For a sub-$400 laptop, the Lenovo IdeaPad 320 can turn some heads, with its sleek, premium-esque design. However, the specs it offers simply aren't worth the price, as it sports a last-generation CPU, a lower-resolution display and a shorter battery life compared to a laptop like the Acer Aspire E 15, which sells for a similar price. Show
 The IdeaPad 320 has a simple but sleek design. Its gray plastic hood is vast and empty, aside from a glossy, silver Lenovo logo in the left-hand corner. Swipe to scroll horizontally Storage500GB, 1TB 5400-rpm HDDPorts2 USB 3.0, 1 USB Type-C, HDMI, 4-in-1 card reader (SD, SDHC, SDXC, MMC), RJ45, headphone jack, DVD drive, security lock slotColorsPlatinum GraySize14.9 x 10.2 x 0.9 inchesWeight4.85 pounds The interior, brushed-aluminum chassis has a gray paint job accompanied by a dark-gray keyboard. If the IdeaPad 320's keyboard is anything like Lenovo's other keyboards, it should be decent to type on at the very least. We like that the webcam is on the top bezel, but the bezels themselves are pretty meaty. At 4.9 pounds and 14.9 x 10.2 x 0.9 inches, the IdeaPad 320 is relatively slim, especially compared to other sub-$400 laptops like the Acer Aspire E 15. That one weighs 5 pounds and measures at 15 x 10.2 x 1.2 inches. Buy on Walmart For a sub-$400 system, the IdeaPad 320 has a solid number of ports. The left side features the power jack, an RJ45 port, an HDMI port, two USB 3.0 ports, a headphone jack, one USB Type-C port, and a 4-in-1 card reader (SD, SDHC, SDXC, MMC). The right side offers a security lock slot and a DVD drive. We haven't tested the display's color or brightness for ourselves, but it's not a good sign that the IdeaPad 320's 15.6-inch panel has a resolution of only 1366 x 768, especially when the similarly priced Aspire E 15 has a 1080p panel. Regarding performance, the IdeaPad 320 is not getting any love with its Intel Core i3-7100U processor or its AMD A12-9720P CPU, because laptops like the Aspire E 15 have 8th Gen Core i3 processors. The IdeaPad 320 comes with either 4GB or 8GB of RAM and a 500GB or 1TB 5,400-rpm HDD, while the Aspire E 15 comes with 6GB of RAM (upgradable to 8GB) and a 1TB 5,400-rpm HDD. So, the two machines are relatively similar on the RAM and hard-drive front. MORE: Longest Battery Life Laptops According to Lenovo's website, the IdeaPad 320 can last up to 6 hours on a battery charge, which is disappointing considering we typically look for at least 8 hours in any laptop (with the exception of gaming models). In contrast, the Aspire E 15 lasted 8 hours and 48 minutes on our Laptop Mag Battery Test. Based on the specs and price alone, we'd recommend avoiding the Lenovo IdeaPad 320. Sure, it's slimmer and lighter than something like the Aspire E 15, but the performance, battery life and display resolution simply aren't worth the price. For $379, the Acer Aspire E 15 features a sharper panel, longer battery life and better raw performance for an eerily similar price. Even for a sub-$400 laptop, you can do better than the IdeaPad 320. Credit: Lenovo
Get our in-depth reviews, helpful tips, great deals, and the biggest news stories delivered to your inbox. Rami Tabari is an Editor for Laptop Mag. He reviews every shape and form of a laptop as well as all sorts of cool tech. You can find him sitting at his desk surrounded by a hoarder's dream of laptops, and when he navigates his way out to civilization, you can catch him watching really bad anime or playing some kind of painfully difficult game. He’s the best at every game and he just doesn’t lose. That’s why you’ll occasionally catch his byline attached to the latest Souls-like challenge. We purchased the Lenovo Ideapad 320 so our expert reviewer could thoroughly test and assess it. Keep reading for our full product review. The Lenovo Ideapad 320 is a budget-priced line of laptops that look a whole lot more expensive than they are. The unit we tested is the most affordable configuration, including an Intel Celeron N3350 dual-core processor running at just 1.10 GHz, an Intel HD Graphics 500 chip, 4 GB of RAM, and a 15.6-inch display. Those specifications leave the Ideapad 320 struggling to perform anything beyond the most basic tasks, but at least it looks great doing it. Lifewire / Jeremy Laukkonen Design: Premium looksThe Lenovo Ideapad 320 blows the competition out of the water in terms of stylish design. When you look at this laptop, you don’t see a budget device—the sleek unibody construction looks like it belongs on a much more expensive machine. It’s thin, light, and still manages to feel sturdy in the hand. A lot of budget laptops feel like cheap plastic when you touch them, but the Ideapad 320 manages to escape that trap. The DVD drive is located on the right side of the laptop, and all of the ports, including the power jack, headphone jack, ethernet port, two USB 3.0 ports, and HDMI, can be found on the other side. This is nice for a desktop replacement, because it means you only have to deal with cables on one side of the machine. The sleek unibody construction looks like it belongs on a much more expensive machine. The keyboard is particularly nice, featuring an island-style design with individual keys that feel snappy. The one major difference from earlier Ideapad designs is that the up and down arrow keys have been shrunk down to allow for a full-sized right shift key, which may help some users feel more comfortable when typing for long periods of time. The touchpad is located in front of the keyboard and has a unified design, with the left and right buttons incorporated into the main body of the pad. It feels smooth and responsive and supports multi-touch. Setup Process: Easy setup with some bloatwareThe Lenovo Ideapad 320 is a Windows 10 laptop, and we didn’t run into any peculiarities or snags when setting it up. Despite feeling a bit sluggish due to the slow Celeron processor, the actual setup process didn’t take us any longer than we’ve experienced with other laptops that have slightly better specifications. From plugging it in to reaching the desktop, we timed the setup process at about 15 minutes. Once the initial setup process is complete, there’s also some bloatware that most users will want to deal with. The laptop comes with a free trial of McAfee and several apps from Lenovo, all of which slow the machine to a crawl when they launch. Display: Decent display, but not full HDThe display is bright and clear enough for a budget laptop. The viewing angles from above and below the screen aren’t very good, but the brightness and color reproduction remain acceptable even at pretty extreme horizontal viewing angles. The main drawback of the Ideapad 320 screen—and one of the biggest problems with this laptop as a whole—is that the screen isn’t full HD. The maximum resolution that it’s capable of displaying is 1366 x 768. The reason Lenovo went with this screen was to cut costs, but we’d really like to see a 1920 x 1080 display in a laptop that looks and feels as nice as this one does. Lifewire / Jeremy Laukkonen Performance: Extremely sluggish in the configuration we testedThe Intel Celeron N3350 dual-core processor (which runs at just 1.10GHz) and the Intel HD Graphics 500 GPU really hold the Ideapad 320 back in terms of performance. Competitors in this same basic price range boast better processors and graphics chips, and you can even find the Ideapad 320 configured with a speedier i3-7100U (running at 2.4 GHz) and an integrated Intel HD Graphics 620 GPU. In the configuration we tested, the Ideapad 320 is frustratingly slow and struggles to perform anything beyond the most basic tasks. Opening even half a dozen tabs in a web browser creates noticeable slowdown, and apps feel like they take a long time to open. We subjected the Ideapad 320 to the PCMark 10 bench test, and its scores matched our experience to the letter. It managed just 1,062 in the overall benchmark test. For comparison, the Acer Aspire E15 is a close competitor in terms of price and scored more than double that at 2,657. In the configuration we tested, the Ideapad 320 is frustratingly slow. The Ideapad 320 scored an acceptable 2,739 in the essentials category, 1,769 in the productivity category, and an abysmal 672 in the digital content creation category. That means it’s perfectly capable of basic tasks like word processing and light web browsing, but intense image or video editing on this laptop is not recommended. We also ran some gaming benchmarks from 3DMark, but the results are hardly worth mentioning. In the most forgiving benchmark, Cloud Gate, which is designed for low end laptops, it managed a score of just 1,941 at 11 FPS. The Acer Aspire E 15 scored 6,492 in that benchmark and managed a smooth 36 FPS. We tried to launch Streets of Rogue, a lightweight retro indie game, and found that the Ideapad 320 was able to manage a maximum of 20 FPS, dipping as low as 3 FPS at times when a lot of action was happening on the screen. The takeaway is that you can use this laptop to play very basic games, but it’s absolutely not a gaming laptop. Acer Aspire E 15 Review Productivity: Adequate for basic productivity tasksYou’re best off using the Ideapad 320 for basic productivity tasks like word processing, light web browsing, and email. The excellent keyboard is great for long sessions of typing, but the sluggish processor means that running any resource-intensive applications—or even editing images—is a real chore. Audio: Dolby Audio-optimized speakers sound great, but lack bassThe Ideapad 320 has dual Dolby-optimized speakers that sound really good for a laptop in this price range. They’re decently loud when you turn the volume all the way up, and we didn’t notice any distortion when listening to music on YouTube or playing Streets of Rogue. The downside to the speakers is that they’re located toward the front of the laptop, and they fire down instead of up. That means it’s easy for the speakers to be muffled by a table surface, your lap, or whatever else you set the laptop on. The speaker grills are mounted on a slight angle so they don’t sit totally flush against a desk surface, but the positioning is still less than ideal. Lifewire / Jeremy Laukkonen Network: Good download speeds, but no 801.11ac wirelessThe wireless card in the Ideapad 320 doesn’t support 801.11ac, so it can’t connect to 5 GHz networks. That isn’t a concern if your wireless modem only supports 2.4 GHz, but anyone with an 801.11ac modem will miss that extra speed. We tested the Ideapad 320 on Speedtest.net, and we found that it was able to achieve download speeds of 78 Mbps (compared to 66 Mbps on an Acer Aspire E 15 that was tested at the same time). The lack of 801.11ac also prevents the Ideapad 320 from achieving the fast download speeds of comparable laptops with this compatibility. Camera: The 720p webcam is sufficient for basic video chatThe Ideapad 320 includes a 720p webcam that works well enough for basic video chat, but it’s a bit washed out and blurry for professional video conferencing. The rest of the hardware in this laptop is also a little anemic for video conferencing—don’t expect to run Skype or a Discord video chat while also running a game or other resource-intensive application. Battery: Poor battery life makes this a hard sell as a portableBattery life is one of the weakest points of the Ideapad 320. It has a two-cell lithium ion battery with a nominal capacity of 30 Wh, which just isn’t enough for a laptop like this. In our testing, it only stood up to about four and a half hours of constant use. By turning off the Wi-Fi, lowering the screen brightness all the way, and adjusting other settings, you can squeeze out another hour or two of battery life. But generally speaking, we don’t think the battery capacity is enough to make this a truly portable laptop. The battery only stood up to about four and a half hours of constant use. Software: Includes McAfee anti-virus and some bloatware from LenovoThe Lenovo Ideapad 320 comes equipped with Windows 10, some basic Windows apps, a free trial from McAfee, and a handful of Lenovo apps that most users will probably want to uninstall. The bloatware situation isn’t that bad, but this is a laptop where every ounce of processing power and RAM matters, so having unnecessary apps hurts its already slow performance. Price: You won’t find a better-looking laptop at this pricePriced under $300, you would be hard pressed to find a laptop that looks and feels this good without spending a whole lot more. But even though the Ideapad 320 looks slick and feels solid, the performance just isn’t there. Competitors in this price range blow it out of the water in terms of performance, so what you’re really paying for is a laptop that looks like a premium device even though it isn’t. Competition: Look elsewhere for performance and battery lifeCompetitors in this basic price range can’t compete with the Ideapad 320 in terms of aesthetics or build quality. The Acer Aspire E 15, which is available for about the same price, feels like cheap plastic in comparison, and the slightly more expensive HP Notebook 15 is more or less in the same boat. The problem is that while the Ideapad 320 looks and feels better than the competition, it falls far behind in terms of performance. The HP Notebook 15 beats it in every important benchmark, and for about $100 more you can get a 15.6-inch HP with a much faster processor, bigger battery, and even a touchscreen. The Ideapad 320 really falls apart in comparison to the Acer Aspire E 15, which more than double its scores in many benchmarks. The Aspire E 15 also sports a full HD 1920 x 1080 display, a faster processor, more RAM, and a battery that lasts well over eight hours between charges. HP Notebook 15 Review Final Verdict Looks aren’t everything — this budget laptop is stylish but extremely limited in its basic configuration. Unless you only need a laptop for email and web browsing, you’ll want to invest in a more high-end configuration of the Ideapad 320 that’ll give you a faster processor and more RAM. But even if you do step up the processing power, this laptop still suffers from a low-resolution screen and low-capacity battery. Generally speaking, you can find better laptops in this price range—they might just not look as good. Why is my Lenovo IdeaPad 320 so slow?The system may have drivers that are corrupt or outdated. Make sure that Windows Update has completed all updates. To update drivers, see these links: Lenovo System Update: Update Drivers, BIOS and Applications and Simple Tips To Update Drivers. Is the Lenovo IdeaPad 320 good?The Lenovo IdeaPad 320 has two redeeming qualities: its clicky keyboard and its vast selection of ports. However, between the IdeaPad 320's poor battery life, middling performance and low-res display, it's hard to recommend it. What is the specs of Lenovo 320Lenovo IdeaPad 320-15IKB is a Windows 10 laptop with a 15.60-inch display that has a resolution of 1366x768 pixels. It is powered by a Core i5 processor and it comes with 8GB of RAM. The Lenovo IdeaPad 320-15IKB packs 1TB of HDD storage. How long does Lenovo IdeaPad 320 last?The Lenovo IdeaPad 320 comes equipped with a 2Wh 30-cell battery, which gives us an idea of its capacity. Based on testing, under normal usage conditions, this laptop can provide a battery life of approximately 4 to 6 hours. This includes web browsing, using office applications and streaming multimedia content. |
