Review: Lenovo IdeaPad 5x 2-in-1 (Gen 9, 14 Inch)

Want a really inexpensive computer that still has decent performance? Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Plus is emerging as the CPU of choice to build upon—with machines like Lenovo’s new IdeaPad 5x sporting a price of just $850 (under $700 when it’s on sale).

The Snapdragon Plus is, in every way, the baby brother of the Snapdragon Elite that's in so many Copilot+ PCs—slower, less fully formed, and generally ignored by most of its family. As such, it’s a curious choice for Lenovo to use as the backbone for its new IdeaPad 5x, a 2-in-1 laptop with higher aspirations.

Photograph: Christopher Null

As a 2-in-1, it features a hinge that allows the screen to fold back 360 degrees until it’s flush against the laptop’s base. In this mode, the device can be used as a tablet, or you can prop it into a tent shape as an impromptu screen for passive streaming. Today’s 2-in-1 laptops tend to be built with more powerful guts, but hey, maybe times are a-changin’ and this design is trickling down to a more mass-market position.

The specs are basic. The unit features a 14-inch touchscreen with a 1,920 x 1,200-pixel resolution. A 1-TB solid state drive and 16 GB of RAM are paired with the Snapdragon X Plus X1P42100 CPU, the same chip we encountered on the Asus ProArt PZ13. For a cheap laptop, it’s got surprisingly robust connectivity: two USB-C ports, two USB-A ports, HDMI, and a microSD card reader. Note, however, that the USB-C ports don’t support USB4 or Thunderbolt 4, and you’ll need to save one for the charger.

Photograph: Christopher Null

The all-gray unit is constructed from a mix of aluminum and plastic, the only design feature of interest being a notch on the top of the LCD where the webcam sits. The notch is sizable, and wide enough to prevent the unit from teetering when positioned in tent mode. A dedicated fingerprint reader rests below the ample, spacious keyboard, which adds two Dolby speakers on either side. They’re loud, but when you’re in tent or tablet mode, they fire backward. The touchpad is on the small side, but it worked fine for me; so many of today’s touchpads are getting so large they’ve become unwieldy.

I have one complaint about the keyboard, and it’s one I don’t think I’ve ever made: It is extremely difficult to make out the letters on the keys when there’s overhead lighting due to the lack of contrast between the color of the keys and the symbols on them. A picture doesn’t do it justice, and I had to crank the keyboard backlighting up all the way to make this peculiar problem go away. However, with the backlighting on, you end up with a ton of unappealing light leakage from around the edges of the keys, so this isn’t an ideal solution either. This design simply needs to go back to the drawing board.

Photograph: Christopher Null

Performance is lackluster but on par with the Asus ProArt, the only other Snapdragon Plus machine I’ve tested to date. In comparison to Snapdragon Elite systems, on general applications and web work, expect about a 20 percent performance drop and significantly more on graphics-related tasks, where the IdeaPad runs at about half the framerate. Some Copilot+ PC features struggled, such as translated Live Captions, though the Cocreator AI image creation system was reasonably expedient.

I figured there would be a silver lining to the laptop’s sluggishness in that the IdeaPad would certainly prove to have outstanding battery life, but that unfortunately wasn’t the case. While the ProArt pulled down a near-record 19+ hours of running time, the IdeaPad mustered barely over 9 hours in my full-screen YouTube test and under 12 hours on a second run-through. That may be fine for entertaining the kids for the day, but it pales in comparison to most other Snapdragon machines.

Another issue: At 3.3 pounds and 22 mm thick, the IdeaPad 5x is rather gargantuan for its screen size. I had to scroll back to 2016 in my testing records to find something with a 14-inch screen that was heavier. (That said, some 14.4-inch systems released since have also been on the beefy side.) The weight is noticeable, both on the lap and if you’re trying to use it as a tablet—though on the plus side, the system is dead quiet either way. I couldn’t get the fan to register so much as a hum, even under a stress-test load.

Photograph: Christopher Null

The price nonetheless makes this laptop at least vaguely appealing, and on a price-performance level, the numbers don’t look all that bad. However, some base level of performance is still a requirement given how power-hungry modern applications tend to be, even on a budget machine, and at $850 the IdeaPad 5x isn’t so incredibly cheap as to allow its drawbacks to be easily overlooked.