Lenovo z570 review

Lenovo Z570 Review

Earlier this year, Lenovo rolled out a slew of Sandy Bridge notebooks, one of which was the Lenovo Ideapad Z570. I was able to spend some quality time with the unit and was pretty impressed with its Intel Core i5-2410M processor. Other specs were pretty good too. The unit I got for review came with 4GB DDR3 RAM (2x 2GB sticks), 750GB hard disk drive, 15.6 inch display, Blu-ray drive and Intel HD 3000 graphics. Read the full review to find out more about it.

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The Lenovo Z570 is a budget notebook comes with a 15.6 inch display. It has a stylish appearance and sports a piano black finish. The palm rest is metallic and features a large textured touchpad. Build quality is okay, not as good as the Lenovo Y-series and certainly no way near the ThinkPad series (X200, X220 etc). That said, the hinges felt very strong. Its 15.6 inch display has a glossy finish with 1366 x 768 resolution. Screen has average color and contrast levels. I really feel Lenovo should have improved the resolution to 1600 x 900 or something as this was something users did not like about its predecessor, Lenovo Z560. Oh well.

There are a lot of ports on the Z560. It comes with 3x USB 2.0 ports (including eSATA), LAN port, VGA, HDMI, SDHC card slot and Express card slot. There is also a wireless on / off switch on the front of the unit.

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Keyboard, TouchPad – Z560 has an island style keyboard (chiclet style) and has shaped keys that make it easy to center the finger tips while typing. It is excellent to type on and I can certainly type away few novels on it. It has no signs of flex and offers wonderful typing experience. It uses Synaptics touchpad with full support of multi touch gestures. The mouse buttons have nice travel and soft feedback.

Performance

My favorite part of every review. As said earlier in the review, the Lenovo Z560 features an Intel Core i5-2410M processor that runs at 2.13GHz clock speed (2.9GHz

under Turbo Boost). The processor can handle 2 cores and 4 threads at the same time. The graphics department is handled by Intel HD 3000. Here is its Windows Experience Index:

Overall: 5.7
Processor: 6.9
Memory: 5.9
Gaming Graphics: 6.2
Hard disk: 5.9

And here are the CrystalMark results: ALU 40094, FPU 40242, MEM 34751, HDD 11428, GDI 14171, D2D 1368 and OGL 2448

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I was able to run full HD videos with no problem but watching full HD videos on a a 720p display make less sense unless you are connected to an HDTV / bigger monitor.

Battery Life – I ran BBench on it with Wi-Fi on and was able to get 4.6 hours out of it on a single charge. Under a more realistic web browsing test, I was able to get 4 hours and 15 minutes. Not bad from a 6-cell battery.

Verdict – The only thing that I did not like about the Z570 is its low resolution display. If that is something that does not matter to you, I would not stop you from buying it. Otherwise, look at the base Vaio F series. They are pretty good.