Lenovo Z50-75 review Part 1 Physical Tour

 

The Z50-75 weighs just 2.2KG. The screen is a 1920x1080p glossy TN panel with really really bad color depth and reproduction. Simple put the blue channel is massively exaggerated on this screen this results in things that should be a pale green/yellow ending up light blue. The screen is connected to the body with 2 thin but extremely stiff hinges. The battery is a small 4 cell 2650mAh. The left hand IO is composed of 1 USB 2.0, 1 USB 3.0, 1 HDMI out, 1 RJ45 port and a VGA port. The right hand IO is 1 USB 2.0, full size SD card slot, 4 pole 3.5mm jack and an optical drive. The CPU is a FX 7500 that runs 2.1Ghz stock and 2.8Ghz Turbo. The integrated GPU has 384 shaders and shares the CPU dual DDR3 dual channel memory connection so it does benefit from having 2 sticks of RAM. The dedicated GPU is an R7 M260 with 384 shaders cores and a 64bit bus hooked up to 2GB of 900mhz DDR3 VRAM.

The keyboard is mostly OK being a scissor switch based design. The only real problem is the mess that Lenovo made of the right hand side of the keyboard.
I'm OK with the shape of the enter key since my last laptop had the same. However the decision to cram the backslash between the quotation mark and enter key has made it really difficult for me to hit either of them since I'm not used to the position.


 The bottom of the laptop is covered in holes for ventilation. The holes in the top right of this photo feed the single blower fan that cools the GPU and CPU. The bottom cover is attached with just 3 Philips screws.

Here's what you'll see when you open up the bottom. From here you can remove the optical drive
Swap out the HDD change the WiFi card(however Lenovo has a BIOS block on some WiFi cards) and swap out the RAM. My one came with 1 4GB stick because I bought the cheapest variation of the Z50-75 I could find.



This wouldn't be AHOC if I didn't look at cooling.
The cooler is composed of 1 blower fan 1 flattened heatpipe an aluminum fin array 2 copper contact plates for the GPU and CPU and an aluminum contact plate for the GPUs VRAM. It keeps the CPU and GPU bellow 80C when gaming or doing CPU intensive tasks as long as the intake holes for the fan aren't blocked up. It operates between 35 and 47C° with light usage(interner+music+dogecoin wallet) on batter power.

The default harddrive that the Z50-75 ships with is a 1TB Seagate SSHD that has 8GB of SSD cache. It has a rated power draw of 2.75W and is located directly below the right hand wrist rest and runs warmer than the top right corner of the keyboard where the heatsink is when idle and under load.

The Laptop has stereo sound provided by 2 of these
speakers. They are tiny and bassless but can get very very loud. The 4 pole 3.5mm out sounds pretty good and can get painfully loud with my Steelseries Siberia V3s.

I decided that publishing 1 massive laptop review was pointless. This is the objective part of my review once I get to performance and usage Lenovo will not be happy.

Hooray! 5K views

Today the blog reached 5,000 views so here is a quick tip as thanks.
If you have a low power laptop underclocking the monitor using Custom Resolution Utility can save a ton of battery life. I have my Lenovo's screen running at 30hz and it really boosts my battery life because the screen is one of the most power hungry parts of this laptop.

BTW I draw a really dark comic over at http://nutterdome.blogspot.cz/.

Lenovo Z50-75 Intro:SSDs in cheap laptops are stupid

Yesterday I got my new Lenovo Z50-75 laptop without an operating system for 11200czk with shipping and 21% VAT. Hardware wise it's pretty good using an AMD FX7500 APU with a base clock of 2.1Ghz 4 cores and a max turbo of 3.3Ghz. The integrated GPU has 384 stream processor clocked at a peak of 533mhz. The main GPU is also has 384 cores but is clocked at ~800mhz. As of right now it only has 4GB of RAM clocked at 1600mhz but I plan to upgrade to something faster soon. The laptop it's self is made of very soft plastic but at this price point I don't mind. The keyboard is rather flexible due to this however this somewhat of a good thing because it adds extra cushioning to the keys. The only major issue I have with the keyboard is that Lenovo gave it a tall enter key and ended up wreaking the layout of the key to the left of it. So I mess up apostrophes and slashes but even with that I prefer this keyboard to the one on my mac book pro.
Now lets get to the bad stuff.
The screen is freaking awful. It's a TN as far as I can tell with good horizontal angles and an OK vertical but fails epically in the color department with very obvious gradient stepping and washed out colors. The good thing about the screen is that it's 1080p so while colors will make your eyes bleed it's high PPI and contrast make text look excellent. The LED backlight is very very strong when on it's maximum setting and in my opinion doesn't go low enough even though it has 15 different brightness levels.
Software support for this laptop is iffy since I still haven't managed to install the ELAN/Synaptic touch-pad driver and so have to deal with the stupid tap to click that is enabled form the get go.
My final issue with the laptop is the Seagate SSHDD. It manages to pull 2x the amount of power at max and minimum load of a regular mechanical Western Digital Blue HDD while doing very little for performance. Which is bad for 2 reasons the first is that it's wasting power and the second is that the SSHDD is right under my right wrist and as such is really really annoying because it creates a hotspot through the plastic casing above it. The only reason why this stupid thing is in this laptop is because it's hip to shove SSDs into everything these days.

You can expect a full review in about a month so I get some usage out of the laptop and testing.