efficiency	Better performance	High performance
1616	1654	3001	3110
6,5w	6,6w	19w	19w

Anno 1800 STAPM / battery test

Energysaving	High Performance
50,75 (22,085w max)	54,03 (25,005w max)

Workload	overall powerdraw	battery-time (55wh)
Idle	~7w	~7.40 hours
Idle (low disp.)	~4,8w	~11.30 hours
Office	~9,2w	~5.50 hours
Youtube	~14w	~3.55 hours
Gaming	~ 20w (3 games average)	~2.45 hours
Max load	~29,5w	~1.50 hours

If you don´t put the display to the maximum brightness you can easily save 1-2w powerdraw. We still show the max display-powerdraw results, since we want to show the „worst-case“.

Get the Ideapad 5 from Amazon:
Lenovo IdeaPad 5 82LM005YGE – 14″ FHD IPS, AMD Ryzen 5 5500U, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, Windows 10* (*amazon affiliate link for supporting us)

Conclusion

We were suprised to get the Ideapad 5 with the 5500U so fast and for a rather cheap price (we payed 699€ for pre-order). Since even the Acer Aspire 5 we used for daily tasks gets more and more expensive we where happy to snatch such a great deal.
The CPU upgrade of the 4500U helps a lot in big tasks, the gaming performance also raised by a good chunk (~25+%), the better mobility and more charge possibilities (Power Delivery USB-C) will let us now use the IdeaPad 5 with the 5500U as our main laptop for daily tasks and work.
It also stays silence (in normal workloads) and rather quiet (in games) as long you don´t force a hard benchmark on it.

Good job! to Lenovo to keep up the good work with the AMD Ryzen series laptops and the usefull usage of battery-modes.

Recommended Buy for Laptops in the >750€ price range for user who needs good portability, no dedicated GPU but still want to game from time to time 🙂