Lenovo G570 Review: Sandy Bridge Core i5 2.3Ghz

Alright guys, this is my review for the Lenovo G570 laptop. I just picked this up a few days
ago, here it is getting out of the box. Nothing fancy here, just kind of throw in there as
you can see. Some Styrofoam and bubble wrap. Not the greatest pack job but this is a budget
laptop. This is something that’s cheap and dirty. So there’s the 6 cell lithium ion
battery and the wall adapter. The wall adapter is pretty compact but you still need this
power cord. The manual.. this is the Japanese model so I’m not really going to be reading
that. This is a size comparison with my Macbook Pro power brick. As you can see, the Lenovo’s…
you know it’s not too bad. But not too elegant. So I’m just checking out the laptop here.
Oh yea, I’m going to pop in the battery for the first time. This is real easy. The
battery sits flush with the unit. And brings the overall weight to around 2.6 kilograms.
So I’ll just plug in the power here and fire it up. Oh yea, ok, here’s some ports:
Headphone jacks, DVD slot drive, and a USB port. On the front you got the WiFi switch,
a row of LED light. Gods knows what they mean, and you have (what is this) a memory card
slot. So on the left side you have the hole for the lock, VGA out, LAN, HDMI out, USB
plus e-SATA, USB and USB. All the USB ports are 2.0. So you can see the hinge is pretty
strong on this sucker. It might loosen up over time, who knows. It’s quite a handsome
unit, the keyboard has these island style keys I really like. The trackpad is an average
size with two good buttons on there. I’m just trying out the DVD drive here. You can
actually get a Blu-ray drive in this thing if you want. So the trackpad has a nice textured
surface so your finger won’t stick to it. The trackpad buttons are pretty large and
well placed. And the keyboard is really nice. You have these sort of curved keys. And here’s
a better shot at it. You can see that textured surface so that your finger never really sticks
to it. And this is brushed aluminum on the deck of the laptop and it’s a really nice
feature for a budget laptop. It feels great on the wrists. I’m going to power it up
for the first time. Or the second time – I think this is when I installed an English
copy of Windows. So I just rebooted the machine holding down F12 and it booted off the DVD
and here it is with everything installed. And I’m just kind of man-handling the unit,
just seeing if there are any creaks or shakes or rattles and there isn’t. It’s actually
quite a solid unit. You know, I was kind of surprised considering it’s just a hunk of
plastic. But it feels quite solid and it’s not too bad. The lid on the other hand, it’s
got this glossy, plastic lid. It just looks kind of cheap and I wish they went with something
with a matte finish on it, but, you know, you can’t ask for everything.
Ok, here’s a little viewing angle comparison with my MacBook Pro from four years ago. The
display just isn’t very good on this budget laptop. The Lenovo, you can see the angles
just aren’t too great. Here’s the light diffusion from my overhead light. You can
see, it just reflects it back into your face because it’s a glossy screen, whereas the
matte display on the Macbook Pro diffuses it much better. Well, this notebook has a
Synaptics trackpad which I’m quite happy about. You can do two-finger scrolling. You
can do pinch-to-zoom, and some other gestures. Unfortunately, the trackpad isn’t that large.
So using these advanced gestures feels a little bit constrained. As I mentioned before, it’s
quite a handsome unit when you look at it with the lid open. But these are the function
keys. You can see the function key on the left hand side, but the brightness and volume
controls are over the arrow keys. This means you can only adjust these settings with two
hands! Some of the other functions are adjustable with one hand, but they’re not really vital
function, like setting the video out, like I’m doing right here. I’m just going to
test out the HDMI out. You can see right now it works just fine if you’re going to use
this as an HTPC. It’s really just plug-and-play. So here’s a video stress test. This is a
little clip. HD 1080p and it spikes up to 42 megabits per second. So this is really
stressing the video capabilities. And of course the core i5 Sandy Bridge processor handles
it no problem as long as you have the right codecs. I noticed that VideoLan player couldn’t
play this clip smoothly, but Media Player Classic did the job just fine for it.
So here’s a little gaming stress test. This is (let me see) Battlefield Bad Company 2.
So this is a fairly modern game. I got it on native resolution, lowest settings possible,
and unfortunately it’s just not really playable. I know it looks kinda OK in this video but
it’s choppy. As soon as the effects go, here I am in a multiplayer game, as soon as
the guns start firing and the particle effects and the dust, the frame rate takes a hit and
you can’t play competitively online. So maybe you can play single player, but this
game was meant for online play of course and I just found it unplayable. My Xbox 360 version
looked much better as well as much smoother and all that. So this is going to sort of
wrap up my review. As you can see the unit, has this minimalist kind of understated look,
and it’s much nicer than the other budget 15 inch notebooks that I looked at. Now things
that I like about this laptop, I like the fact that it’s pretty powerful. It has the
Sandy Bridge Core i5 processor, so it’s going to handle everything I want to do as
long as it doesn’t involve heavy gaming. What I also really like is the keyboard and
Synaptics trackpad; although I wish the trackpad was a little bit bigger. What I really didn’t
like about this laptop is the poor display. It’s LED backlit, but the viewing angles
are pretty atrocious, the contrast is not very good and the brightness is also pretty
poor. But it is par for the course for a budget 15-inch notebook. So that’s my review of
the Lenovo G570. I hope you enjoyed it. Visit my site Aibal.com if you have a chance.