Lenovo V17 G4 review: An affordable all-round laptop with a display surprise

For an estimated price of around $470, the Lenovo V17 G4 IRU makes a more than decent impression—at least if you exclude the poor graphics performance of its iGPU (UHD Graphics Xe G4 with 48EUs), which falls significantly behind the Iris Xe Graphics G7 with 80 or 96EUs. Although the laptop's case is only made of plastic, it looks like it is made of metal. In addition, it features a useful selection of ports and good input devices (although its keyboard has to make do without any backlighting), which isn't always a matter of course in this price range.

Further highlights include its screen. Yes, some aspects such as its contrast and black level could be better, but its color space coverage consisting of almost 90% sRGB is superior to lots of competing devices in the budget segment. Its battery life (approx. 7 hours of web surfing at reduced brightness) also isn't bad. Moderate emissions round off the total package. On the flip side, it's a bit of a shame that Lenovo has soldered on the 8 GB RAM (at least there is still a free SO-DIMM slot for expansions) and the device only has one M.2 slot. The manufacturer could also do with working on the occasional SSD throttling as well as the laptop's webcam.

The Lenovo V17 G4 IRU has an MRSP of around $470 and can be purchased from various online retailers.

Please note: There are currently two devices on the market under the name V17 G4 IRU. While one model houses the Core i5-1335U, the version we tested is equipped with a (slower) Intel U300.

Lenovo has opted for more of a discreet case design without any frills or gimmicks. Subjectively, its gray surfaces attract fingerprints much less than laptops with black surfaces. The case's stability is a mixed bag. In some places, the V17 is quite firm, whereas in other places it yields and flexes clearly. A lot of force is required for the hinges due to how tightly they have been adjusted—so you can't open the device with one hand. Thankfully, we have nothing to say about the quality of the laptop's finish.

With a weight of around 2.1 kg, the V17 isn't necessarily one of the lightest laptops, although its size naturally also contributes to this. Meanwhile, its height of 2 cm is neither much nor particularly little.

Ports

Apart from an RJ45 port, the V17 features all the typical connections you'd expect. In addition to an audio jack, buyers get an SD card reader and an HDMI port (unfortunately only 1.4b). There are also two USB-A ports (1x 2.0, 1x 3.0) and a USB-C port with DisplayPort and PowerDelivery functionality. As the ports are located in the rear half of the side panels, plugged-in cables won't get in your way.

The installed card reader delivered a solid performance of just under 90 MB/s (e.g. when reading sequentially and transferring photos) during our test.

The wireless module from Realtek (RTL8852BE) wasn't able to deliver top performance values, instead ranking in the midfield. Even so, the comparison devices achieved similar values.

The manufacturer deserves praise for including a physical webcam shutter. The webcam's image quality itself is rather poor—as we know it from most laptops. Its color accuracy and sharpness could also be better.

The laptop comes with a fairly compact 65-watt power supply unit, making it still easy to transport.

Before removing the base plate, you first have to loosen 10 Torx screws. You can see from the photos how the internal structure is designed. The free RAM slot, for example, is hidden under a cover. Lenovo only uses a 2242 model for its SSD despite the laptop having a 2280 slot.

Its packaging isn't entirely plastic-free. Both the bag for the power supply cable and the protective film and padding for the laptop are made of plastic. At least the material is appropriately labeled in each case.

The laptop is covered by a standard 12-month warranty.

The touchpad feels rather small in relation to all the other dimensions. Around 10.5 x 7 cm is no revelation in the 17-inch range. We would describe its precision and smoothness as good, but the click areas are somewhat unstable and rickety. All in all, however, the mouse replacement still achieves a "good" rating.

The Full HD display based on IPS technology only delivers passable performance in many respects. Be it its brightness, which at an average of 305 cd/m² tends not to be sufficient for outdoor use, or its suboptimal black level of 0.38 cd/m², leading to a mediocre contrast of 868:1.

The Lenovo V17 G4 IRU clearly belongs to the entry-level segment. Intel's U300—as we will show in a moment—is, as expected, not capable of leaps and bounds. 8 GB of RAM is also borderline, especially with regard to its iGPU, although you can easily expand its working memory.

The U300 is the slowest processor from Intel's Raptor Lake U generation. The 10 nm model has to make do with just one performance core (including hyper-threading), although it is supported by 4 efficiency cores. Nevertheless, its performance is on the poor side. Although the U300 is faster than the Core i3-1115G4  (at least on the CPU side), which was quite popular in budget computers until recently, the chip has no chance against a Core 5 120U or Core 7 150U (more performance or efficiency cores).

The V17 G4 also struggles when it comes to system performance. 4,370 points in PCMark 10 are not exactly impressive. Subjectively, the laptop sometimes feels a bit sluggish, especially when it comes to its loading times (e.g. when playing games). Multitasking is also not one of the Lenovo laptop's strengths, and the 17-inch device quickly reaches its limits.

The laptop's mass storage fulfills its purpose without causing a storm of enthusiasm. Even so, the installed 512 GB drive from WD (model PC SN740) struggled with performance fluctuations after prolonged load during our test—similar to the IdeaPad Slim 3i comparison device—as our DiskSpd loop proved.