Pros & Cons
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- Excellent near-30-hour battery life
- Punchy productivity performance
- Reasonably sturdy build
- A fine deal when on sale
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- Disappointing display
- Cramped keyboard
Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x 15 Specs
| Boot Drive Capacity (as Tested) | 512 |
| Boot Drive Type | SSD |
| Class | Budget |
| Dimensions (HWD) | 0.7 by 13.5 by 9.4 inches |
| Graphics Processor | Qualcomm Adreno GPU |
| Native Display Resolution | 1920 by 1200 |
| Operating System | Windows 11 Home |
| Panel Technology | IPS |
| Processor | Qualcomm Snapdragon X (X1-26-100) |
| RAM (as Tested) | 16 |
| Screen Refresh Rate | 60 |
| Screen Size | 15 |
| Tested Battery Life (Hours:Minutes) | 29:54 |
| Touch Screen | |
| Weight | 3.52 |
| Wireless Networking | Bluetooth 5.4 |
| Wireless Networking | Wi-Fi 7 |
Budget laptops typically top out at $600, with midrange models rising to around $1,100. That makes it hard to pigeonhole the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x 15 (starting at $749.99; as tested; price set to $569.99). It has a "midrange" starting price, and some nice features to match: a reasonably sturdy build, enough speed for everyday productivity work, and exceptionally long battery life. But it also comes with drawbacks common to budget models—subpar display, cramped keyboard, and mechanical touchpad instead of haptic—that keep it out of premium territory. Depending on your preferences, the decision may come down to cost. For all its problems, the IdeaPad Slim 3x 15 looks pretty attractive when it's on sale. We found our test model for just $569.99 at the time of publishing. Our top budget laptop pick remains the Acer Aspire 3 (A315-24P), which tops our list of the best cheap laptops at just $349.99.
Configurations: A Fence-Straddling List Price
Lenovo lists two configurations for the IdeaPad Slim 3x 15 on its website. The first starts at $749.99 (seen for $569.99) for a Snapdragon X X1-26-100 chipset, 16GB of memory, a 512GB solid-state drive, and a 15.3-inch WUXGA (1,920-by-1,200-pixel) IPS display. The second configuration is identical to the first but with twice as much SSD space, at 1TB capacity, for $879.99. (Lenovo no longer lists the configuration of our test unit, which comes with only 256GB of storage.)
Design: Bargain Builds Aren’t Necessarily Bad
You don't usually get all-metal construction with a budget laptop (or near-budget, anyway), so the IdeaPad Slim 3x 15's setup shouldn't come as a surprise: The lid is aluminum, and the bottom chassis is plastic. That said, the lid isn’t overly flexible, and you'll feel no give in the keyboard deck. The laptop feels sturdy enough overall, and it passed MIL-STD-810H certification. It just doesn’t exude the same quality feel as a $1,500 laptop.
Lenovo's aesthetic is fine, with today’s minimalist design: mostly dark gray with only the chrome Lenovo logo on the lid and a bright gray keyboard breaking up the colorway. Some of Lenovo’s laptops, such as its Yoga series, have designs that stand out more but are also considerably more expensive. I’m most bothered by the plastic bezels, which always detract from a modern appearance.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The IdeaPad Slim 3x 15 is reasonably portable at 3.52 pounds and a slim 0.70 inches max. Overall, this 15-inch machine is comfortable to use, with the hinge being just a little too stiff to open the lid with one hand. I have no complaints about the design and construction, particularly given its price.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)One interesting feature is the second SSD slot, easily accessible with the proper hex screwdriver, which lets you add another drive if you run out of space. That increasingly rare option makes the IdeaPad Slim 3x 15 a bit more future-proof (and an especially handy feature for my 256GB review unit.)
Keyboard, Touchpad, and Webcam: Standard Budget Fare
Number crunchers and gamers will appreciate the IdeaPad's numeric keypad, but most people won’t like the resulting cramped layout and smaller keycaps. The switches are decent, however, with sufficient travel and a precise bottoming action. I couldn’t quite hit my full typing speed with this set of keys, but they're generally comfortable.
My biggest complaint is the tiny function keys, which I noticed when hunting for the button to control the three-level backlighting. (Fn plus the space bar.) My other gripe: The backlighting spills out from under the keys.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The touchpad, meanwhile, is mechanical rather than haptic, which is no surprise at this price. It’s responsive enough, but a little smaller than it could be, given the gaps at the top and bottom, and the button clicks are a little sharp and loud. While my review unit's display is not touch-enabled, the generally available configuration has a touch screen, if that matters to you.
The webcam is disappointing by modern standards, at just 720p resolution. Most laptops today have at least 1080p webcams, and some are even sharper. The IdeaPad Slim 3x 15 is a Microsoft Copilot+ PC, meaning it fully supports all the Windows Copilot AI features with a fast neural processing unit (NPU), including Studio Effects video call enhancements. However, even with these AI-based quality boosts, the webcam just doesn't provide a suitable videoconferencing experience.
Display and Audio: Some Deeper-Cut Corners
You shouldn't expect an outstanding display when you spend $750 (or less) on a laptop. It’s not unheard of, but most manufacturers seem willing to compromise to hit a low price. And get ready for a big compromise here. The IdeaPad Slim 3x 15’s display is undoubtedly one of its most disappointing features.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)To begin with, it’s 15.3 inches diagonally but only WUXGA (1,920 by 1,200 pixels) in resolution. That’s dull enough to notice pixelated text almost immediately. The screen also isn't terribly bright, and its colors aren't as full and rich as I would like. The panel refreshes its image at a pedestrian 60Hz, but I don't expect anything faster at this price.
The audio isn’t impressive, either: The laptop's two downward-firing speakers don’t pump out much volume. Even worse, you'll hear a bit of distortion at full volume, with only passable mids and highs, and minimal bass. You’ll want to use a decent pair of headphones or a Bluetooth speaker.
Ports: Limited Connections, But Fast Wireless Connectivity
Usually, 15-inch laptops and larger have more ports than the typical ultraportable laptop. The IdeaPad Slim 3x 15 is an exception, with two USB-A 5Gbps ports, one USB-C 5Gbps connection, an HDMI 1.4 port, and a 3.5mm audio jack. And, since this is a Qualcomm machine, there’s no Thunderbolt 4 (or 5) support.
To its credit, the laptop does have an SD card reader, something that’s been lacking on several other laptops I’ve reviewed lately. A proprietary power connection leaves the USB-C port free while charging, and you can also use any standard USB-C power adapter. Wireless connectivity is fully up to date with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4, an advantage of the Qualcomm chipset.
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Performance Testing: Punchy Enough for Its Price
To see how well the laptop stacked up to the competition, I chose a group of comparable machines. I started with the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3i 15 ($519 as tested), the Intel version that runs the entry-level Intel Core Ultra 5 120U chipset. That’s in roughly the same class as the IdeaPad Slim 3x 15’s Qualcomm Snapdragon X X1-26-100, the eight-core entry-level Snapdragon X chipset. You can sometimes find the Intel version for less than the Qualcomm version, so that provides a decent point of comparison for overall value.
For the rest of the competitors, I chose more AMD- and Intel-based systems: the Acer Aspire Go 15 (AG15-51P-510U) ($599.99 as tested), the Asus Vivobook Go 15 (E1504FA-AS54) ($382 as tested), and the Dell Inspiron 15 (3535) ($449.99 as tested). Note, though, that we're comparing a set of midrange performance chips to the IdeaPad's entry-level processor. This arrangement may sound off-base, but hold your judgment until we get into the results.
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
Our primary tests for Arm-based laptops are CPU-centric or processor-intensive. Maxon's Cinebench 2024 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we see how long the freeware video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 takes to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
Other tests we usually use on Windows systems, namely UL's PCMark 10, aren't available for Arm-based CPUs in a way that we can use, so they're excluded from this comparison. Windows on Arm has far better app compatibility than before, but it can't run everything that x86-based PCs can.
In the benchmarks we could run, the IdeaPad Slim 3x 15 dominated these budget systems—making Lenovo's frequently discounted price all the more enticing. However, this level of performance for just above $550 when on sale makes it tough to place the Snapdragon-based IdeaPad among its peers.
Perhaps Qualcomm is slowly setting a new performance baseline for affordable laptops, but that can only be proved with testing more systems. Suffice to say, the IdeaPad Slim 3x 15 will tackle any general productivity task you toss its way with ease, not to mention minor content creation work.
Graphics Tests
We challenge each reviewed system’s graphics with a quintet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K) use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds.
Steel Nomad's regular (4K) and Light (1440p) subtests focus on APIs more commonly used for game development, like Metal and DirectX 12 in addition to Vulkan, to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. A fifth test, Solar Bay, emphasizes ray-tracing performance using Vulkan or Metal APIs at 1440p resolution. (The IdeaPad Slim 3x could not run this fifth subtest, so we've removed it from the chart below. Likewise, some systems could not complete the Steel Nomad subtests, so they've been omitted.)
The IdeaPad Slim 3x 15’s particular Snapdragon X chipset has the slowest Adreno integrated graphics processor (IGP) in Qualcomm's lineup. But it still turned in a solid performance, topping the other x86 systems in three of the four tests it managed to complete. (Intel's Core 5 120U IGP kept pace with the 3x's Adreno IGP and beat it once.)
None of these systems is a gaming laptop or a powerful creative workstation, but the Slim 3x 15 is technically the most potent of the bunch. It can handle one-off creative tasks like editing a photo or home video, but you'll need to spend much more for a laptop that can reliably and regularly handle that kind of work.
Battery Life and Display Tests
We test each laptop and tablet's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
The IdeaPad Slim 3x 15 has a 60-watt-hour battery, which isn’t a lot for a 15-inch laptop. However, it benefits from a low-resolution IPS display and a profoundly efficient Qualcomm Arm-based processor. When the display is at 50%, it produces just 69 nits of brightness, lower than many competing laptops.
The result was incredibly long battery life—almost 30 hours looping our test video. I was so surprised by that result that I reran the test to confirm. Granted, the battery won't last as long if you boost the brightness to a more usable level, but you’ll still get impressive, multi-day life.
Now the bad news: Like a lot of budget or near-budget laptops, the IdeaPad compromises big time on display quality. First, it wasn’t very bright, a slim 312 nits at 100% brightness, which is just enough to be visible with a lot of ambient light but well below modern standards. The color coverage was also narrow, coming in at just 67% of sRGB, 52% of AdobeRGB, and 53% of DCI-P3. That’s well below the IPS averages of around 95%, 75%, and 75%, respectively.