Lenovo G550 Performance, Battery Life and Conclusion

Performance and Benchmarks
The Lenovo G550 works very well as a desktop replacement notebook, handling most tasks with ease. The target market for this notebook includes small businesses, students, or home users looking for a basic machine. The G550 has no problems surfing the web, playing SD or HD movies, or playing the occasional 2D game like Peggle. Compared to the older G530, Lenovo switched from using DDR2 memory in favor of DDR3 which is faster and now becoming cheaper. In theory this change could have meant greater performance, but we didn't see any significant change. Both PCMark05 and 3DMark06 dropped, while wPrime saw a small boost in speed.

wPrime processor comparison results (lower scores mean better performance):

PCMark05 measures overall system performance (higher scores mean better performance):

3DMark06 measures overall graphics performance for gaming (higher scores mean better performance):

HDTune storage drive performance test:

Heat and Noise
Thermal performance of the G550 is very good thanks to the large chassis, slower processor, and integrated graphics. Under stress the system controlled temperatures very well, and under normal loads the bottom of the notebook and palmrests stayed cool to the touch. Fan noise was minimal, with it staying off under light system loads, and going just above a whisper under intensive use. The one hotspot that stood out on the G550 was the panel beneath the hard drive that warmed up considerably if you were stressing the disk. The temperatures shown below are listed in degrees Fahrenheit:

Battery
The new Lenovo G550 uses a slightly smaller battery than the G530, but with a more efficient processor it consumes less power and gets longer runtimes. The G550 stayed running for 4 hours and 18 minutes in our tests with the screen brightness reduced to 70%, Vista on the "Balanced" power profile, and wireless active. This is better than the original 3 hours and 29 minutes the G530 managed with a larger battery. While I hate to see the battery capacity decrease, at least the efficiency made up for it and gave us a net gain in battery life.

Conclusion
The Lenovo G550 is a very solid and durable notebook, but now is missing some of the features that were standard on the previous revision. From what could only be considered cost-cutting measures, Lenovo took away one USB port, removed the ExpressCard slot, and moved to an ALPS touchpad. These types of changes might not look as bad if the retail price also dropped, but it is selling for the same price as (if not slightly more than) the previous model. I would still gladly take this model over a lot of the small-business targeted notebooks on the market, but it is just a shame that it is no longer as nice as it once was.

Pros:

• Almost tough enough to stand on
• Textured interior and exterior finish hides smudges and fingerprints
• Comfortable and solid keyboard

Cons:

• Missing features from previous revision