Deal | Affordable Lenovo laptop with 16 GB RAM drops below $650 courtesy of 57% discount

Courtesy of an ongoing sale, the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5x laptop with a healthy set of specifications is now available with a sizable $850 discount on Lenovo's official US online store, bringing its price down to just under $650.

This specific variant of the IdeaPad Slim 5x laptop comes equipped with a relatively powerful ARM-based Snapdragon X2 Plus 42-100 SoC paired with 16 GB of LPDDR5X RAM and half a terabyte of solid-state storage (M.2 2242). Customers are requested to utilize the following coupon during checkout: SLIM5SAVINGS.

Lenovo Slim 5x: ARM-powered budget laptop with solid performance and 16 GB RAM

Needless to say, folks who have workflows that are heavily dependent on x86-only applications will have to pass up on this quite attractive offer. However, other customers with primarily browser-based workflows, as well as those who use applications with native ARM support will be plenty pleased with the performance that the Slim 5x brings to the table.

To be more specific, the Snapdragon X2 Plus 42-100 SoC features a 6-core setup consisting solely of Oryon v3 cores, clocked at 4 GHz. In synthetic benchmarks, the 3 nm SoC can easily keep up with Apple's M3 SoC and is around 37% faster than Apple's A18 Pro SoC found in the MacBook Neo.

Compare to x86-based chips such as the Core Ultra 7 355 "Panther Lake" CPU found in pricier laptops, the X2 Plus 42-100 SoC should be a few percentage points faster. In simpler terms, the vast majority of ARM-native workloads should absolutely fly on the system. 

For non-native applications and gaming, translation layers will have to come into play, which will undoubtedly affect performance quite heavily. 

In terms of raw performance, the Adreno X2-45 iGPU is quite decent and can keep up with a Radeon 880M iGPU found in modern APUs such as the Ryzen AI 9 465. Therefore, some lightweight video editing and photo editing should be doable on the system.

At the front, the IdeaPad Slim 5x laptop boasts a 15-inch display with an IPS panel and a resolution of 1920 x 1200. According to Lenovo, the panel should be able to cover the sRGB color gamut entirely and feature a 400-nit peak brightness. Thankfully, 120 Hz support is present. 

The IO on offer is generous enough, considering the price:

• Dual USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C
• Dual USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A
• HDMI 2.1
• MicroSD
• 3.5 mm audio 

At its current discounted price on Lenovo, the Slim 5x laptop offers a healthy value proposition for folks with moderately intensive workloads that aren't dependent on the x86 architecture.

Disclaimer: Notebookcheck is not responsible for price changes carried out by retailers. The discounted price or deal mentioned in this item was available at the time of writing and may be subject to time restrictions and/or limited unit availability.