Lenovo IdeaPad 330s (15″) review – IPS display laptop at an absurdly low price

If you are familiar with the Ideapad 330 series, you know that they are really one of the most budget-friendly notebooks which can actually deliver pretty high performance at the same time. However, it has a certain downside – it’s bulky and it looks freaking old. Fear not, IdeaPad fans, because today we have a laptop just for you – an AMD equipped Lenovo IdeaPad 330s with an IPS panel for a pretty tiny price.

Of course, it has an Intel version, if you are a fan of the blue company and it can be equipped with up to a GTX 1050. However, let’s focus on what we have in our office today. The device on our desk is probably one of the best solutions for office clerks and students who want to look modernistic, but also want to stay on a budget… or is it?!

You can check the prices and configurations in our Specs System: https://laptopmedia.com/series/lenovo-ideapad-330s-15/

Contents


Specs Sheet

Lenovo IdeaPad 330s (15) technical specifications table

Acer
Not available
Display
15.6”, Full HD (1920 x 1080), IPS
HDD/SSD
1TB HDD, 5400 rpm
M.2 Slot
1x 2280 M.2 slot See photo
RAM
4GB DDR4, 2400 MHz
Dimensions
358 x 244 x 20.9 mm (14.09" x 9.61" x 0.82")
Weight
1.87 kg (4.1 lbs)
Body material
Plastic / Polycarbonate, Aluminum
Ports and connectivity
  • 2x USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps), Sleep and Charge
  • 1x USB Type-C 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps)
  • HDMI 2.0
  • Card reader SD, SDHC, SDXC
  • Ethernet lan
  • Wi-Fi 802.11ac
  • Bluetooth 4.1
  • Audio jack 3.5 mm combo
Features
  • Fingerprint reader
  • Web camera HD
  • Backlit keyboard
  • Microphone Dual-Array Microphone
  • Speakers 2x 2W, Dolby Audio
  • Optical drive
  • Security Lock slot

What’s in the box?

Lenovo IdeaPad 330s (15″) is bundled with a couple of good old paper manuals and a 65W power adapter.


Design and construction

Despite the relatively low price, Lenovo IdeaPad 330s (15″) has an aluminum lid cover. Props to Lenovo for the nice touch here. However, the rest of the notebook is as plastic as it can be. On the bright side, this results in a super light chassis – 1.87 kg (4.1 lbs) is impressive for a 15-incher.

In addition to that, the screen features super narrow upper and side bezels, which shortens the overall footprint of the laptop – so far, so good.

On the not so bright side, however, the machine is susceptible to bending even with the slightest force applied to the base. Sadly, this draws the attention away of the otherwise good keyboard experience. The keys are relatively large (except the “up” and “down” arrows) and have good feedback with average travel. Some models feature an optional backlight, although the configuration we have doesn’t.

In addition to the keyboard, there are the power button and the touchpad. We are happy to see that the first one is not placed above the “Escape” key, which usually causes involuntarily triggers of shutdowns and restarts. While the touchpad felt good at the beginning, we noticed that the experience deteriorates with time. And by “time” we mean, no more than an hour. Probably because of a build-up of oil and dirt from the user’s hands but it is not a commonly seen issue on other laptops.

The sleekness of the Lenovo IdeaPad 330s (15″) is transferred to the bottom of the notebook. There we can see a clean look with a single long ventilation grill and two smaller one speaker grills. As with many devices in this league, the exhaust grills are moved at the back of the device, being trapped by the hinge cover. We are not really fans of that, but it means that none of the air is going towards your hands.

WidthLengthHeightWeight
Lenovo IdeaPad 330s (15″)/td>358 mm (14.09″)244 mm (9.61″)20.9 mm (0.82″)1.87 kg (4.1 lbs)
Lenovo IdeaPad 330-15ICH378 mm (14.88″)260 mm (10.24″)22.9 mm (0.90″) (+10%)2.20 kg (4.9 lbs) (+18%)

Ports

IdeaPad 330s (15″) has everything you’ll ever need, except if you are a fan of Ethernet connection. On the left, you can see a hole, meant for the charging of the device. Next, we have an HDMI 2.0 connector, a USB Type-A 3.0 with an always-on function and a USB Type-C 3.1. The last one we can see on this side is the audio combo jack. Moving to the other side we have another USB Type-A 3.0 port, this time without the always-on feature, as well as a full-size SD card reader.


Disassembly, upgrade options and maintenance

In case you have the desire to dig inside your brand new IdeaPad 330s (15″) or try to upgrade your memory or storage, you can do it pretty easily. There are no hidden screws, nor tricks around it. Just all 10 of the screws you can see on the bottom plate – and once they’re out of the way, you need to carefully unpry the panel from the main body.

First, you’re going to see an interesting setup – the CPU, the RAM DIMM, and the M.2 slot are covered by a plastic black plate. It is held in place by some pinches and a total of four screws. Underneath it we discovered something even more interesting – the motherboard seems to be universal, as there are empty slots for a GPU assembly. However, there is no way to add one by yourself, as it has to be soldered in place.

In addition to that, the cooling solution seems to be not too spectacular either but you’ll get real-life information about it in our “Temperature” section.

We are happy to see a free DIMM for RAM addition. It being empty would mean that there are 4 GB of chips soldered somewhere on the motherboard.

Right next to the RAM slots is located the M.2 PCIe SSD slot – a nice addition to a super cheap device.

In the bottom right side is located the 5400rpm 1TB Western Digital HDD. Everything seems too good to be true.

And finally, the balance in the Lenovo universe is back on track as there is a stupidly small battery inside of this laptop. And don’t get us wrong, physically, the battery unit is not that little, but capacity-wise, it is rated at the mere 30Wh. Don’t worry though, probably you’ll have enough time to boot the Operating system and open your web browser before you need to plug the power cord.


Display quality

Lenovo IdeaPad 330s (15″) is equipped with a Full HD IPS panel, model number AUO B156HAN02.1 – essentially, the same we saw in ASUS VivoBook S15 S530. Its diagonal is 15.6″ (39.62 cm), and the resolution – 1920 x 1080p. Additionally, the screen ratio is 16:9, the pixel density – 142 ppi, their pitch – 0.18 x 0.18 mm. The screen can be considered Retina when viewed from at least 60 cm (from this distance, the average human eye can’t see the individual pixels).

Viewing angles are comfortable. We offer images at different angles to evaluate the quality.

The maximum measured brightness is 272 nits (cd/m2) in the middle of the screen and 258 nits (cd/m2) average across the surface with a maximum deviation of 10%. The Correlated Color Temperature on a white screen and at maximum brightness is 5930K (average) – just a little warmer than the 6500K optimum for sRGB. The average color temperature through the grey scale before profiling is 5970K.
In the illustration below you can see how the display performs from uniformity perspective. The illustration below shows how matters are for operational brightness levels (approximately 140 nits) – in this particular case at 62% Brightness (White level = 141 cd/m2, Black level = 0.11 cd/m2).
Values of dE2000 over 4.0 should not occur, and this parameter is one of the first you should check if you intend to use the laptop for color sensitive work (a maximum tolerance of 2.0 ). The contrast ratio is pretty good – 1270:1.

To make sure we are on the same page, we would like to give you a little introduction to the sRGB color gamut and the Adobe RGB. To start, there’s the CIE 1976 Uniform Chromaticity Diagram that represents the visible specter of colors by the human eye, giving you a better perception of the color gamut coverage and the color accuracy.

Inside the black triangle, you will see the standard color gamut (sRGB) that is being used by millions of people in HDTV and on the web. As for the Adobe RGB, this is used in professional cameras, monitors etc for printing. Basically, colors inside the black triangle are used by everyone and this is the essential part of the color quality and color accuracy of a mainstream notebook.

Still, we’ve included other color spaces like the famous DCI-P3 standard used by movie studios, as well as the digital UHD Rec.2020 standard. Rec.2020, however, is still a thing of the future and it’s difficult for today’s displays to cover that well. We’ve also included the so-called Michael Pointer gamut, or Pointer’s gamut, which represents the colors that naturally occur around us every day.

The yellow dotted line shows Lenovo IdeaPad 330s (15″)’s color gamut coverage.

Its display covers only 53% of the sRGB/ITU-R BT.709 (web/HDTV standard) in CIE1976.

Our “Design and Gaming” profile delivers optimal color temperature (6500K) at 140 cd/m2 luminance and sRGB gamma mode.

We tested the accuracy of the display with 24 commonly used colors like light and dark human skin, blue sky, green grass, orange etc. You can check out the results at factory condition and also, with the “Design and Gaming” profile.

Below you can compare the scores of Lenovo IdeaPad 330s (15″) with the default settings (left), and with the “Gaming and Web design” profile (right).

The next figure shows how well the display is able to reproduce really dark parts of an image, which is essential when watching movies or playing games in low ambient light.

The left side of the image represents the display with stock settings, while the right one is with the “Gaming and Web Design” profile activated. On the horizontal axis, you will find the grayscale and on the vertical axis – the luminance of the display. On the two graphs below you can easily check for yourself how your display handles the darkest nuances but keep in mind that this also depends on the settings of your current display, the calibration, the viewing angle, and the surrounding light conditions.

Response time (Gaming capabilities)

We test the reaction time of the pixels with the usual “black-to-white” and “white-to-black” method from 10% to 90% and vice versa.

We recorded Fall Time + Rise Time = 29 ms.


Health impact – PWM / Blue Light

PWM (Screen flickering)

Pulse-width modulation (PWM) is an easy way to control monitor brightness. When you lower the brightness, the light intensity of the backlight is not lowered, but instead turned off and on by the electronics with a frequency indistinguishable to the human eye. In these light impulses, the light/no-light time ratio varies, while brightness remains unchanged, which is harmful to your eyes. You can read more about that in our dedicated article on PWM.

Thankfully, Lenovo IdeaPad 330s (15″)’s display is free from flickering at every brightness level. This means that the display is safe for use for extended periods of time, at least in this aspect.

Blue light emissions

Installing our Health-Guard profile not only eliminates PWM but also reduces the harmful Blue Light emissions while keeping the colors of the screen perceptually accurate. If you’re not familiar with the Blue light, the TL;DR version is – emissions that negatively affect your eyes, skin and your whole body. You can find more information about that in our dedicated article on Blue Light.

Conclusions

Lenovo has definitely chosen an adequate IPS panel for the IdeaPad 330s (15″), especially given the pricing of the device. It features a good contrast ratio, comfortable viewing angles and lack of PWM-adjustment of the brightness. However, it lacks almost half of the sRGB colors.

Buy our profiles

Since our profiles are tailored for each individual display model, this article and its respective profile package are meant for Lenovo IdeaPad 330s (15″) configurations with 15.6″ AUO B156HAN02.1 (FHD, 1920 × 1080) IPS.

*Should you have problems with downloading the purchased file, try using a different browser to open the link you’ll receive via e-mail. If the download target is a .php file instead of an archive, change the file extension to .zip or contact us at [email protected].

Read more about the profiles HERE.

In addition to receiving efficient and health-friendly profiles, by buying LaptopMedia's products you also support the development of our labs, where we test devices in order to produce the most objective reviews possible.

Office Work

Office Work should be used mostly by users who spend most of the time looking at pieces of text, tables or just surfing. This profile aims to deliver better distinctness and clarity by keeping a flat gamma curve (2.20), native color temperature and perceptually accurate colors.

Design and Gaming

This profile is aimed at designers who work with colors professionally, and for games and movies as well. Design and Gaming takes display panels to their limits, making them as accurate as possible in the sRGB IEC61966-2-1 standard for Web and HDTV, at white point D65.

Health-Guard

Health-Guard eliminates the harmful Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) and reduces the negative Blue Light which affects our eyes and body. Since it’s custom tailored for every panel, it manages to keep the colors perceptually accurate. Health-Guard simulates paper so the pressure on the eyes is greatly reduced.

Get all 3 profiles with 33% discount


Sound

The sound produced from Lenovo IdeaPad 330s (15″)’s speakers is relatively good. The low tones are a little off the norm, while the mids and highs are clear.


Drivers

All of the drivers for Lenovo IdeaPad 330s (15″) are available on Lenovo’s official web page: https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/us/en/products/laptops-and-netbooks/300-series/330-15arr/downloads

Battery

Now, we conduct the battery tests with Windows Better performance setting turned on, screen brightness adjusted to 120 nits and all other programs turned off except for the one we are testing the notebook with. Obviously, we wouldn’t expect anything spectacular from a 30Wh battery. So let’s jump straight to the results – 4 hours of web browsing, 3 hours of video playback, and an hour and 10 minutes of “gaming experience”. These screen on times honestly made us feel bitter sadness. It was too good to be true, but perhaps you have to let something go, right?!

In order to simulate real-life conditions, we used our own script for automatic web browsing through over 70 websites.


CPU options

Lenovo IdeaPad 330s 15″ is available in two major options – one with Intel processors and one equipped with AMD devices. This review is about the AMD equipped configurations. You can get the notebook with a variety of 7th Gen A APUs or with the newer Ryzen processors.


GPU options

The choice of graphics cards for this laptop is CPU dependent. Basically, apart from the integrated graphics solutions typical for the certain CPUs, you can get an AMD Radeon 540 and AMD Radeon 530. If you opt for an Intel machine, you can get up to NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 (2GB GDDR5).


Gaming tests

Being equipped with a Ryzen 3 2200U, there is not a lot to be expected. The onboard graphics is the Vega 3. After we tested it with some light games and some… well, not so light, we weren’t impressed at all. Obviously, this laptop is not meant for gaming, so many of you won’t even care about this part of the review, but the frames are basically lower than the ones Intel’s UHD620 provides.

cs-go-benchmarks

CS:GOHD 1080p, Low (Check settings)HD 1080p, Medium (Check settings)HD 1080p, MAX (Check settings)
Average FPS41 fps26 fps– fps

GTA-V-benchmarks

Grand Theft Auto V (GTA 5)HD 720p, Normal (Check settings)HD 720p, High (Check settings)HD 720p, Very High (Check settings)
Average FPS31 fps– fps– fps

Temperatures and comfort

Max CPU load

In this test we use 100% on the CPU cores, monitoring their frequencies and chip temperature. The first column shows a computer’s reaction to a short load (2-10 seconds), the second column simulates a serious task (between 15 and 30 seconds), and the third column is a good indicator of how good the laptop is for long loads such as video rendering.

Average core temperature (base frequency + X); CPU temp.

Ryzen 3 2200U (15W TDP)0:02 – 0:10 sec0:15 – 0:30 sec10:00 – 15:00 min
Lenovo IdeaPad 330s (15″)3.40 GHz (B+36%) @ 59°C3.40 GHz (B+36%) @ 69°C3.01 GHz (B+20%) @ 61°C

Lenovo IdeaPad 330s (15″) is the first device equipped with a Ryzen 3 2200U processor that we tested. As a such, we didn’t expect anything special from it… or at least we couldn’t know what to consider special. However, the IdeaPad 330s (15″) was able to easilly maintain 3.4 GHz (which is the maximum boost clock of this CPU) through the first and the second part of the test. Moreover, it never exceeded 69C. And while the end result of 3.01 GHz is somewhere in the middle between the base and the maximum boost frequency, the temperature at the end was just 61C.

Gaming comfort

While the IR image shows that the left hand side of the notebook is a little warm. However, the hottest spot is around 39C, which is a little higher than the average persons body temperature (37C).


Verdict

Lenovo IdeaPad 330s (15″) is a relatively adequate budget device with a good enough performance and an IPS panel – something rarely seen on a notebook at this price. Moreover, it has upgradable memory via one RAM DIMM and even an M.2 PCIe slot for NVMe SSDs. Of course, if you don’t want to pay a premium price for a notebook you have to settle with some cuts. Usually, manufacturers prefer to substitue the IPS panel with a cheaper TN one. However, here the cost cutting came mostly with the build quality, as there is a little wobble to the base, but still nothing too dramatic.

On the screen side, we have basically the same panel (AUO B156HAN02.1), seen on the ASUS VivoBook S15 S530. While it is definitely not one of the best on the market, it has a pretty high contrast ratio and most importantly – lacks PWM brightness adjustment. Also, the panel fails to display half of the sRGB colors but it’s still miles ahead of a TN model.

Sadly, there is something about this device that can’t be justified by the low pricing. As we said above, there must be something that has to cut the costs, but one should never sacrifice battery life. Yet, this is exactly how things happen with the IdeaPad 330s (15″). The petty 30Wh battery was able to provide only 4 hours of web browsing and roughly 3 hours of video playback. This could easily be a huge deal breaker for a lot of people but if you plan on using the notebook mainly connected to the wall, it won’t be a problem for you.

One last thing about the Lenovo IdeaPad 330s (15″) – if you wish to buy a configuration with an AMD processor, make sure you get a Ryzen model as even the cheapest option would be better than any Bristol Ridge CPU.

Pros

  • Adequately priced
  • IPS option available, despite the very low price
  • The screen doesn’t use PWM for brightness adjustment (AUO B156HAN02.1)
  • Aluminum lid cover


Cons

  • Absurd battery life
  • Wobbly keyboard
  • Just 53% coverage of sRGB (AUO B156HAN02.1)

You can ch eck the prices and configurations in our Specs System: https://laptopmedia.com/series/lenovo-ideapad-330s-15/

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Me
5 years ago

What about noise level?
Many users complaining about annoying cooling system that activating at 40 ºC.
And it is low temperature for laptop, so it is happens very often even with easy tasks like chrome with few tabs.

braulio
braulio
3 years ago
Reply to  Me

i have bought the intel I7 versin and theres no really high sounds, honestly i didint even notice

Corey Cain
5 years ago

I really love the Lenovo laptop, because my first laptop is Lenovo. And it’s working good. I found only one problem, whenever I get an update in the laptop, it’s working too slow. Did you face such kind of problem?

Denis
Denis
5 years ago

I have Lenovo IdeaPad 330s with display AUO B156HAN02.1.
I bought your profiles (3) for 9.99$. I set 2 profile, but I can not set the games profile. Why? Can you help me??

Denis
Denis
5 years ago

People, do not buy from them any profiles. Site support is not working. I ran into the problem that the profile I bought does not work. I wrote support for the post office, in the comments. No one answered me after almost 2 weeks.
They just throw money. You can get it for free faster and better!

Simeon Nikolov
Admin
4 years ago
Reply to  Denis

Hello, Denis,
Sorry to hear that, can you tell me your e-mail address so I can check what has happened?

Javier Bardem
4 years ago

Wow . That’s what I call a detailed review. This is one awsome review of ‘IdeaPad’

braulio
braulio
3 years ago

I own this laptop, it is great BUT i have found that at least in mine the Wifi anthena had disconnected at least 2 times and also in my university i just cant get acces to wifi, it is an open WPA network with a user sign in password to access, and the missing gpu maked my 16gb RAM and the core I7 kind of usseless when editing video, also as mentioned, the screen is just CRAP in color accuracy, u must calibrate it…
but for programming and modeling omg this is glorious for the price