Best Lenovo Ideapad 3 Laptops under $500: Affordable and Reliable Options for Any Need

This is actually a great laptop for most people, with some cons. Let’s see:

PRO
– Great performance. After running some benchmarks, it beats some 11th intel i7 processors. For real usage, it is very fast and responsive. No complains there. The chip is set with the max TDP allowed by AMD so performance is better than other laptops with the same configuration.
– Light and thin
– Keyboard is excellent and it is a backlit keyboard with 2 levels of light. Touchpad is also good
– System is stable
– Looks good for the price
– Fingerprint really really fast
– Comes with privacy options, like camera and microphone lock
– Windows 11 looks fresh and new
– Upgradable RAM

AVERAGE
– Battery life is just average, nothing great about it. You can setup some energy options for better battery life
– 2Gb are taken from RAM to be used for the graphics card. If you are not using the laptop for gaming, you can low that amount of ram taken by the video in the BIOS. I did that and it was easy and fast.
– No USB type C charging. I have no complains there because the charger is light and small, but it would be a nice to have
CONS
– Screen is not good, at least not when the laptop arrived. The contrast was extremly low. So I found a way to set the contrast at max, and for most tasks, it is very usable now. Not recomended for design work, could work with a extra monitor.
– The realtek audio drivers are a disaster. This is not lenovo’s fault but it should be adressed and corrected as soon as possible. I found on the web a way not to use realtek drivers and use the Windows drivers, then the problem was solved.
Overall I’m pretty happy with the laptop. Still, I’m upgrading the RAM and probably will be installing a bigger SSD.