Top 5 reasons to BUY or NOT to buy the Lenovo IdeaPad 3 Gen 6 (14″)

The IdeaPad 3 from Lenovo is one of the best-selling devices in the budget laptop category. This is because it offers decent hardware at a very affordable price, so what’s not to like. Today we have the IdeaPad 3 Gen 6 (14″). Bear in mind that this is the 3 (non-I model), meaning that it packs the Ryzen 5000 U-series, which are powerful, but more importantly power-efficient.

Keep in mind, however, that these specific units use the older Zen 2 architecture, despite bearing the 5000 name. It’s safe to say that this one will approach the best seller category, because it comes from a known brand, brings good performance, all at a reasonable price.

Today we are presenting you with LaptopMedia’s top 5 picks about the Lenovo IdeaPad 3 Gen 6 (14″).

Lenovo IdeaPad 3 Gen 6 (14″): Full Specs / In-depth Review


4 reasons to BUY the Lenovo IdeaPad 3 Gen 6 (14″)

1. Upgradeability

The notebook offers decent upgradeability, with a single SODIMM slot, which works in tandem with the 4GB of soldered DDR4 RAM. Storage-wise, there is one 2.5-inch SATA drive bay, and two M.2 PCIe x4 slots.

Here is our detailed teardown video, which shows exactly how to access both the RAM and SSD slots.


2. Display

The laptop comes with two display options, both with a diagonal of 14 inches and a Full HD resolution. The first display uses a TN panel, while the second one, which we actually tested, has an IPS panel. The IPS display has comfortable viewing angles, a max brightness of 333 nits in the middle of the screen, 320 nits as an average for the entire area of the display, and a maximum deviation of 11%. The contrast ratio is quite high, sitting at 1310:1. The screen also covered 53% of the sRGB color gamut.

The laptop’s color accuracy improved a lot once we applied our Design and Gaming profile, however, it still didn’t reach the standard. Here are the results of our test with both the factory settings (left) and with our Design and Gaming profile applied (right).


Buy our profiles

Since our profiles are tailored for each display model, this article and its respective profile package are meant for Lenovo IdeaPad 3 Gen 6 (14″) configurations with 14.0″ AUO B140HAN04.E (AUO408D) (FHD, 1920 × 1080) IPS panel.

*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


3. Performance

Our laptop came powered by the Ryzen 3 5300U and the RX Vega 6 iGPU. You could also purchase it with a Ryzen 5 and a Ryzen 7 CPU.

CPU benchmarks

Results are from the Cinebench 20 CPU test (the higher the score, the better)

Results are from our Photoshop benchmark test (the lower the score, the better)

Results are from the Fritz chess benchmark (the higher the score, the better)


GPU benchmarks


4. Battery life

The laptop comes with a very small 38Wh battery unit, which lasted for 8 hours and 53 minutes of Web browsing, and 7 hours and 36 minutes of video playback. 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.


1 reason NOT to buy the Lenovo IdeaPad 3 Gen 6 (14″)

1. Design and build quality

The machine is entirely made of plastic, which is completely fine, as this is a budget offering and not a flagship one. However, we would have appreciated a stronger chassis, especially from the creators of the ThinkPad series, which is known for its rigidity, despite using plastic for many of its laptops. The IdeaPad 3 bent like crazy, as the material seems really thin, which also probably has a lot to do with the 1.41 kg of weight and 19.9 mm height.

The lid doesn’t open with a single hand and the hinges feel pretty unstable, as even the lightest touch of the lid results in wobbling. The display has thin bezels and a matte finish, which are great for outdoor use.


All Lenovo IdeaPad 3 Gen 6 (14″) configurations:

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