Lenovo IdeaPad Z580 - a universal soldier from the Middle Kingdom
If you need a laptop for a fairly wide range of needs, the IdeaPad Z580 is the perfect fit. This device has an outstanding design and excellent performance for quite reasonable cash. As a result, Lenovo IdeaPad Z580 is suitable for study and work, as well as for games and other entertainment.
The Lenovo IdeaPad Z580 is a great example of how you can combine performance, functionality and a fairly democratic price tag. Our test model has an NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M graphics card and an Intel Core i5-3210M processor at its disposal, but there are many other combinations, ranging from Intel Core i3 to Intel Core i7.
Specifications
CPU: Intel Core i5-3210M 2500 MHz
RAM: 6 GB DDR3 1600 MHz
Data storage: 1 TB HDD 7200 rpm SATA II
Display: 15.6 "1366x768 WXGA LED, glossy
Video card: Intel HD Graphics 4000, NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M
Drive unit: DVD SuperMulti
Wireless connection: Wi-Fi 802.11 b / g / n, Bluetooth 4.0.
Audio: 2 speakers
Interfaces: 2xUSB 3.0, 2xUSB 2.0, VGA, HDMI, RJ-45, card reader, audio connectors
Additionally: 1 megapixel webcam
Battery: 6-cell Li-ion 4400mAh
Dimensions, weight: 329x376x25 mm, 2.5 kg
Operating system: DOS
Equipment: Lenovo IdeaPad Z580 (59340588)
Contents of delivery
The laptop comes in a box that, in addition to the personal computer itself, also includes: a 90-watt power supply, a 6-cell 4400 mAh lithium-ion battery, and a set of documentation including three brochures. In addition to all this, the package contains a CD with drivers for models Z380, Z480 and Z580.
Design
Outwardly, the laptop turned out to be quite strict, in other words it cannot be called a business device, but also a purely multimedia image model too. The top cover and bottom surface are made of polished aluminum, and the bottom is made of plastic. Some of the distinctive features of the laptop include the Lenovo inscription on the lid and a nice-looking grille located above the keyboard, which covers the speakers.
The laptop comes in 3 colors: cherry red, snow white and graphite gray. We got a laptop in the latest color version for testing. Inside it, the laptop looks more strict and even more like a business model. The build quality can be highlighted, but with regard to the strength of the case, there are rather strong deflections in the lid sphere and in the upper left part of the keyboard.
In general, the design of Lenovo IdeaPad Z580 can be called standard, it does not have any futuristic pretentious lines and contours. The lid is made with small bevels along the edges, the front edge is also beveled down, which gives the laptop a lighter appearance.
The bottom of a personal computer can also be noted separately, but it stands out not for materials or design, but for its functionality. It turns out that the majority of laptop computers have a compartment on the bottom for access to internal components, but it is not quite huge. In our model, the lid covers almost the entire bottom, therefore, you can get quick access to almost all the "insides" by unscrewing just one screw.
In general, on the bottom there are two quite huge ventilation holes and 4 rubber feet that will confidently hold the laptop, in particular on a glass table.
The dimensions and weight of the 15.6-inch multimedia model correspond to its content and functionality, as the dimensions of a personal computer are 329x376x25 mm, and the weight is much more than 2.5 kg, this is, of course, not an ultrabook, but also quite a transportable device.
Display, sound and webcam
Lenovo IdeaPad Z580 is equipped with a 15.6-inch display with a resolution of 1366x768 pixels, using the B156XTN02.0 matrix from AU Optitronics. Regarding its quality, it is far from the best of the best, more precisely, it is standard, but for a multimedia model I would like it to be better.
It is also true that the display of the Z580 is glossy, which can be difficult when working outdoors or in a well-lit room.
As for the viewing angles, horizontally they do not cause any complaints, the picture is not distorted even when viewed from a huge angle, but the vertical angles leave much to be desired; even with not very large deviations from the center, the picture on the monitor screen begins to fade.
The multimedia of this model is emphasized by the high-quality acoustics installed on it. The volume reserve is quite huge and you can listen to music or watch a movie even in a rather noisy room. But loud is not always of high quality, to great joy in Lenovo IdeaPad Z580 both the volume level and the sound quality are at a high level. The sound reproduced by the loudspeakers can be described as quite clean and generally pleasant, there is a little lack of bass, but this is the weak point of the majority of portable computers. If we evaluate the acoustics in the Lenovo IdeaPad Z580, then on a five-point scale it is 5, but without a plus.
The laptop also has a webcam, it is located in the display frame. It is capable of taking pictures with a resolution of 1280x720 pixels. It's also true that the image capture is pretty crisp and fast.
Below are examples of images taken with the Lenovo IdeaPad Z580 webcam, with the help of CyberLink YouCam.
Keyboard and touchpad
The undoubted advantage of this personal computer is its keyboard, it is like an island here, which gives a great advantage when typing texts. The distance between the keys is large, even despite the fact that the keyboard has a full-fledged number pad. Obviously, I would like to slightly increase the space between the main keyboard and the numeric pad, but then I would have been able to squeeze the keys themselves.
As for the size of the keys, they are given the opportunity to seem somewhat smallish, but it's pretty easy to get used to them. They have a slightly concave top surface, and the pressure is soft and extremely pleasant.
The personal computer power button is located above the keyboard and is built into the speaker grill. It looks brief and concise, when it is on, it glows with white light rays.
In addition, the Z580 has another nice plus - separate multimedia keys, which are not often found on laptops at the moment, since most manufacturers assign multimedia functions to function keys. Right there we have a row of separate, touch-sensitive buttons that are located above the speaker grill. Among these buttons, you can see a key for decreasing and increasing brightness, as well as adjusting the volume, mute and others.
The touchpad in the IdeaPad Z580 is impressively large. Much of this visual experience is achieved by the fact that the two physical touchpad keys are hidden behind a common touch surface. The surface of the touchpad is pleasant, and all movements are carried out extremely clearly. Also noteworthy is the chrome frame, which is framed by the touchpad, with its help you will always feel the boundaries of the touch zone.
The touchpad supports multi-finger gestures, including rotation, zooming, scrolling with 1 and 2 fingers, and swiping with three fingers. It is true that different multitouch gestures are performed in different ways - some more clearly, others less, but in general, everything is quite functional.
Performance
There is no OS preinstalled on this model, it comes with DOS system. But for the convenience of testing, we decided to use Windows 7 Ultimate.
The performance index for this laptop was 5.1 points, which is exactly how much the desktop graphics scored. The standard 5.9 points were scored by a 1 TB hard drive. But the graphics card, memory and processor performed better: the NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M scored 6.6 points, the Intel Core i5-3210M processor scored 7.1 points, and the most influential member was RAM, which earned 7.5 points.
The processor installed in the laptop was introduced in the 2nd quarter of 2012. This is a dual-core Intel Core i5-3210M with a base frequency of 2.5 GHz, but thanks to Turbo Boost technology, it has the ability to increase up to 3.1 GHz. The L3 cache size is 3 MB, and the thermal package does not exceed 35 W. If you need more accurate information, then the screenshots of the CPU-Z program indicate the clock frequencies, the amount of cache memory of different levels, and other data.
With the release of Intel's new Ivy Bridge processors, the integrated graphics performance of the HD Graphics 4000 is significantly improved over the HD Graphics 3000. The clock speed can be increased from 350 MHz to 1100 MHz with Turbo Boost technology based on workload and tasks. Compared to Intel HD Graphics 3000, the HD 4000 supports DirectX 11 with dynamic shaders, hardware tessellation, DirectCompute, and a dedicated L3 cache.
But the performance of the integrated graphics is significantly inferior to the discrete NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M graphics card installed in the IdeaPad Z580. It was presented in the 1st quarter of 2012 and belongs to the Kepler family, as a result of which it is manufactured using a 28 nm technological process, and 384 shaders are involved in graphics processing. For operation, this adapter uses video memory of the DDR3 or GDDR5 standard and a 128-bit bus. It is also worth noting that with GDDR5 memory, this adapter is comparable in power to the GT 650M, but it is regrettable for us that DDR3 memory is used. The graphics card supports DirectX 11 and provides good performance in games and other resource-intensive applications that require serious graphics processing.
Thanks to a modern processor from Intel on the Ivy Bridge architecture and a fairly powerful NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M graphics card, this device has good potential. So for a more visual demonstration of the performance of the Lenovo IdeaPad Z580, we tested it with the help of the 3DMark06 benchmark. A bundle of NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M and Intel Core i5-3210M showed a result of 10899 points.
And here is the same test in 3DMark06, but with integrated graphics, HD Graphics 4000 showed a shy result of 6090 points, which, by the way, is not even an extremely bad result.
In addition to testing in 3DMark06, we also tested in 3DMark 11. Since both the discrete and integrated video cards support DirectX 11, this means that testing was carried out separately for NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M and HD Graphics 4000. Below you can see the result of a discrete video card, which scored 1696 points.
The expectedly shy result in the 3DMark 11 benchmark was obtained with integrated graphics. Then the overall score was 638 points, which is more than half of the discrete GT 640M.
Based on the results of the 3DMark06 benchmark, we built a performance graph in which only the integrated graphics card was used.
The exact same performance graph was also built for the discrete video card. However, the results of both the 3DMark06 test and the 3DMark 11 test were suddenly taken into account. As you can see in the graph, the Lenovo IdeaPad Z580 has excellent performance and is ahead of its competitors.
Excellent performance in tests was also confirmed when playing games. Although this is not a gaming model, the running games were run at fairly high settings and with good old fps. The games tested included Battlefield 3, Dirt 3, and The Witcher 2. The first-person shooter Battlefield 3 is a pretty demanding game, it was run on high settings and at a resolution of 1366x768 pixels, with all this we got a result of 24- 35 fps. Dirt 3 was set to ultra settings, also with a resolution of 1366x768 pixels, the minimum fps dropped to 25, and the maximum rose to 32 frames per second. And in the end, the most demanding game that we tested was released - The Witcher 2, at medium settings and a resolution of 1366x768 pixels, an indicator of 23-31 fps is quite acceptable.
Another benchmark that tests the performance of the processor and video card is called Cinebench R11.5. Three-dimensional scenes with complex effects are modeled inside it. In this test, the Lenovo IdeaPad Z580 performed well. The processor earned 2.90 pts, and the graphics 15.47 fps. Quite good performance considering that it was obtained with the integrated HD Graphics 4000.
Although the result in the Cinebench R11.5 test with the integrated video card turned out to be good, the discrete video card still got more than twice the performance - 36.69 fps versus 15.47 fps for the HD Graphics 4000. The processor score remained almost unchanged at 2.89 pts.
It is easier to assess the performance of a laptop when there is something to compare, as a consequence of this, in this graph, just like in the comparison graphs 3DMark06 and 3DMark 11, you can see that the Z580 is ahead of its competitors.
As for the RAM, the IdeaPad Z580 has two memory sticks, one Hynix HMT325S6 CFR8C-PB with a capacity of 2 GB, the other Hynix HMT351S6 CFR8C-PB with a capacity of 4 GB. As for their characteristics, both bars have the DDR3 standard and a clock frequency of 1600 MHz. It is thanks to its clock speed that the operating system rated the memory at 7.5 points. Detailed information about RAM can be seen in the screenshots of the CPU-Z program.
For people who like to store junk on their hard drive, Lenovo has specially placed a 1TB drive in the Z580. This volume should be enough to meet the needs of the majority of users. The spindle speed of the Seagate ST1000 LMO24 HN-M101MBB hard drive is 5400 rpm.
The drive was tested by us with the help of the HDTune application. Thanks to this utility, we were lucky to find out the relative performance of the hard drive. After passing the test, we received the following data on our drive: the smallest read speed was 46.5 MB / s, the maximum was 112.6 MB / s, and the average was 82.2 MB / s. The access time is 17.5 ms.
The graph shows a comparative characteristic of the performance of the drive installed in the Z580 and drives of similar models.
HDTune isn't the only utility that can drive performance. CrystalDiskMark tests sequential as well as random writing of blocks of a certain size. Test results can be seen in the screenshot.
Finally, the laptop underwent two comprehensive tests, PCMark 7 and PCMark Vantage.
The PCMark 7 benchmark provides an opportunity to assess the performance of the entire system, as well as each of its individual components. In this benchmark, the laptop received 2227 points. The result is generally good, but it was given the opportunity to be better if it were not for the low indicators of the System storage and Productivity categories, which scored 1474 and 1534 points in accordance with this. The most influential member in this test was the Computation category, which scored 3125 points. The rest of the categories received an almost equal number of points - from 2012 to 2530 points.
In the PCMark Vantage test, just like in PCMark 7, a comprehensive test of all systems and components of the laptop is carried out. The overall score was 6457 points. As in the PCMark 7 test, here the drive scored the lowest, with only 2,188 points, and the undisputed most influential member was the Communications category, which reached 9395 points. The Gaming and Music categories ranked second and third with 6043 points and 5162 points accordingly.
For complex tests, as for other performance tests, a comparison graph was built.
Ports and communications
The set of ports in multimedia models is always excellent, this is due to the class status. Although there are no special connectors, in particular FireWire or Tunderbolt, there are also ports available for more users.
Let's start our review of the available ports on the left side, since there are more ports here than on the other sides. Closer to the front, there are two USB ports, and most of all, they are 3.0. In addition, there are HDMI and VGA video outputs, which are separated by an RJ-45 network connector located among them. And behind the ventilation grill you can see Kensington Castle.
The right side is not so loaded with ports, but despite all the above, there is an optical drive, the characteristics of which will be discussed below. Also, on opposite sides of the optical drive, we found a place for two USB ports, but unlike the USB 3.0 ports on the left side, these are 2.0 standards. Closer to the rear edge, you can see the power connector.
The card reader and indicators are located in front, or to be more precise, the SD card reader is located closer to the right side, and the set of indicators is located closer to the left side.
Now almost all manufacturers try not to place ports on the back. It is caused by the fact that almost the entire rear edge is occupied by the battery compartment, and also the fact that using the ports located there is not very convenient. Our model also did not get out of the usual frames and almost the entire rear edge is dedicated to the battery.
As for the optical drive, the TSSTcorp CDDVDW SN-208AB model is installed here.
Its characteristics, as well as the supported read and write formats, can be seen in the screenshot of the Nero InfoTool program.
In addition to providing communication with other devices through physical ports and connectors, this device also has wireless Broadcom 802.11 b / g / n Wi-Fi modules, as well as Bluetooth 4.0.
Heat and noise
An important factor is the heating of the laptop, in addition, if the stability of the system depends on the temperature indicators of the internal components, then the heating of the working surfaces of the case and, in accordance with this, the comfort of work, depend on the thoughtfulness of the case design and the efficiency of the cooling system.
We measured the heating of internal components with the help of the CPUID HWMonitor application. As you can see in the screenshot below, the CPU temperature was around 16 to 63 degrees. The discrete video card warmed up more than the processor, from 37 degrees the temperature rose to 94. The minimum heating of the hard disk was 46 degrees, and the maximum - 62 degrees.
As already mentioned above, the heating of the internal components has a direct effect on the stability and performance of the system components, in many respects this takes place in throttling. Throttling is a mechanism for protecting the microprocessor from thermal damage, as a result of this, when the temperature rises, the processor begins to skip machine cycles in order to prevent its further increase. The screenshot from the AIDA program shows a graph on which, when the processor is 100 percent loaded, there is absolutely no skipping of machine cycles.
And if the cooling system properly copes with the heating of the internal components, then externally the laptop is quite hot in some places, and even when idle. So without load, the maximum temperature was noticed in the center of the keyboard (31 degrees), and in the central part of the bottom it reached 39 degrees. It turned out to be a pleasant fact that the under-palm surface almost did not heat up.
When the load was applied, the temperature readings rose in almost all parts of the case, except for the right side, where the optical drive is located. The central part warmed up to 40 degrees in the keyboard area, and to an impressive 51 degrees on the bottom. I would not advise you to keep your laptop on your lap at such a moment. As a result, an active cooling pad will be a good accessory for the Lenovo IdeaPad Z580.
In terms of noise, the Lenovo IdeaPad Z580 is almost no different from similar models. In the idle state, its "noise" was 38 dB. And under load, the fans increased their speed, and the noise level increased to 45 dB. I will repeat again that these are digestible figures, and working with this laptop you will not feel any discomfort from excessive noise.
Battery
The Lenovo IdeaPad Z580 comes with a 6-cell 4400mAh Li-Ion battery. In order to remove the battery, you need to push back the two latches on the bottom of the laptop.
The laptop is charged with a 90-watt power supply for 2 hours 39 min
