Lenovo G500s review

Benchmark results

3D Mark - Ice 23946, Cloud 2236, Fire 297
Cinebench - OpenGL 11.02 fps, CPU 1.80 pts

PC Mark Home battery test- 162 mins

In the realm of £350 - 400 laptops the results help us come to the conclusion that the G500s performs above its closest peers. It just goes to show that, although compromised of budget parts, careful selection has resulted in greater performance. This was confirmed in the real world where, although not perfect, the G500s does multi-task with ease.

It can't match the Core processors for grunt, as you might expect, since they have more cores, as well as hyperthreading and turbo boost tech to enhance performance when needed, but the Pentium does just edge past the equivalent AMD-powered laptops - in its nearest rival, the G505, as well as the Samsung Ativ Book 9 Lite. It even shows the Acer Aspire P3 the door, and that's rocking a Core i3 processor - admittedly, a low powered version though.

Where it didn't seem to fare as well comparatively, is in battery life. A score of just under three hours in our benchmarking software under a mixed range of home-focused tasks isn't bad at all, especially since Lenovo only quotes four hours from the tiny four cell battery life.

But the G505 just had a little more juice left in it. Either version would be great for keeping you going for most of the day, though we would carry the charger just in case.

Gaming certainly isn't the G500s' strong point - the weedy on-board graphics struggling under pressure - though the 3D Mark score of 23,000 isn't all that bad, and the processor handles 1080p video fairly well, with just a little juddering.

The occasional web page was slower to respond than we would have liked, but it wasn't a total deal breaker.

And despite the lack of an SSD, the Lenovo G500s doesn't spend much time booting up - probably thanks to Windows 8 being just that bit zippier than its predecessor. The 8GB of memory helps, that's for sure.