Lenovo's ThinkPad E14 G3 AMD offers plenty of performance and an excellent keyboard
If you are looking for an affordable Office laptop from Lenovo, you will definitely stumble across the ThinkPad E-series. The manufacturer does not equip the third generation of its 14-inch E14 with a new chassis, but brighter IPS displays and the latest Ryzen 5000 chips from AMD. We reviewed the unit with the Ryzen 5 5500U, which offers high system performance in combination with the fast PCIe SSD. The AMD chip is also much faster than Intel' current Tiger Lake chips when you stress all six CPU cores. Intel is a bit faster in terms of single-core performance, but you will not notice the difference in practice.
The displays have often been a weakness of inexpensive ThinkPads, because a brightness of around 250 nits is not really up to date anymore. The new E14 G3 gets IPS-panels with a higher advertises brightness of 300 nits, and we even measured an average of around 330 nits for our test unit, so you have a bit more headroom in bright environments or outdoors. The default IPS screen is a good choice for common office scenarios, but you should get the optional IPS display with 100% sRGB coverage if you want to edit pictures.
Lenovo should definitely improve the port situation for the next generation. You get all important connectors including USB-C, but both the old HDMI 1.4b output as well as the USB 2.0 port at the right side are outdated on a 2021 laptop. There is good news about the keyboard: Contrary to some more expensive models, Lenovo did not reduce the key travel, so the E14 still gets one of the best keyboards in the mobile segment (with background illumination).
The fan is pretty quiet even under load and our test unit did not suffer from coil whine, either. The efficiency of the Ryzen 5000 CPUs has improved and with the slightly larger 57 Wh battery, the E14 G3 AMD manages practical runtimes of more than 10 hours.
If you are looking for an affordable business laptop, the E14 G3 is definitely a recommendation. It offers a good overall package and beats many other inexpensive office laptops from brands like Dell or HP in terms of display brightness and thanks to the excellent keyboard. More information about the E14 G3 is available in our comprehensive review:
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