Intel’s new Core i3-N305 is a peculiar little chip. It’s one of Intel’s Alder Lake-N CPUs, and with its eight cores and speeds of up to 3.8GHz, it feels it belongs in the Core i3 line rather than the barebones “Processor” line of the cheaper, four-core N100. However, those eight cores are Efficiency cores rather than the Performance cores you’ll find in the higher-end 12th and 13th gen Core i3 part, and this has a tangible impact on performance. Basically, I’d say this chip has more in common with the old Pentium Gold CPUs than a modern Core i3.

Chrome OS has grown over the years since its first release. With each update, something new is added to make a feature better or have Chrome OS in general run much smoother. At the time of this review being published, the current OS version was 93.0.4577.107. This update doesn’t compare to new features as Chrome OS 92 does, but some bug fixes and minor additions make the operating system run smoother. The two P-cores in the 1235U are capable of multi-threading and can run at a maximum turbo power of 4.4GHz. The eight E-cores are capable of a maximum 3.3GHz. The CPU’s base power is 15 watts, while the maximum turbo power is 55 watts. The Flex 5i also supports Rapid Charge Boost, regaining two hours of use from the 52.5Wh battery on just a 15-minute charge. If I can live with the ergonomics, I’m more than happy with the screen. The 14in IPS display follows the Chromebook Plus spec with its 1080p resolution but it turns out to be surprisingly capable in other ways. Sure, colour performance isn’t anything to write home about, with an sRGB colour gamut of 61% (that’s equivalent to 43% of DCI-P3) but it goes fairly bright, reaching peaks of 329cd/m 2. Colour and contrast are fine for most purposes, too, although the average Delta E of 4.21 (indicating colour accuracy) is on the high side. The newest chip is a Pentium processor but handily beats a Core i5 that’s two generations old. And it fares better against last year’s Core i3 mobile CPU as well. The sound quality on the IdeaPad 5i Chromebook Gen 6 is decent. It’s not the greatest but does offer plenty no matter what you’re playing. Since the speakers are front-facing, you’re getting the most out of the sound quality versus what you would if the speakers were at the bottom of the laptop.

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The new chassis material adds rigidity and having USB Type-C ports on both sides of it is fantastic. Putting all of those on one side should be a criminal offense, in my opinion. I liked the continued inclusion of a physical slider to disable the webcam. The webcam itself is average at best, but serviceable. Interestingly, both the Flex 5i and the Yoga 7i showed great variance between 100% and 50% brightness, with the Flex 5i shifting from 400.8 nits at 100% all the way down to 47.6 nits at 50%. The Yoga 7i had 324 nits at 100% and 39 nits at 50%. The Acer Spin 5 had a more expected variance, 552.8 nits at 100% brightness to 223.3 nits at 50%. Up to 10 hours battery life. Actual battery life will vary based on configuration, power settings, and software usage, amongst other factors. I suppose that depends on how you view entry-level and mid-range Chromebooks. However, a Celeron or Pentium has long been considered on the low end of that scale.Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). Consider the brand. We’ll go into more detail in a moment about brand and whether Lenovo is your best option for Laptops. But the point here is just to make sure you’re factoring in brand when considering the quality of a product. Some brands will be better known for quality than others, and no doubt some of the much higher quality brands will attract a higher price for their products. As for charging, it comes with a 45W AC adapter that can recharge the battery from low battery to full in about two and a half hours. It’s not the longest wait time, but if you’re near an outlet doing work, you won’t even notice a thing. Even after two weeks of using the Lenovo IdeaPad 5i Chromebook, this little laptop continues to surprise me. My first impressions on it mostly discussed the design changes and high-level thoughts. Those haven’t changed. But I also made early observations about the 11th-gen Intel Pentium Gold processor, noting that it impressed me.