Top 5 reasons to BUY or NOT to buy the Lenovo IdeaPad 3 (17″, 2021)

The niche that the IdeaPad 3 fills is now more important than ever. The need for a budget-conscious laptop has skyrocketed with the world being in the state that it is. The newest generation IdeaPad 3 laptops offer the Ryzen 5000 U-series chips, albeit the ones that are built on the Zen 2 architecture.

However, they still offer plenty of performance for day-to-day activities, as well as the occasional heavy workloads. The IdeaPad 3 (17″, 2021) offers a lot of bank for the buck, with its 17.3-inch screen and is one of the more interesting IdeaPad 3 laptops.

Today, we present you with LaptopMedia’s top 5 picks about the Lenovo IdeaPad 3 (17″, 2021).

Lenovo IdeaPad 3 (17″, 2021): Full Specs / In-depth Review


4 reasons to BUY the Lenovo IdeaPad 3 (17″, 2021)

1. Upgradeability

The laptop offers decent, but not perfect upgradeability. For example, half the RAM is soldered onto the motherboard, with there being only one SODIMM slot for future expansion. Storage-wise, you get one M.2 PCIe x4 drive, along with an optional 2.6-inch SATA drive bay, depending on which battery you go for.

Here is our detailed teardown video, which shows how to access the laptop’s internal components, including the RAM and SSD slots.


2. Display

The laptop offers two display options, each with a 17.3-inch diagonal. The first laptop offers a 1600x900p resolution and uses a TN panel, which offers narrow viewing angles and poor color reproduction. The second option increases the resolution to Full HD and uses an IPS panel. Our laptop had the latter option, and it showed comfortable viewing angles, a maximum brightness of 327 nits in the middle of the screen, 321 nits as an average for the entire display area, and a maximum deviation of 8%. The contrast ratio is good – 1150:1.

The display also covers 97% of the sRGB color gamut, making a good case for being a budget creator laptop.

The display solidifies its case by delivering great color accuracy once we applied our Design and Gaming profile applied, bringing down the dE value to 1.1.

Here are the results of our color accuracy test with both the factory settings (left) and with our Design and Gaming profile applied (right).


Buy our profiles

Since our profiles are tailored for each individual display model, this article and its respective profile package are meant for MSI Katana GF76 configurations with 17.3″ FHD IPS AUO B173HAN04.3 (AUO439D).

*Should you have problems with downloading the purchased file, try using a different browser to open the link you’ll receive via e-mail. If the download target is a .php file instead of an archive, change the file extension to .zip or contact us at [email protected].

Read more about the profiles HERE.

In addition to receiving efficient and health-friendly profiles, by buying LaptopMedia's products you also support the development of our labs, where we test devices in order to produce the most objective reviews possible.

Office Work

Office Work should be used mostly by users who spend most of the time looking at pieces of text, tables or just surfing. This profile aims to deliver better distinctness and clarity by keeping a flat gamma curve (2.20), native color temperature and perceptually accurate colors.

Design and Gaming

This profile is aimed at designers who work with colors professionally, and for games and movies as well. Design and Gaming takes display panels to their limits, making them as accurate as possible in the sRGB IEC61966-2-1 standard for Web and HDTV, at white point D65.

Health-Guard

Health-Guard eliminates the harmful Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) and reduces the negative Blue Light which affects our eyes and body. Since it’s custom tailored for every panel, it manages to keep the colors perceptually accurate. Health-Guard simulates paper so the pressure on the eyes is greatly reduced.

Get all 3 profiles with 33% discount


3. Battery life

The laptop comes with the choice between two different battery units, either 38Wh or 45Wh. Our laptop came equipped with the 45Wh battery unit, and it performed quite well, lasting for 9 hours and a half of Web browsing, 9 hours and 3 minutes of video playback, and two hours and five minutes of gaming. Now, we conduct the battery tests with Windows Better performance setting turned on, screen brightness adjusted to 120 nits, and all other programs turned off except for the one we are testing the notebook with.


4. Performance

The laptop offers adequate performance, with its Ryzen 5 5500U, which is a nice middle ground between the Ryzen 3 5300U and the Ryzen 7 5700U. Here you can compare the benchmark scores of our laptop, as it goes against several of its competitors.

CPU benchmarks


GPU benchmarks


1 reason NOT to buy the Lenovo IdeaPad 3 (17″, 2021)

1. Design and build quality

The laptop is built entirely from plastic, which is totally understandable, considering the price of it. However, we would have liked it if Lenovo had put more effort into making it sturdier. When you are the brand that created the ThinkPad laptops, which annually show the world that you don’t need fancy materials on laptops to make them rigid and tough, you need to apply the same effort for your other, less expensive laptops, which make the largest chunks of your revenue.

Both the lid and the base are bendy, and the lid cannot be opened with a single hand. However, it sports portable dimensions especially for a 17.3-inch device, weighing only 2.10 kg, while being 19.9 mm tall.


All Lenovo IdeaPad 3 (17″, 2021) configurations:

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