Lenovo IdeaPad 3 14: Quiet, Affordable Office Notebook

If you want a cheap laptop, you have to choose between a lot of different options. When you’re looking at a lot of machines that look pretty much the same, it’s hard to find a good balance between a tight budget and a set of features that mostly includes the basics.

So, when you find a great laptop for a low price like the Lenovo IdeaPad 314 ($1,299), it’s a nice break. At $519, it’s on the higher end of the budget range, but this 14-inch laptop has just about everything you’d want in a laptop in this price range. It also has great performance and some unexpected luxuries for the price. Our latest Editors’ Choice award for cheap Windows laptops goes to this one.

Modern features at low prices -Lenovo IdeaPad 3 14

The 14-inch full HD screen is sandwiched between four thin bezels that give the screen a lot of room. The bezels aren’t as thin as those on the XPG Xenia 14, for example, but they still look very modern. The IdeaPad 314 also has an Eye Care mode that changes the color temperature of your screen to filter out blue light. This can help you feel less tired after using your computer for a long time. A 720p webcam with a privacy shutter is tucked away at the top of the screen.

When it comes to low-cost laptops, the IdeaPad 3 14 is one of the best I’ve used. The keyboard is easy to use and gives just enough feedback when you press a key. The touchpad works well, and the power button even has a fingerprint reader built in. The speakers, which are under the touchpad, aren’t very good. They don’t make a lot of noise and sound hollow. You should use headphones or an external speaker instead.

PROS Of Lenovo IdeaPad 3 14

• Low price and you can choose some colors.
• Optional fingerprint reader
• Decent input devices
• Has an SD card reader and can be upgraded in a good way.
• Doesn’t use PWM to change the brightness (Innolux N140BGA-EA4).

CONS of Lenovo IdeaPad 3 14

•  No Type-C USB port
• All plastic has a surface that shows fingerprints.

How things look!

The Lenovo Ideapad 3 (14) has a WXGA TN screen made by Innolux called N140BGA-EA4 (CMN14C3). It is 14.0 inches across the diagonal (35.56 cm). The aspect ratio of the screen is 16:9, and the resolution is 1366 x 768, which means that there are 112 PPI of pixels per inch. The distance between each pixel is 0.227 mm. When seen from more than 80 cm away, the screen can be called a “Retina.”

From this distance, the average person’s eye can’t tell the pixels apart anymore. In the middle of the screen, the maximum measured brightness is 200 nits (cd/m2), and the average brightness across the surface is 196 nits (cd/m2), with a maximum difference of 19% in the lower right corner (which is inappropriate). The average correlating colour temperature for a white screen at full brightness is 6930K, which is a little cooler than the best temperature for sRGB, which is 6500K.

Good Battery, Not-So-Great Screen

To test the battery life of a laptop, we first charge it to 100%. Then, we play a locally stored copy of the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel on a loop at 50% brightness and 100% volume, along with a few other tweaks to make sure that all devices get the same accurate results. We’ll play the movie from a drive if the laptop doesn’t have enough space to store a copy. We also turned the laptop’s mode to “Airplane.”

The IdeaPad 3-14 did well. After 10 hours and 32 minutes, it ran out of power. Even though they tried hard, the Asus VivoBook S14, the HP Pavilion x360 15, and the Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 13 are still better. The last test in our benchmark gauntlet is how bright and colorful the screen is. Using Datacolor’s SpyderX Elite calibrator and its software tools, we measured display performance, brightness output levels, and gamut settings for the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 standards, which are the three most important color spaces for laptop users.

A Budget Baron

A cheap laptop can’t be perfect, but even though the Lenovo IdeaPad 314 is cheap, it feels like a high-end device. The IdeaPad 3 is better than its competitors because it works quickly, is well-built, and has features like a USB-C port, Wi-Fi 6, and a fingerprint scanner. Even though it has some of the usual problems with cheap laptops, like boring speakers and a dull screen, the IdeaPad 3 14 is still worth buying and is one of the best cheap notebooks you can buy. It’s our new Editors’ Choice for laptops in this price range.

FAQs

Is it worth it to buy the Lenovo IdeaPad 314?

At $450, the Lenovo IdeaPad 3 14 laptop is a great deal and a must-buy. This laptop is very light, easy to carry, quick, and strong.

Is the IdeaPad a good laptop for a first-time buyer?

IdeaPad Slim 3i (14, Intel) You shouldn’t be slowed down by a cheap laptop. So, we made the 35.56-inch (14) IdeaPad 3 with cutting-edge 10th Gen Intel® CoreTM processors and powerful memory and storage options. This is a great choice for everyday use because it has thoughtful features like a physical shutter for the webcam.

Conclusion

The Lenovo IdeaPad 3 14 is an excellent low-cost laptop. It works well and has so many modern features that you almost forget it costs less than $600.