Monday, April 25, 2011

Lenovo ThinkPad X120e laptop review

Lenovo calls its ThinkPad X120e an ultraportable--and its new AMD Fusion CPU certainly endows the laptop with significantly better overall performance than netbooks have accomplished from the past. But it's nowhere close to as fast since the regular Intel Core processor-based ultraportable. Lenovo has accomplished a impressive job supplying the keyboard a full-size experience, but the 1366 by 768, eleven.6-inch display suffers compared to the 12- and 13-inch displays of other ultraportable laptops. Offered the option amongst characterizing the X120e as an underpowered ultraportable or like a great netbook, I am heading using the latter.

Lenovo is king with the keyboard, as well as the X120e has the most effective netbook keyboard ever--nothing else comes close. The experience is magnificent, with none with the finger scrunching widespread to your breed. The touchpad is cozy and completely responsive, and old-school Lenovo enthusiasts will probably be content to learn that the business consists of a TrackPoint eraserhead cursor handle.

The ThinkPad X120e comes in a variety of configurations beginning at $399 for an E-250 Fusion CPU, 2GB of memory, plus a 250GB, 5400-rpm hard generate. Our X120e check system came outfitted with the somewhat quicker E-350 CPU, 4GB of memory, plus a 300GB, 7200-rpm difficult drive. These burlier elements carried the X120e to a WorldBench six score of 57--a far greater mark than standard netbooks tend to acquire, but reduced than a common pricier ultraportable would get. The more powerful configuration of our assessment unit ratcheted up the cost to $650--pretty steep for a netbook.

Video performance using the Fusion CPU/GPU ranges from excellent to mediocre. With codecs supported by the graphics hardware (Radeon Hd 6310), it delivers sleek playback of 1080p video. With codecs dealt with through the CPU alone, though, it's limited to 720p, and also then playback often isn't as smooth when you may possibly like. Gaming frame rates approached playable, falling just shy of thirty fps in Unreal Tournament at 800 by 600 at medium resolution. Which is a tantalizing near-miss, but it really is even now a skip. Simpler games will fare far better.

The X120e carries the netbook-standard three USB 2.0 ports, but business customers will appreciate that Lenovo incorporates the two VGA and HDMI video clip outputs. The ethernet supports gigabits speeds, you get Bluetooth on board, and you can decide on between b/g/n and a/b/g/n wireless.

The unit is really a tad more substantial than the common netbook at 11.one inches wide, by 7.45 inches deep (add about 0.seventy five inch for your six-cell battery), and 1.16 inches thick. It's also somewhat heavier at two.93 pounds and three.31 lbs (when equipped with a three-cell or perhaps a six-cell battery, respectively). Our check configuration's six-cell battery powered the unit for virtually five.five hours--impressively prolonged, thinking about the performance.

The system we tested arrived loaded with Windows seven Specialist, however you may possibly pick Home Top quality 32-bit or 64-bit, in the event you prefer. Office 2010 Starter is on board, and Norton World wide web Security is available for user installation.

Lenovo's marketing preferences aside, the X120e isn't an ultraportable: Its display screen is also tiny and its overall performance is as well sluggish. We're not even positive why the company would desire to match it versus full-fledged ultraportables. However the X120e could be the best netbook heading. Although it is a little pricey, a single typing session will convince you the $450 starting up price tag for this model is more than really worth it.

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