The Lenovo Thinkpad Edge E485 is the AMD counterpart to the Thinkpad Edge 480. The Edge models E585 and E580 are variants with a 15.4" display and numeric keypad. It was released two weeks ago, but so far there has now been much press coverage or reviews
Let's start with the outer appearance. The E485 has a black plastic shell with aluminum on the outside of the display lid which gives it a high-value feeling. Unfortunately when typing or resting the hand on the right side there is rattling coming fromt the right side (Youtube
Clip 1,
Clip 2). As I planned to upgrade the E485 with more RAM and a 2nd SSD, I had also a look from where the rattling comes. How to fix this is described below. Although the bottom case uses screws, it also is clipped to the top side. During my first try to remove the bottom case I broke a few clips and now it has a small gap in one corner :(.
The battery is not replacable without removing the bottom cover, but at least it is replaceable and not glued in. I hope Lenovo will offer spare batteries. Other components like NVME, SSD/HDD, RAM & WiFi-module are replacable, so adding a 2nd SODIMM and SSD was easy. Oddly there was a folded ESD bag glued with duct tape beneath the drive dummy in the 2.5" slot.
The preinstalled Windows 10 Pro was pleasantly free of 3rd party bloat ware. A few Lenovo applications are installed, but sofar I have not found use for them. The other useless preinstalled crap like MS Office demo, Candy Crush App downloader and so are part of Windows 10. Unfortunately for Linux you need some boot parameter as a work around.
The display showed has a hot pixel in the first days, but it vanished after some time (it's back :( ). Especially in b/w Linux terminals a constant bright pixel is very annoying. I hope it's gone forever. The display itself is a anti-glare IPS panel.
A constant pain for me is the keyboard, with the 2012 generation Lenovo dropped the old keyboard layout with the separate navigation block. At least Lenovo does not move them into an additional column on the right side, obscuring enter, right shift, backspace and so on. The noisy touchpad of the 2014 was improved and does not click so loud anymore. The separate buttons for the trackpoint are back, but not the buttons on the bottom of the touchpad, so there's stil no haptic feedback if you are in the right zone for a left or right click. There is a nice 4 your old rant on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doEZMNXz1JY. The Thinkpad 25 might have become a interesting alternative, but Lenovo botched that
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxQGhqF60zE
During use the notebook gets a little bit warm, but not hot. This might be the reason the CPU/GPU combo is set to 15 Watt TDP, theoretically the R5 2500U could be configured to 25 Watt. Due to the limited cooling in a notebook the turbo frequencies cannot keep for long and not on all cores. With load on all cores 1-2 cores can go up to 3-3.6GHz, but the others fall below the 2.0 Ghz base frequency. So I doubt that the larger R7 2700U can make better use of its additional 200 MHz base clock and turbo clock. It's listed on the Lenovo homepage, but currently not available in the configurator.
I am quite happy with the performance. Despite running Veracrypt, antivirus and a lot of background process it never feels sluggish. It is surely not meant as a gaming machine, but for graphically lighter games it should be sufficient. The Ryzen CPU has a dual channel memory controller and adding a second SODIMM helps at least in 3DMark. In Time Spy a second memory module yielded a 30% higher score. Additionally the Steam achievements "What's the Rush?" (<5FPS in Time Spy) and "OC Madness" ("Only experts should try to push their CPU more than 50% over stock"; 2 GHz base clock/3.6 Ghz turbo). Sure other applications will benefit from more memory and bandwidth. Other vendors only have only one memory module and no slot for a second.
I did a comparison test with the Dell Notebook in september and the E485 showed a nice performance increase in 3DMark.
(Note: The E480 values are taken from the 3DMark Database)
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
|
Resolution |
FPS |
Score |
Min FPS |
Max FPS |
|
720p 1st run |
40.6 |
1023 |
8.3 |
77.4 |
|
720p 2nd run |
40.2 |
1012 |
16.9 |
79.5 |
|
1080p 1st run |
19.9 |
502 |
6.6 |
37.0 |
|
1080p 2nd run |
18.9 |
476 |
13.0 |
34.5 |
Regarding battery life I cannot say much, but interestingly Lenovo gives only 9.37h (was 9h earlier) runtime on battery for the E485, but the E480 with the same battery is supposed to run 13h. The longest estimate I got was around 6-7 hours with very light web browsing and work and 25% brightness. With 45Wh battery capacity and 9 hours runtime the device must not consume more than 5 Watt. I only achieved this in Windows with 0% screen brightness and everything closed except BatteryMon. Not very useful.. but to be fair I must admit I added a second RAM module and an old Samsung SSD, which was not configured in Windows. Other people also complain about battery time.
Another bit letdown is the audio quality. I do not expect much from integrated laptop speakers, but the audio quality on headphones was surprisingly bad. At first I thought the stream was the problem with too low bitrate or something like this, so I went on debugging my audio server, I even ripped the CD again, but in end it was the DAC in the notebook. I tried a couple of settings and profiles, but at least for music it was just awful.
The keyboard issue, where fast typing caused certain key combinations to get registered in a different, was
solved after some weeks with a BIOS update. Funny story, I opened a support ticket for this issue in the hope of getting this BIOS update early, I got a reply quite fast, but did not read it as I had no time and was out of town. The next day fedex rang at my door and wanted to pickup the notebook, to my surpise. That was quite fast, but Lenovo or Fedex really should ask for when the customer is at home for the pickup.
During boot, you can press enter to interrupt boot and then go to the BIOS or Boot Manager. The funny thing is that this stopped worked at some point. F2 and F12 were still working and the enter key worked in UEFI setup and in the boot loaders, but the enter key did not stop the boot anymore. At that point you see the red Lenovo log and the message "Press Enter to interrupt boot".
On the plus side, one the of the updates also gave a nice performance boost. (I will update the tables above later). Updated.
And one comment on the pricing, for RAM and NVMe it is cheaper to downgrade the standard option and buy the a larger device yourself than buying the option. In the end you pay less and have additionally the preinstalled module you can keep or sell. As for the 2.5" drive slot you can only buy HDDs, so if you want a second SSD, you have to install one on your owns The possible configuration options are quite limited in comparison to the Intel based E480. In Germany you can upgrade from 8GB RAM to 16GB for currently ~127€, if you do the upgrade yourself, you can buy one 8GB module with the same spec for 60€, but then you won't the Lenovo warranty. For the NVMe, you can save 70€ by downgrading the NVMe from 256GB to 128GB and buy a faster NVMe for the same price, or a for additional 30€ a NVMe twice as large. For the 2.5" you can choose between 2 HDDs or youi can install a SSD yourself. Funnily when buying from Lenovo you will get the 45Watt PSU, but for 1,19€ more (1€+VAT) you can upgrade to 65Watt PSU.
Unspecified components built in:
|
NVME |
Samsung NVMe MZVLW256HEHP-000L7
|
|
RAM |
Hyundai Hynix DDR4 2400 8GB HMA81GS6AFR8NUH CL-17-17-17-39 (Single Rank)
|
|
WLAN |
Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377 Wireless Network Adapter
|
|
LAN |
Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller (RTL8111/8168/8411)
|
|
SD Adapter |
BayHubTech Integrated MMC/SD controller (O2 Micro Inc., PCI)
|
|
Bluetooth |
Atheros USB based |
Rattling
Real annoying is the metallic rattling on the right side. When I type or lay my hand on rest it rattles. This is really annoying and makes the notebook sound shoody. After a couple of tries it narrowed down to something that looks like a slot bracket with padding to keep the NVMe down. This bracked is clamped down on the short sides and fixed with a screw on one long side. Beneath the bracket is metal ventilation grille and beneath that are ventilation slits of the bottom case. I tried to clamp it tighter down with a piece of duct tape, but it did not work. I planned to to try double sided tape, but instead I removed the bracket under the assumption that the NVMe is sufficiently fixed in place. The rattle went away. My guess is that the E480 has the same issw No idea was wrong with my device as Lenovo was not able to reproduce this.
So, i think this is the last update. I sold the notebook and everything I have to say is written here.
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