Lenovo ThinkPad E480 - Review 2022

The Lenovo ThinkPad E480 (starts at $599.99; $974.99 as tested) is Lenovo's budget fourteen-inch laptop for small and medium-size businesses and the education marketplace. It offers armed services-grade durability, a comfy keyboard, and the latest Intel processors for less than $one,000. That's the adept news. The bad? Information technology'due south heavy for the screen size, and it tin can run hot at times. The ThinkPad E480 tips the scales at nearly four pounds, making information technology a tedious choice for road warriors. And despite using an efficient eighth-generation Intel Cadre i5 processor, it tends to engage the organisation's cooling fan during demanding graphics tasks. We would exist willing to put upwardly with the majority and heft, given the approachable price, but the heat and frequent fan dissonance dampen the bargain.

Heavy, Simply Metallic

Lenovo attempts to streamline the ThinkPad E480's majority by employing tapered edges, simply there'southward no mistaking that this is more of a tank than most ThinkPads. You are getting a upkeep workhorse in the E480, not a boardroom status symbol like the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon.

The chassis measures 0.78 by 12.96 by nine.53 inches (HWD) and weighs 3.nine pounds. That puts it in the ballpark of the Dell Breadth 3490 (iii.79 pounds), another bulky budget laptop for business, too as nearly 1.v pounds heavier than the 2.49-pound ThinkPad X1 Carbon and about a pound more than the 3.07-pound Lenovo ThinkPad T480s.

The ThinkPad E480 comes in traditional ThinkPad matte blackness, but the test system I received came outfitted in a silver chassis. Unlike pricier ThinkPads, it does not feature a carbon-fiber case, but thankfully it's non made of flimsy plastic, either. The chassis is an aluminum trounce that'due south sturdier than plastic but not as rigid as a carbon-fiber ThinkPad; the keyboard deck flexes a fleck when you are typing. The system design does pass a dozen MIL-SPEC tests for durability under extreme conditions, withstanding grit and sand ingress, sudden shock, and other environmental hazards.

The keyboard itself measures up to the ThinkPad's lofty standard, merely I found it a bit clacky compared to the luxuriously silent gold-standard keyboard on the ThinkPad T480s. And the keys have a bit of a textured surface, which is a divergence from the usually shine experience of a ThinkPad keyboard. Overall, the keyboard is comfortable, with that satisfyingly springy ThinkPad feel.

The keyboard is spill-resistant but does not offer backlighting. Also, our examination organization lacked a fingerprint reader, merely y'all can add together one for $25 on Lenovo's site with certain configurations of the E480. Following ThinkPad tradition, the ThinkPad E480 offers both a touchpad and a red pointing stick.

The ThinkPad E480 comes standard with a i,366-by-768-pixel native-resolution display, merely the test organization I received features Lenovo's upgrade that bumps y'all up to a 1080p (ane,920-by-1,080-pixel) IPS panel. (Certain base models of the E480 offering this panel; you'll want to double-cheque what you lot are getting.) This upgrade is well worth the money for the sharper prototype and wider viewing angles. The display's effulgence is limited, only it suffices for indoor function use, and its anti-glare coating does an admirable job of keeping distracting reflections at bay. Note that the display, in any of its iterations, does not offer touch back up.

The system's stereo speakers are built for work and not play, which is to say their sound is acceptable for video conferencing but not music playback. They attain a fairly loud level at maximum book, merely the audio is not dynamic. The high and, peculiarly, low frequencies are lacking.

Essential Connections, Only No Thunderbolt three

The 720p webcam above the brandish produces a crisp image with accurate colors, merely it lacks items you can go as you move higher upwards the ThinkPad price scale and pecking club. On pricier ThinkPads, you tin can opt for an infrared (IR) camera, which lets you log in to Windows using facial recognition, or Lenovo'southward new ThinkShutter photographic camera, which features a transmission privacy embrace. You get neither the IR functionality nor a privacy feature with the upkeep ThinkPad E480's webcam.

The port selection covers the nuts, but I wish it had Thunderbolt 3 support or at least a 2d USB Type-C port. You do become ane USB Type-C port, only information technology doubles as the power connector, then you can't employ information technology unless you lot are running on battery power. Elsewhere on the left edge, you get a pair of USB 3.1 ports, an HDMI output, and an audio philharmonic (mic/headphone) jack...

On the correct side, you'll find a microSD card slot, a USB 2.0 port, an Ethernet jack, and a Kensington-fashion cablevision lock notch. If but I could glimmer and turn that USB 2.0 port into a USB Type-C Thunderbolt port.

On the storage front, though, I had no complaints. The test system I have in paw features a 256GB PCI Express NVMe solid-state drive (SSD), which represents a big speed upgrade from the standard 500GB seven,200rpm difficult drive on the ThinkPad E480 base model. I strongly recommend opting for the SSD, for two reasons. Starting time, equally you'd look, you'll get faster information access from an SSD than from a traditional spinning hard drive. Second, the ThinkPad E480 is already noisy enough with the whir of its cooling fan that yous don't need the chatter of a spinning hard bulldoze on top of information technology.

If you need more than storage capacity, Lenovo offers a 512GB SSD upgrade (a $200 upcharge over the 256GB SSD, at this writing), and for the budget-minded, Lenovo as well offers a 128GB SSD option, which knocked down the overall price past $100 versus the 256GB SSD.

Lenovo includes a i-year warranty with mail-in hardware back up for the ThinkPad E480.

Dig Those Spiffy Threads

The $974.99 ThinkPad E480 tester configuration hither features the eighth-generation Intel Core i5-8250U, 8GB of RAM, and on-CPU graphics acceleration, dubbed Intel UHD Graphics 620. The Core i5-8250U has 4 processing cores, with support for eight processing threads, and it operates between a stock frequency of 1.6GHz and a tiptop turbo of 3.4GHz. The base models of the E480 apply seventh- or 8th-generation Cadre i3 CPUs, and yous can go one step higher than this Core i5: a Cadre i7-8550U, which also carries with it modest AMD Radeon RX 550 dedicated graphics.

Overall, with the Cadre i5, the arrangement feels snappy during usual Windows tasks, from running office apps to browsing while juggling a dozen open tabs. One consistent behavior I noted, though: Running graphics apps like Photoshop and playing games caused the cooling fan to spin, sometimes loudly.

The productivity tests shook out similar and then...

Our test arrangement performed admirably on the PCMark 8 criterion examination, using the Work Conventional setting. That trial measures general calculating performance by simulating web browsing, video conferencing, and other basic tasks. Whatsoever score above 3,000 on this test indicates first-class operation, and then the result of 3,249 makes the cut. That it trailed the Dell Breadth 3490 can be explained in office by the Latitude 3490'south lower-resolution display, which creates an advantage for that Latitude machine on this test. Having more pixels to push leads to lower scores.

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The ThinkPad E480 also turned in an outstanding score on the Handbrake video-encoding test, abaft only the Breadth 3490. And thank you to its 4 processor cores with thread-doubling Hyper-Threading support, information technology achieved a competitive score of 563 on the Cinebench 3D rendering test. Looking at the dual-core Apple MacBook Pro's Handbrake and Cinebench scores, you can run across what additional processing cores do for intensive graphics work in programs that can tap them.

Gaming performance is limited, which comes every bit nada surprise given that the ThinkPad E480 relies on integrated graphics. The E480 failed to hitting frame rates higher than 30 frames per 2d, the minimum threshold for smooth gameplay, even on our medium-quality tests.

The ThinkPad E480 uses a three-cell, 45-watt-hour battery and ran for more than than 11 hours on our bombardment rundown exam. That's enough juice for the entire workday, plus working on the railroad train or motorcoach during your commute to and from work. That said, you ought to get a couple more than hours from the Apple tree MacBook Pro, Dell Latitude 3490, or Lenovo ThinkPad T480s, each of which features a higher-chapters battery.

The ThinkPad E480'south battery, however, charges quickly. With the E480's rapid-charging characteristic in play, Lenovo claims a lx-infinitesimal charge will get you back to 80 percent bombardment life. I put that merits to the test and found that Lenovo underpromised and overdelivered; a completely dead battery shot to 86 per centum in an hour.

Performance Over Design

All budget machines are studies in sacrifice, forcing you lot to decide which facets you are willing to compromise and which you are non. The Lenovo ThinkPad E480 forces you to surrender more on the design and portability side of things than on features and cadre componentry.

At nearly 4 pounds, it's a hefty laptop for a 14-incher; spend more, and y'all tin become a 14-inch model that weighs closer to 3 pounds, or perhaps even less. Information technology lacks Thunderbolt 3 back up for speedy data transfers, an external GPU connectedness, or daisy-chainable video-out. And its thermals are a chip worrisome; the cooling fan doesn't always engage, but information technology frequently cycles on during graphics tasks and games. And when it does, it makes itself known.

On the other hand, Lenovo doesn't force yous to settle for the plastic chassis then typical of other upkeep laptops; you get durable aluminum. Its display is adequately abrupt if you opt for the 1080p-resolution model, and information technology is similar in quality to the screens on pricier models. Within, it features ample memory and a snappy SSD, along with a quad-core, Hyper-Threading-enabled processor from Intel's latest lineup, if y'all match our exam model. And its battery life is more adequate.

If you lot are on a budget and care more about durability and raw performance than design, the ThinkPad E480 delivers reasonable bang for your buck, along with a comfortable ThinkPad keyboard. Just we wouldn't recommend it for heavy graphical lifting (information technology'll exist noisy) or frequent travel about town (it'south heftier than it should be).