Battery Life, Noise and Wireless Woes
The HEXUS battery life test involves playing back a 720p movie clip until the laptop is automatically forced into hibernation. A balanced power profile is chosen for the duration of the test, all wireless radios are disabled and screen brightness is set to 50 per cent.
Lenovo's built-in battery may not be interchangeable, but it performs in line with our Ultrabook expectations, providing roughly four-and-a-half hours of constant video playback from a single charge.
The U310 also managed to keep suitably cool throughout all of our tests, but it does so at the expense of noise. The vent on the left side of the chassis is constantly pushing out air, and, unfortunately, the fan is always audible. It'd be a stretch to call it loud, but the constant hum can be a distraction, particularly late at night or in a quiet room.
Overall performance, from a CPU, GPU and battery life perspective, is good, with the U310 making light work of anything other than cutting-edge games. It's an Ultrabook that should prove to be a capable workhorse, but it falls short of hitting that mark by offering poor wireless networking performance. Whether this is a hardware or software problem remains a mystery, but for whatever reason, we struggled to maintain a constant connection to our router.
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Wireless Network Speed Test Dell Inspiron 1520 (above, left) and Lenovo IdeaPad U310 (above, right) |
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From a range at which all other laptops in our office connected at full speed, the U310 would struggle to the extent that playing a standard-definition YouTube clip couldn't be completed without regular bouts of buffering. Using a quick web-based speed test to check performance, we can see that the Lenovo machine is struggling; we get a vastly superior connection using a five-year-old Dell Inspiron.
We had hoped that the wireless woes would be limited to our review sample, but the 500+ posts related to the issue on Lenovo's own forum suggest that ours isn't the first U310 to suffer from wireless instability.
