In today’s review, we will discuss the Lenovo Ideapad 330 – one of the best gaming laptops under $500. Lenovo has designed its Ideapad series for the people who love gaming, or the ones who need to work while traveling and take their laptops with them. Though the Lenovo Ideapad 330 is not the most powerful laptop present in the market, it is capable of providing sufficient processing power which will definitely wow the gamers as they won’t need full-fledged workstation PC with Lenovo Ideapad 330 by their side.
Today in our Lenovo Ideapad 330 review, besides discussing the specifications part, we will also shed some light on the negative and positive aspects of the laptop. This laptop comes in two models with different specifications, but in this guide, we will review the Lenovo Ideapad 330 laptop that comes with the 8th Gen Core i5-8250 processor, 8GB RAM and 1TB HDD. Before we move ahead, let’s take a quick look at its pros and cons.
Pros
- Lenovo Ideapad 330 is available at an affordable price.
- It has a pretty much good keyboard.
- RAM and Hard Driver are Upgradeable.
- 4-in-1 card reader.
- The Ethernet is full sized.
Cons
- Disappointing Viewing angles
- The keyboard does not have a backlight
- HDD of the laptop is slow
- Quality of the webcam is poor
- The stock battery is precisely small
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Verdict
Lenovo IdeaPad 330 is the best gaming laptop under $500 that has been specifically designed for gamers so that they can get the feel of full-fledged workstation PC while playing games at affordable prices. The Lenovo IdeaPad 330 is pretty much compact in size which makes it suitable for the users who travel a lot for work and uses it for multimedia activities.
Contents
A Review of the Specs of Lenovo IdeaPad 330
Design
Lenovo has designed its IdeaPad 330 using glossy polycarbonate material which gives it a premium look. IdeaPad 330 comes equipped with high-tech specs including a 15.6-inch Full HD IPS panel display,8GB RAM, 1TB HDD, 8th Gen Intel Core i5-8250 processor, Nvidia GTX 1050 GPU, etc.
The screen lid comes with a brushed metal finish. With a weight of 2.2KG, the IdeaPad 330 is pretty much handy, but it is not the lightest laptop available in the market. The weight of the laptop is the sole reason why the device is the perfect fit for the users who travels a lot. Lenovo is providing plenty of color options in the laptop including Platinum Grey, Blizzard White, Midnight Blue, Chocolate, and Onyx Black.
As soon as you open the lid of the laptop, you will notice the 15.6-inch display with a webcam and a LED at the top. LED will let you be assured that the webcam is on. The Logo of the Lenovo brand is etched below the screen on the left side. Though the laptop is best in the price segment, the laptop is competing hard with its rivals Lenovo Thinkpad T480 and Lenovo Ideapad 530S.
Display
Lenovo Ideapad 330 comes equipped with a 15.6-inch full HD IPS display. The IPS display has been designed to offer 1080p resolution with good quality images. Moreover, it has an anti-glare coating that has been introduced to eliminate light reflections. The anti-glare coating ultimately overrules the use of screen glare on the screen. The display of the IdeaPad 330 is capable of being brightened up to 200-nits which is quite average, but a brighter screen could have been much better on this part.
While testing the display of the Lenovo Ideapad 330, we noted that the black text appeared gray on the screen when the background was light or vice-versa. When we pushed the display up to 95-degrees, the colors were distorted to such extent that they were unrecognizable. No changes in the color of the text were noticeable until we pushed the display to 130 degrees.
Input Devices
The laptop has a standard Lenovo keyboard with 6-rows and multimedia keys. The multimedia keys on the laptop can be used to perform various functions directly from the keyboard. It includes play, pause, volume control buttons, etc. The 6-row keyboard also includes a numeric keypad with the ten numeric keys. The keyboard of the IdeaPad330 also comes equipped with the backlit feature so that you can use it in the dark environment.
Talking about the Trackpad, the laptop has a multi-touch trackpad with left-click and right-click buttons. It is situated below the keyboard and works fine with the laptop. The Trackpad of the IdeaPad 330 also supports multi-touch gestures. The integrated buttons on the touchpad are also of good quality, but the unwanted sound made by the clicks may bother you.
Connectivity
When it comes to connectivity ports, the laptop offers a decent amount of ports to connect it with various external devices. There is a USB Type-C 3.1 port and two USB 3.0ports. Users who wish to connect an external display to fulfill the gaming needs can use the HDMI port of the laptop. Besides this, the users will also have an option to use the ethernet port, the charging port, and the Kensington lock port. The Kensington lock port can be used to lock your laptop with your work table.
To fulfill the multimedia requirements, Lenovo has provided a 3.5mm combo audio jack. The audio jack can be used to connect a headphone with a microphone and external speakers for a theatre like experience while watching movies and playing games. Lenovo IdeaPad 330 also has a card reader to read MMC, SD, SDHC, SDXC cards.
Performance
As the laptop is equipped with 8th Gen Intel Core i5-8250 processor coupled with 8GBRAM with a frequency of 2400MHz and 1TB HDD, the premium specs of the laptop make it best suitable for the gamers and the users who want to use the laptop for daily work. When we tested the IdeaPad 330 against several latest AAA games, the performance was unmatchable even with some of the fast-paced games with action sequences. Besides this, the laptop also performed well against day to day apps usage.
Though the laptop offers 8GB RAM which has been divided into 4GB soldered RAM on the motherboard and 4GB DIMM RAM in the RAM slot, users will have the option to expand the RAM by replacing the 4GB DIMM stick with higher capacity RAM. The other models of the laptop come equipped with up to 16GB RAM, and gamers who feel that the specs are insufficient to fulfill their needs can add 16GB Intel Optane memory to improve the performance of the laptop.
Talking about one of the most important specs of the system, the GPU, we had an inbuilt Intel HD 620 Graphics chip with 2GB memory in our IdeaPad 330. When tested against several aspects, the GPU performed pretty much good, and the games including Fortnite with others managed to provide around 45-50FPS during the fight scenes when everything was set to medium graphics.
Other variants of the Lenovo Ideapad 330 included a GPU with up to NVIDIA GTX 1050 with a memory of 2GB or 4GB. The option with NVIDIA GTX 1050 is highly recommended for the core gamers as they will be able to play every latest game with good FPS on the screen.
So overall the performance on our Lenovo IdeaPad 330 laptop with 8th Gen IntelCore i5-8250 processor, 8GB dual channel RAM and AMD Radeon 540 GPU was pretty much good, and we noted that the laptop managed to run latest games including Fortnite and GTA5 smoothly. The FPS that was recorded while testing the laptop against the latest titles was decent and playable.
Conclusion
Concluding the review, we noted that the Lenovo IdeaPad 330 is a good laptop which is capable enough to wow most of the gamers with its specs and performance. It is one of the best gaming laptops that we have reviewed until now. Besides being equipped with premium specs, the laptop is lightweight and is travel-friendly. The laptop is also the best fit for the people who travel at work. The most crucial part is that it is pretty much affordable, and the company is providing good specs at a fair price.
Gamers with Lenovo IdeaPad 330 will not only get a good processor, but the GPU that comes equipped with the laptop is powerful enough to play any of the latest games with good FPS. Noting the features that the laptop comes equipped with, we will highly recommend the IdeaPad 330 to gamers and users who use their laptops for video editing and other similar stuff. For more information, explore the internet.
