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Don’t let the Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E545’s ($474.05 as tested) good looks fool you. Despite its solid build quality and smooth, soft-touch finish this 15-inch desktop-replacement laptop carries a very affordable price and a few features you wouldn’t expect to find on a budget laptop, including dual video outputs and a DVD burner. Its AMD A6 processor delivers more than enough power to run basic home-productivity and light office apps, but you don’t get a lot of storage capacity, and battery life is mediocre. For a few dollars less, you can get more storage and better all-around performance with our Editors’ Choice budget desktop-replacement laptop, the Dell Inspiron 17 5000 Series Non-Touch( at Amazon)(Opens in a new window).
Design and Features
The E545’s black, soft-touch rubberized finish and sturdy, dual-hinge assembly give it a solid, durable look and feel. The familiar ThinkPad badge and Lenovo logo adorn the lid, which has slightly rounded corners and a band of silver trim around its edge. At 1.3 by 14.8 by 9.6 inches (HWD) and weighing 5.4 pounds, the E545 is bigger and heavier than the Dell Inspiron 15 Non-Touch($589.00 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window), but is still portable enough to travel around the house or office.
With a maximum resolution of 1,366 by 768, the 15.6-inch screen can’t display 1080p video, but it delivers bold colors and a nicely detailed 720p picture with decent viewing angles. The display’s matte coating is non-reflective, too. The spacious keyboard features the same slightly curved keys used on the Lenovo Z40, and they, too, are responsive and comfortable to type on. Fans of the older ThinkPad models will be happy to know that the E545 offers a Trackpoint pointer stick and buttons in addition to a 3.5-by-2.5-inch clickpad. The clickpad’s textured surface provides just enough friction to ensure accurate cursor control and easy gesturing.
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Dell Inspiron 17 5000 Series Non-Touch
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Dell Inspiron 15 Non-Touch (3531)
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The left side of the E545 holds three USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI video output, and a VGA video output. Over on the right side is a tray-loading DVD multidrive, a headphone jack, a LAN port, and a USB 2.0 port with sleep-and-charge capability. Embedded options include Wi-Fi b/g/n, a 4-in-1 card reader, and a 720p webcam. The E545 comes with a 320GB hard drive, which is small compared with the 500GB drives included with the Dell Inspiron 15 Non Touch and Inspiron 17 Non Touch laptops. In addition to Windows 8, it has trial versions of Norton Internet Security and Microsoft Office 365, as well as PowerDVD Mobile, eBay, Zinio, and Skype apps. The E545 comes with a one-year warranty.
Performance
The E545 uses AMD’s A6-5350M, a dual-core processor with clock speeds of 2.9 to 3.5GHz and an integrated Radeon HD 8450 GPU. Combined with 4GB of DDR3 memory, it turned in a respectable score of 1,777 on the PCMark 8 Work Conventional test, beating out the Dell Inspiron 15 Non Touch (1,554) and the Lenovo G40 (1,581), both of which are Celeron-based laptops. However, it couldn’t keep pace with the Pentium-powered Dell 17 Non-Touch (2,097). It also topped both of the Celeron laptops on the Handbrake encoding and Photoshop tests.
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Gaming performance is similar to what we saw from systems equipped with the Intel HD Graphics solution; the best the E545 could muster was an unplayable 5 frames per second on the medium-quality Valley test. The E545’s 48-watt battery lasted just 4 hours 10 minutes on our battery rundown test, which puts it in last place among the competition. The Lenovo G40 (5:56) and the Dell Inspiron 15 Non-Touch (6:19) lasted around two hours longer, and the Dell Inspiron 17 (5:20) lasted more than an hour longer, which is impressive, given its 17.3-inch screen.
Conclusion
The Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E545 brings a premium look and feel without a premium price. Its AMD A6 processor is well-suited to running basic home office and light multimedia apps, but don’t count on its Radeon GPU to run graphics-heavy games smoothly. It would be nice if the E545’s screen ran at 1,920-by-1,080, but that’s a rare feature for a budget laptop. That said, longer battery life and a 500GB hard drive (rather than the included 320GB drive) are reasonable requests. The Dell Inspiron 17 5000 Series Non Touch comes with a 500GB drive and has a larger display with a higher resolution. It also offers better performance and is around $25 less expensive than the E545, which is why it remains our Editors’ Choice budget desktop-replacement laptop.
3.5
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The Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E545 is a well-built desktop-replacement laptop that delivers solid entry-level performance for less than $500.
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Source link : https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/lenovo-thinkpad-edge-e545