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Thursday, August 4, 2011

Lenovo E125-303522U Review

Business Edge. First introduced at Computex 2011, ThinkPad E125 Edge is one of the smallest portable sleekest and around edge. Fusion-powered ThinkPad can withstand potential commercial expectations and crafts high.

As part of the Edge series ThinkPad, the E125 is more or less related to the edge 11 in terms of size and design. This particular model under consideration includes a merger with AMD's 1GHz "Ontario" dual-core C-50 Advanced processing unit (APU). Consequently, the netbook has an integrated Radeon HD 6250 GPU. While the hardware is not exactly high end, the advantage of series phones have been marketed primarily to small and medium enterprises on a budget. Therefore, we will evaluate the E125 is its ability to provide adequate performance and ease of use for the average of the march, the business users in this review.

Specifications Lenovo E125-303522U :
  • Processor : AMD C-Series C-50 1 GHz
  • Memory : 4096 MB, PC3-10600 DDR3 SDRAM
  • Graphics adapter : AMD Radeon HD 6250 - shared with system RAM 1972 MB, Core: 275 MHz, Memory: 533 MHz, 8.813.4.0
  • Display : 11.6 inch 16:9, 1366x768 pixel, TN, glossy: yes
  • Harddisk : 250 GB - 5400 rpm, 250GB 5400rpm HITACHI HT5543225A7A384 SATA Disk Drive
  • Connections : 3 USB 2.0, 1 VGA, 1 HDMI, 1 Kensington Lock, Audio Connections: 3.5mm combo input/output, Card Reader: SD reader,
  • Networking : Atheros AR8151 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller (10/100/1000MBit), Thinkpad 1x1 11b/g/n Wireless LAN PCI Express Half Mini Card Adapter (bgn)
  • Size : height x width x depth (in mm): 22 x 290 x 210
  • Weight : 1.35 kg Power Supply: 0.28 kg
  • Battery : Lithium-Ion, 3-Cell
  • Operating System : Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit
  • Additional features : Webcam: Silicon Motion Inc.
Performance
ThinkPad E125 is powered by the AMD Fusion baseline C-50 APU as part of the platform Brazos. The first was launched in early 2011, this dual-core processor has a power low TDP (Thermal Design) is only 9 watts. Here, the processor runs at 1.0 GHz with 128KB of L1 cache to 1024KB of L2 cache.

This processor also incorporates Fusion GPU Radeon 6250, which has 80 single, shaders and performance far surpassing the old Intel GMA 3150 graphics commonly found in some Atom-powered netbooks. Hwinfo shows the Radeon 6250 GPU clocked at 275mhz (core) and 533MHz (memory) DirectX 11 support. As with most integrated graphics solutions that the Radeon GPU will need to borrow your computer's RAM, up to 1972MB.

For video playback, processor 720 operates in the YouTube videos without problems. Using the HDMI output, 1080p videos have been tested in both an external TV, Full HD resolution, but it proved too much for the C-50 APU and stuttering issues have been found.

Four GB PC3-10600 DDR3 SDRAM at 667 MHz is provided by Samsung in a single module for a total of 4 GB. Lenovo 303522U motherboard can support a maximum of two modules and is easily accessible by unscrewing the three screws on the underside of the laptop.

In the CPU-oriented benchmarks, Fusion C-50 APU is working properly, but the processor can not keep up with Core i3 380UM EDGE-11, or even the 1.3 GHz Athlon Neo K345, in some cases. For example, E125 integrates wPrime 1024m 3723 in a second, much slower than the K345 (1742s). SuperPi 32m requires a relatively long time 3,766 seconds, while the Core i3 ThinkPad Edge 11 flashed with the benchmark in 1776 seconds.

The test provides a PCMark Vantage score of 1647 points, which is quite normal, even for a notebook of this size. The score put the E125 goes against low-end Atom-based netbooks.

Compared to competing 11-inch netbooks, like Asus Eee PC 1215N (1.8GHz Atom D525) and the Acer TravelMate 8172T (1.2GHz Core i3 330UM), E125 to get PCMark Vantage score of 8.5 per cent and 76 per cent lower , respectively. In addition, E125 Cinebench R10 32-bit is a score on par with the Eee PC 622 vs. 634 points, but Lenovo will disappear in a model 64-bit in 1294 compared to 1692 points. Acer for the Intel Hyper Threading easily win the two other mini-laptops in all benchmarks of the CPU.

The comparison shows that the merger of the low end, low-power 1.0GHz C-50 is still comparable to some Atom higher clock speed, while more energy efficient. The AMD APU, however, not yet in a low-end Core ULV processor designed for laptops i smaller and lighter.

The 11.6-inch Acer Aspire One 722 and 10.1-inch Toshiba NB550D are two other laptops sporting the same C-50 processor as E125. As planned, Cinebench and 3DMark scores are quite similar between the two, means that this 11.6-inch ThinkPad packs similar functionality, such as netbooks of the same size.