2017 IdeaPad 720s is looking good!

Here are my 4 day impressions...

Pro's

• build quality is excellent
• it has all the ports I need, including a full HDMI port if you need to present and don't want to lug around an additional USB-C breakout box. BTW, you can charge the laptop using a USB-C cable into a standard 5V charger adapter used for USB devices.
• The laptop has great performance and with 16GB onboard you cannot go wrong. The GFX did well with some basic assemblies in Solidworks, I'll test some games out too at some point.
• The fingerprint reader is a great feature, however if you have a domain account at your workplace, the company profile may disable the reader and you will be forced to use the password (still looking into this)
• Battery so far has held up around 4.5 hours with light to moderate use with the profile set to balanced. This was mostly to setup the system for my work place and web browsing, youtube watching, etc. (bare in mind that there were lots of background tasks going on to update the OS also). I am sure that once all is settled the battery will last a bit longer.
• The trackpad is decent and what matters to me most is that it's surface is smooth. I had laptops before that were like sandpaper and my finger tips were raw after a days use. Still I use my BT mouse most of the time, but at my work there are places I cannot use a mouse.
• The keyboard has decent tactile feedback and the spacing is perfect for my size hands. The backlighting works well too, but what I miss is an option that dims them when they are not used after lets say 20sec to save on battery live. Instead it has three settings: off, low and high brightness.
• The SSD can easily be upgraded to a larger size down the road if that is something that is important to you.

Cons:

• The fan still is my biggest gripe with the system. There are times when they are completely off, but when they turn on and there is not a large load on the laptop they throttle up and down which makes for a very annoying experience. As soon as the load increases the fans stay at one speed and while that may be a bit louder it is less annoying as it's a constant hum.
• The display has a yellowish tint as Erfan pointed out. You can use the OS built in color calibration tool to minimize the effect but it's not as good as other laptops I owned. All in all though it is a small issue to me.

Bottom line:
I don't regret buying this machine despite the two con's. In fact I had more fun setting this up and it had fewer issues so far with the initial setup of Win10 and Lenovo specific drivers. My XPS 13 was more troublesome, especially the screen drivers.
With the 8th GEN i7 you get 4 cores and 8 threats in a 15W TDP chip which is amazing, so it will do well with any multicore apps out there. Handbrake and other content creation software comes to mind, of course some games or engineering applications that take advantage of those cores. To complement that you get a really nice upgrade to the older 940M with the MX150 on the smaller 14nm architecture.

 

If you could do the test it would great!

 

• The fan still is my biggest gripe with the system. There are times when they are completely off, but when they turn on and there is not a large load on the laptop they throttle up and down which makes for a very annoying experience. As soon as the load increases the fans stay at one speed and while that may be a bit louder it is less annoying as it's a constant hum.

I have a colleague with a Yoga 720 and, if we are in a meeting room, we can hear the fans turning on and they are noisy enough to have some people making jokes about it. You say that this Ideapad is just a "hum"...

 

In terms of gaming, it's holding its own quite well. At 1080p on medium settings GTA 5 I get about 45-50fps GPU overclocked 100mhz on clock and 700mhz on the memory. Destiny 2 being more intensive at 720p low setting I get 35-40fps this is with the latest nvidia drivers.

 

Let me clarify...

When the fan is on, what I assume to be full speed under load, it is certainly not quiet, but because the tone/frequency doesn't change it doesn't bother me as much as say, when the fan is constantly chasing up and down it's RPM range. So if I do a benchmark test the overall experience of the fan is less annoying than when I do regular tasks and the fan constantly adjusts. I have to say that in this regard Lenovo could do a much better job. Fact is there is only one heat pipe for both the CPU and GPU with two fans on the opposite ends. Instead one heat pipe for each device would have made more sense.

 

I have confirmed this is working. I had my TLC TV on HDMI over USB-C and my desktop monitor on the main HDMI out and then of course the laptop screen in extended mode.

See screenshot below of the setup...

 

Anyone figure out if this model specifically has its TB3 port accessing 2 or 4 pci-e lanes?

 

Greetings,
I bought the 720s 80XC model (i7-7500U/940MX/16Gb/512Gb/TB3). I can see that the new one has TB3 x2 lanes like the 80XC so I want to ask:
1) Wich type of hub is compatible with this models? (littel bit confused about Gen 3 version 2.x, DP Alt mode, etc). I saw this 8-1 hub: https://goo.gl/4dxkjk
2) Is this port compatible with an eGPU and wich will be the main concerns before buy a case & for example an NVIDIA 1070 GPU?

The 80XC model is very quiet on normal use. Then on a game for example the fans are loud. Not noisy but hearable.

 

How can we tell this model has its TB3 post running on 2 lanes vs 4?

 

Thanks for clarifying and the 4 day impression. About the fan noise, like you mentioned in an earlier post, this is probably easily fixable by a BIOS update. However, how long this takes to get released I'd wager depends how fast this problem is escalated and prioritised. And I guess that depends on how popular the device is and how many units Lenovo is able to sell. My guess is not anytime soon as this device still has quite limited availability (only place selling pretty much is MC and lenovo, afaik). Hopefully, I am wrong / availability improves and they release a fix before next year. The battery life does seem abit dissapointing though, as it really does seem closer to 6 hours on balanced profile. Could you try and test to see how it does on a more battery saver friendly profile? Is it closer to 8-10 hours then? Hopefully, they'll release a BIOS update which improves battery life aswell.

 

It would also be nice if someone could make a video running various games on this thing while displaying the fps, cpu/gpu clockrates and temps for the skeptics out there like me (even though I know its been said many times that it does not throttle under long term sustained load, seeing is still believing, especially moreso when you're thinking about dropping $1000 on this machine). I am specifically interested in CEMU/dolphin emu performance (e.g. super smash bros), if anyone would make a video of this would be very grateful.

 

Hi, I was wondering how glossy the ideapad 720s screen is. The Lenovo page says it's anti glare, but review sites say it's glossy. I am looking for a screen with as close to a matte finish as possible for my particular needs. It is to be a work computer almost exclusively and so any mirroring effect where head movements can be seen on a dark screen is unwelcome. Thanks!

 

I looked at this at my local shop yesterday. It's glossy, but I didn't find it annoyingly so. The screen's very nice, and arguably one of the best ones I've seen amongst the ultrabooks there.

Glossy vs Matte is obviously subjective as it tends to be either something you love or hate. I personally like them, and the screen looks great indoors. However, I could see it being harder to see in sunlight outside.

But yeah, I'm looking to this to replace my ultrabook that had an unfortunate accident with a parking lot.

 

Supposedly in HWinfo it'll show the PCIe bus width the port's attached to. I ran it on the demo unit at a local shop, though, last week and couldn't tell because they didn't have the TB driver loaded.

If anyone was wondering, the WiFi card was an Intel 8265.

 

Thanks for the info! It's somewhat misleading that Lenovo lists this as an anti glare screen, maybe it has something to do with the yellow tint that people have been noting, it suggests some anti blue light filtering. Also I guess a screen can have only 1 to 5% haze effect and still be noted as 'anti glare'. Nevertheless, other true matte screens from Lenovo are also called anti glare, so it is confusing.

 

The quoted response notes that there are 2 lanes

 

Even if it only ends up being x2 instead of x4, I'd still take half-speed TB over no TB at all.

 

Well, I guess my hopes would be to attach an external GPU, from what I am reading 2 lane thunderbolt relative to 4 lanes would lead to a hit on the order of 15% when using an external monitor and worse when using a laptop monitor. But that's just some redditer comments, I don't know that the info is reliable.

 

Understandable. That's been attractive to me as well. I'm more curious how that market's going to flesh out. Right now, it seems crazy expensive for the enclosure and the GPU on top of that. Can almost buy a new laptop. But then again, once you pony up for the initial investment, you only have to by the GPU after that. Tough call.

My current solution is having a separate, beefier laptop for gaming and using this one more for business and travel. But that won't work for everyone and may not even be practical going forward.

/sigh *goes back to gazing into the crystal ball ... *

 

That Reddit link still does not show the IdeaPad 720s. Did I miss something?

 

True, considering that these external GPU enclosures are huge, may as well get a desktop and get beefier all around performance.

 

You need to click on the little arrow after Erfron said:

 

Should be picking mine up tomorrow. Reserved an open box 8550u version for 900. That's a steal at that price.

 

Thanks! I will definitely buy the laptop.

 

You're welcome. This is the adapter I used, just in case you are curious.

 

That's the 16G 512GB version? That is a good deal indeed.

 

Not really sure what to look for, but here the bus configuration on mine...


This is the rest..

 

I'll try to stay away from my power source tomorrow when I am at work and see how much I can squeeze out over the day in regards to battery live on the power saver profile. I totally agree with you, only the squeaky wheel will get some recognition from Lenovo regarding the fan noise. Let's hope we have a large enough community to make a difference, but first we need that momentum of others that agree it is a nuisance.

 

Yeah it was. 8550U/16GB/512GB PCIe SSD. I picked it up Saturday, but haven't had a chance to do anything with it yet as my wife had "other" plans for me this weekend. It's pristine in the box - no scratches or anything.

My only concern was it disappearing while I was waiting for the money to come in. Fortunately, when I went in for another reason, the display showed out of stock and mentioned nothing about an open box. I reserved the open box Friday night, then grabbed it Saturday afternoon. All in all, it was quite painless.

 

Here's an interesting read posted over at Notebookcheck.net this morning about eGPUs in x2 vs x4 TB3 configs. The results were quite surprising.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/eGPU-Two-PCI-e-lanes-no-problem.266658.0.html

 

@840 G1 ...

OK, so I started to work on battery only at 11:08am today, then took at random times snapshots of battery percentage and time, so that I could create a graph of the discharge over the day.

Here my data:

The second column reads "time of sample", also when I broke for lunch at 12:30 the laptop was in sleep mode, so I corrected for my one hour lunch from that point forward as it would otherwise skew the math. The last column is then an incremental representation of time spent using the laptop doing various tasks, such as: using Outlook to read and reply to emails, running Spotfire reports on the Web and the client to make report updates, running various queries against DB2 databases, doing some excel math and lastly this is all with screen on time at 40% brightness and the power option set to battery saver. -- BTW, the fan never turned on once this entire time.

As you can see from the graph the discharge is fairly linear, therefore I extrapolated with in linear fashion the time the battery would run dry...



The Y-axis is battery percentage and the X-axis is the run time in hours.

Nothing too CPU or GPU intensive seems like will allow us to get nearly 10 hours out of this laptop.

Hope this helps with that question.

 

Have anyone experienced some distortions and cracking sound from the speakers? Or is the sound crystal clear even at full volume? When I have the volume at 100% I can sometimes hear a cracking sound from the right speaker. I wonder if I should return the laptop to get the speaker changed or if this is normal behavior?

 

I just noticed this as well, it's not from the speakers, it's an internal hardware/software issue because if you even use an external speaker or even a headphone/headset you can still hear those exact distortions and cracking noise as well.

Maybe because of a bad sound driver?
I will try to install latest realtek hd audio driver from their website and not from lenovo to see if it changes anything ...


EDIT:

After installing latest realtek driver from here (HD), it decreased those distortions a bit just a little bit maybe by 5% ~ 10%, but it's still here ...
@TorbVea Should you contact lenovo support about it please let us know what happened, I will try to speak with them tomorrow about this issue, I need my laptop for Christmas and I will be overseas in two weeks, no time for returning mine and getting another unit if that would be the case ...

 

Nice results!
In my experience, I could only get 4.5 5 hours. I think if you just use it indoors it could increase its battery time by an hour or two maybe? But I'm getting 5 hours at most from mine, that's enough for me ...

 

An update on the sound distortion, after removing dolby software these noises are completely gone!
Can you confirm this @TorbVea ?

UPDATE:

After listening to music it came back in a few minutes later and then gone again ...

UPDATE 2:

It seems that the noise is still here. If it's an interference, with disabling all those sound enhancement apps it should solve it, but no it won't change anything ... Maybe an interference when CPU fan turns on or something like that? I can't figure it out ...

 

Did you guys do a clean install or using the Lenovo load it came with?

I did a clean install and didn't notice any issues, but I was also at work and couldn't play any music either. It did some weird thing with loading OEM drivers, though, that I had loaded on a USB stick while reloading Windows. That was even after completely blowing away the Lenovo partitions and reformatting the new ones. I may reload it again to see if the issue persists.

Just another note - you need to load the Intel F6 driver during install, or Windows won't detect the SSD.

 

This answers my question completely. Really appreciate the detailed answer.

 

Just about to receive this laptop, pretty excited!

Wondering if anyone has tried a usb-c hub yet? Somewhat interested in getting a usb-c hub with power, ethernet, hdmi, etc., and then getting a usb-c charger to plug into that (since the 720s definitely charges through usb-c). Would be awesome to only plug one usb-c cable into the laptop to get everything!

 

So I received the laptop and everything seems pretty good so far. I seem to have a few minor build issues though, including slightly offset hinge (the plastic part), a pinprick "hole" in the left side palm rest (almost as if it was a mistake in the cnc'ing of the aluminum body), and last but not least a slight rattle in the trackpad. My wife's previous gen 720s has none of these things so I'm a bit underwhelmed by the build. However! I think the internals of this thing are pretty sweet and I might be able to fix the rattle in the trackpad, which probably bugs me the most. I'll open up the laptop in the next few days and let people know if I can fix it. Funnily enough my yoga 2 pro had the same rattle, and all I had to do was re-seat the trackpad and screw back in and everything has been fine since then.

Btw thanks to all who contributed to this thread earlier, really diggin all the detailed analysis going on here....super helpful and very much my style!

Cheers,

Dan

 

I tried to figure out what the noise was, and it seems like it is some of the keys on the keyboard that is vibrating when the speaker is playing a specific frequency. The sound is very clear when I use a headset. I did not bother to contact the store or Lenovo support as it is probably nothing to do with it.

I can confirm that my trackpad has a bit of a rattle as well. Would be nice to hear if you are able to fix it!

I also wonder if other have a partition called LENOVO of 25gb containing drivers? If so, is it possible to delete it to get the extra space on the main partition? Or would that affect the possibility to do a system recovery later?

 

I applied a fresh install, wiping all the Lenovo partitions and starting from scratch. Also, in the bios I changed the drive mode from RAID to AHCI, that way you can get around the Intel drivers for RAID. Once Win10 was up I started to apply all the drivers starting with low level device drivers (all the intel drivers).

One thing I know from experience is that the Win10 version needs to be up to date as otherwise you might have issues with the NVIDIA drivers for example. On my desktop PC I could for the live of me not get the latest drivers installed for my 1080 card only to find out that I needed a few Win10 updates to catch up. The error message was a bit cryptic as it basically just said that my OS or hardware was not compatible with the drivers I intended to install.

 

Dan...
To answer one of the other contributors on this thread who had asked if it was possible to drive three displays (laptop screen and two external screens) I used a USB-C mini hub that was my daily hub on my XPS13. The hub provides VGA, HDMI, USB3 and gigabit ethernet, but did not have the ability to feed power as well. There are however hubs out there that allow you to feed power that way and still use all the other features and I already confirmed that USB-C charging actually works over our port.

Like this one...

 

You are welcome. Sorry I can't help with the gaming question you asked. Maybe someone else will oblige.

 

Thanks, that looks awesome! Now just need to find a good usb-c charger. I found a couple 45 W and 65 W ones on amazon for about 35 CAD ish, but need to do a bit more research on them to make sure all the power requirements are met etc.. For what its worth though, my pixel charger (18 W) actually works to charge this laptop, although it goes realllllllllllly slow.

I thought about changing to AHCI too, but am pretty far in to loading all my stuff on this computer. Think its worth it to change now? I believe I would need to completely erase everything on the drive to do so.......

 

So I took the bottom off and had a look around for what was making the rattling sound. As far as I can tell, there is a little pin that holds the trackpad plate in (pic attached, I removed the battery to see it but you don't necessarily need to). When I held this down and clicked (or tapped without clicking, which is what i first noticed), there was no discernible rattle. So I think I found what was causing the rattling sound in my particular case. I tried readjusting it but couldn't quite find anything to do it properly without risking too much damage, so I ended up placing a small piece of electrical tape over it. Seems to be ok for now but eventually I would like to have another try at fixing it. For now it's good enough that it won't drive me crazy. TorbVea, if you do try to fix your rattle, let us know how it goes!

Not sure about the partition, but I would say it's likely that you can reformat the drive. I'm sure you would lose the lenovo system recovery option, but doesn't windows have something like this built in? Specific drivers are always pretty easy to get too, so not sure why they bother with the 25 gb partition...

 

Unfortunately so. Switching from RAID to AHCI will not boot, but there is no harm in the way you set it up. I was too lazy to deal with the drivers, so I switched to AHCI ;-)

 

Has anyone tried connecting this to an external monitor of higher resolution, say 1440. Does it make the fan loud and the temperature get hotter?

Thanks

 

I've received the laptop and it looks good.
I'm trying to to do a fresh install of windows but can't seem to boot from the USB. Can you help with the settings?

 

I'v got it to work. The problem was the way I was creating the USB boot drive.
Followed these instructions http://www.wikigain.com/create-uefi-bootable-usb-windows-10/.
The important part was selecting " GPT partition scheme for UEFI"

 

I just ordered this laptop about 10 minutes ago please tell me the good news and tell me it's a four-lane thunderbolt 3 connector and it will support egpus am I right or won't it does anyone have any details on using an egpus with the 720's