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.

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.