2017 IdeaPad 720s is looking good!

It's not 100% clear to me yet but it is leaning towards 2 lane. What I have learned recently is that 4 lanes on a TB3 port doesn't make all 4 lanes dedicated to that port. Maybe this will help https://www.notebookcheck.net/eGPU-Two-PCI-e-lanes-no-problem.266658.0.html

 

So will egpus work with the Lenovo 720 I'm just curious to know if I can get an Egpu and simply plug it in and have it work

 

That article was confusing to me I'm not that intelligent so I don't understand very much oh well at least I'm happy but anyways I was wondering if you could tell me does having two lanes limit the performance of any GPU or those four lines significantly benefit the computer

 

I think the general idea is that it should be ok and your real limit on performance is going to be your cpu. In the article posted one of the test machines was a yoga 720 with a 7700HQ, which is a bit more powerful than the 8550u in this machine (although the 8550u is more efficient from having four cores, not sure thow this plays into gaming performance completely).....The other was an asus transformer with a 6200u which still benefited from the eGPU, so you might get somewhere in between with the ideapad 720s.

Some important quotes from the article:

"The most important take home message is that the Yoga 720 with its 2 PCIe lanes for TB3 is able to match the scores posted by the overclocked NP9873 at both resolutions.

"The Yoga 720 with it's half-bandwidth TB3 implementation and mobile CPU posted higher scores than the overclocked NP9873 with its desktop-class i7 and x4 PCIe configuration."

"Although a 4-lane TB3 configuration is the preferred choice for eGPUs, going by OwnorDisown's results, those having notebooks with 2-lane TB3 connectors can still make a good eGPU investment so long as an external display is used. "

I think you will probably be ok and will benefit a lot from the eGPU! Let us know how it goes!

Dan

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

 

well thanks a lot for clearing that up that makes sense to me now I was just wondering why this laptop isn't more popular it's got everything Thunderbolt 3 dedicated GPU that's half decent comparable to a 950m great display do you know if there's going to be a successor to this with a better graphics card or is that mx150 as good as it gets for the time being actually scratch that idea off I'll be happy with the mx150 but I was just wondering basically if there's any coupon codes I could use in the purchase of this laptop in Canada because the price is just slightly out of my budget it comes to 10:38 with the discounts that they gave me that's after tax but I need to be around 9:50 is there anything you can do to help me thank you so much

 

I don't want to experiment experiment with an igpu or egpus mean I'm just saying do you think it will work to connect a 1080ti to this laptop I'm just curious to see what will what is to be expected

 

I'm getting the I5 version will that make a tremendous difference versus the i7 version with Annie GPU and do you think a 1080ti is overkill or should I stick with the 1070 will I lose or gain any benefits from going up to a 1080ti your response is necessary and appreciated

 

I so far suggest the i5 just to keep throttling at bay. I think the 8250u will keep boost more frequently due to the 600mhz difference compared to the 8550u. This is just a 1080p/60hz screen and in my opinion a 1070 eGPU solution should be fine This is what I would do anyway.

 

Is it true the new i-five's are faster than the old 4720hq if that's true then I find that very impressive I personally went to 3D mark.com and found out that the new I5 scored 9500 roughly on average and mine the 4720hq scored 9200 on average so that's pretty impressive to say the least for an ultra low voltage 15 watt CPU I figure that's good enough for the time being and I think I'll take you up on that recommendation for the 1070 I think that's probably the sweet spot for 1080p unless I get it 4k monitor which would be pointless because you can hardly notice the difference between 4K and 1080p on anything under 50 in or well I guess 30 in thank you so much for your help I really appreciate it it was good for you to clarify to me that the two-lane pcie connector in the Thunderbolt 3 Port didn't make a difference from the 4-lane versus the two-lane very helpful and very exciting because soon I'll have this laptop probably by January 8th however would you recommend getting the $1,500 one the one with the 512gb SSD and the i7 8550u I might save some money on this

 

My two favorite CPU's of this year are the Ryzen 5 1600 and the i5 8250u. Intel has something great here that will extend into a ton of different solutions.

 

do you think that CPU is comparable to the 4720hq that I currently have I want this laptop so bad but it's out of stock currently and I'm curious about coupon code just 10% the most I can get off a Lenovo laptop I'm just wondering if that lastminute8 coupon is the best or if I should use my birthday gift coupon for $200 off I think it's just up to $200 off I don't think it's exactly $200 off and there's also another coupon for signing up that says up to 100 what's the best way to go about this and are these coupons stackable and what's the best way to get the cheapest price any advice or any hints or any anything at all would help me tremendously thank you very much

 

I gave you 4 reps.... Your very helpful

 

Where are you able to buy from? I know nothing about coupons for these. I have my own set of "rules" I go by when shopping for a laptop. I made a video about it actually. It's just my way of looking at things and it may not suit you.

What are you wanting out of a laptop and what are the details of your current unit? The 4720hq is probably on par with this CPU on average. So what else does that laptop of yours have? Do you need TB3? The Acer Swift is every bit as nice for $100 but does not have a TB port.

 

I want something with a thunderbolt 3 port and an mx150 and 8th gen i5 and those are my only requirements perhaps you can steer me in the right direction

 

Has anyone tested with Geekbench 4 and/or extensively tested the GPU? I bought the laptop and its great but I feel something is a little off.

My GPU seems to be throttled at 1100-1300 MHz and I'm on Best Performance power settings on Windows.

Temperatures never seem to go above 50-60 degrees C on the GPU (and CPU for that matter)

I've reset the PC and still find this is still the case

Contemplating if I exchange this laptop as other laptops have way higher scores

For reference I got the I7 8550u version at Micro Center

 

If I'm getting a eGPU don't you think I should just go for the 13-inch version as it's more portable what is your take on this

 

Only you can decide what is the right size. Especially when we're talking 13.3" vs 14"

 

Glad you got it to work. Rufus is a great tool for both legacy BIOS and current UEFI deployment.

 

Sorry this will be a bit off topic, but you got me to smile... ;-)
I used to be a full AMD supporter up until about the early 2000's when Intel just go too far ahead and nothing AMD produced came even close to matching Intel in the desktop segment. Then, finally AMD announced Ryzen and man, are they back with a vengeance. Today I have a Ryzen 1700 and a platform that is future proof for a few iterations, whereas Intel is forcing folks to fork over more money for a new MOBO if you plan to upgrade from your 7th gen to 8th gen.

I also have my hopes out for the new laptop Ryzen that has the Vega built in, but due to necessity I needed a more powerful laptop now.

I think we will see some great things from AMD in the future and for once I am very happy that we end-users have a more comparable choice again between the two. Just imagine, back 20 years ago, we even still had IBM and Motorola in the running with their Cyrix and 68000 respectively. Things sure have changed!

 

I just ran geekbench 4.2 (the tryout version) and I got a score of 45281 with the mx150 and 19074 with the 620. Both were run while under high performance mode and a slight undervolt on the cpu and gpu. I also tried running in balanced mode and got the same (ish) values. Hope this helps! Seems strange that yours would be so much lower. Maybe a bios or driver thing? Oh I have the i78550u version from Lenovo.

 

Hi guys.
I've got the machine (i5-8250u/8gb/256gb version) for a few days and it's really good. I did clean install. I had almost no issues with it except one youtube freeze on balanced battery plan (had to force shutdown the laptop) and almost unnoticeable rattling noise on max volume coming from the left side (if I haven't read about it here I would probably never hear it). All I did was to press hard the laptop from both sides in the left corner with hands and it was gone. (Weird, I know... ) I'm using only High Performance and Power Saver modes and I haven't seen any new freezes.

My CPU is -0.100mV undervolted and I've set max boost power at 35W. It's definitely stable so far.
MX150 is always below 65 degrees, even on 100% load and High Performance mode. This value seem suspiciously low. Have you guys tried to overclock/undervolt GPU? And if you did - with what values?

 

Coming from my GT60 with a upgraded 3920XM, 24 GB RAM, and SATA SSD, I'd say the 720s feels faster. It would still get destroyed in gaming though since my GT60 has a 970m in out.

 

"U" chip undervolt stability from my experience tends to settle in around -.070. It's always something silly that sets these things off just when you think you have achieved stability (not that you haven't). For me I've seen "fully stable" processors bugger out when loading into a new map in BF1 for example.

Great results so far and I hope you like the new machine!

 

I will say that the 14" 720s is about the same size as my 13.3" Acer, so if possible, I suggest gong to a brick and mortar and check out a floor model. It's hard to go by numbers alone in this class.

 

Isn't there a performance hit I doing that?

 

I've updated with latest Realtek driver and removed Dolby as I still have crackling.

 

I have with no problems. Just download the drivers you need from Lenovo or the vendor.

 

Or just use MS's media maker and it works just fine.

 

I didn't use because I didn't know if it would use the latest version of Windows 10. Does it?

 

I went and downloaded the latest. Updates didn't seem to take terribly long.

 

Would you recommend this laptop... And can you play bf1

 

Of course I do recommend this! I can also vouch for the Acer Swift 3 but it last TB3.

Can the MX150 play BF1? It's about as good as an Xbox One GPU. Is that good enough?

 

Not really since you can't really take advantage of a RAID in 0 or 1 configuration with a single drive. Now if you were able to have two M.2's in the laptop than, yes, RAID 0 (stripe) will be able to double throughput speeds.

 

How are you dealing with the annoying fan noise?
I've noticed that on battery mode the fan is much quieter and tried to change Windows power options to use the same setting when plugged in. The noise stays the same! This is using Balanced mode.
The problem for me is the fan not maintaining a constant speed, as it keeps going slower and faster.

I've tried to use NoteBookFanControl as sugested by jcf, but altough I can get the fan to get quieter, the laptop starts getting very hot. I've used the "Lenovo Yoga 2 13" profile with a target of 87,5%.

Not i'm considering buying a laptop cooler such as this one:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N2S10HY

Maybe I can use NoteBookFanControl and keep the temperature down.

 

Lol... you want a cool laptop yet you don't want the fans running makes sense

I'm out

 

I'm seeing 3 options here.
1 - You didn't read the post
2 - You've read it but didn't understood it
3 - You understood it but just like to make stupid remarks.

All are possible but I'm voting for number 3

 

or 1 im more intelliigent than you..

you say it ramps up and down.....this is typical fan behavior.

if you hear the fan thats because its spinning faster...they spin faster to cool the laptop....how is it supposed to cool the laptop with low rpm...

 

Hi!
I bought the same model a couple of days ago. So far looks pretty good in every aspect. You mentioned about the display calibration, I use a cooler display equipped laptop before, hence everything looks kinda warm. Can you share your calibration (Intel color settings?) and gray-scale calib with lowered contrast ratio? Would like to try it out and see if its just my eye or it's natural Lenovo Ideapad 720s behavior.

Others please comment, if you have any similar experience with this device. Thank you!
Happy new year!

 

So, I finally decided to buy this laptop since the battery in my old one died.

Starting with the bad news:
- The laptop fan noise is really annoying. Specially because it doesn't seem to have a pattern for it. I'm playing Grim Dawn, a Diablo clone, and sometimes it makes less noise than with a few spreadsheets and apps running.
- The notebookFunControl with the Yoga profile does not work on this laptop
- We need to wait for a BIOS upgrade which will not happen unless there are a lot of complains in the Lenovo forums.
- The battery, even in saving mode and not playing any games, just standard apps (excel, powerpoint, spotify, Virtualbox, Thunderbird, browsers), lasts for a maximum of 5 hours.

The good news:
- You can install windows 10 pro without an issue
- You can have two extended external monitors, with an external usb c dock
- You can charge it via the thunderbolt port
- The display is quite good, although a little off in terms of calibration
- I came from a i7, 620M, SSD and there's indeed an increase in performance both graphical and in apps

If you are annoyed by fan noise this is a no,no ! Otherwise a good buy for sure, given the price.

 

Hey Folks!
So I have been testing out the 720s 8th Gen i5 (bought from the Micro-center) and the 8th gen i7 (purchased directly from Lenovo) model, both have 8GB/256 Samsung SSD and MX150 on board. Here are some of my findings:

1) Display: The display color calibration on the i5 model is just too off out of the box. Too much green to my liking, it's definitely not FAULTY and something that can be corrected in a couple of steps (reduce green and red pallete, that is it!). I edit pictures and some videos, so kinda picky here. Haven't check the panel specifications, but I guess both of them use the same panel. Click here to see the color calibration difference

2) Fan Noise: This is also something that does not bother me much but it's there. I used an old (2012 E series) Sony Vaio before my purchase of ideapad and it had better (albeit noisy) and optimized fan control, evident on loads.
I have never used any CPU voltage customization software before, so I have no interest in playing around with the numbers anytime soon. However, to put things in perspective, I feel that i5 model is much more stable than the i7 one. The i5 model fans don't go on and off with erratic pulsation and is pretty silent on most of my tasks and idles very quickly as well. But as mentioned earlier, the Fan algorithm itself isn't optimized and is something to look forward in terms of BIOS update. One more than we can attribute this to is, when I played CS GO for a bit on the i7, the fans were pretty consistent and had controlled frequency, but when I used half a dozen tabs on chrome with a couple tabs running Youtube videos, it did not behave well, constantly running up and down with no control. I have no clue what was happening!

3) Rest of the things remain common and persistent on both the models. Battery is okay (4-5 hours on light load). The performance is pretty good overall, handles loads of things with an ease and the Samsung's NVMe SSD is blazing fast (boot-up times are a killer! Not sure why some people reported 720s with different SSDs, AFAIK, the new ones get the Samsung's, must be regional specific?). While the benchmarks show the upright difference in performance between i5 and i7, I'd say for a normal user, the difference should be minimal, unless the user is taking advantage of higher CPU power. Display is gorgeous, speakers are decent, touchpad is slick (with some minimal rattle as mentioned earlier) and keyboard is very likable. With the addition of the Win Hello enabled fingerprint sensor and in a body most compact a 14" can get, I'd say this Ideapad 720s is surely a great purchase.

I will probably keep the i7. ( Since I paid the same price for both i5 and i7 :/)
Let me know if you have any more questions! Thank you.

 

so BOB your intially saying the mx150 in the 720s is gimped....see I was planning on overclocking it to reach 4200 in 3dmark firestrike, but your saying its limited and no way to get better performance other than undervolting....any ideas on if i should go for the 15in 720s with the 1050ti....or is that gimped also....and batterylife i plan on youtubing most of the time what can i expect with brightness on 75 percent

 

I think the processor (i5 v i7) isn't really a factor in choosing which model to get. There's $200 USD difference here between the two models, and what it seems to come down to is this:

If you plan to do nothing to it out of the box with respect to RAM or SSD upgrade, get the i5 model and save yourself the money. If you think you'll upgrade it down the road, I'd go for the i7 model now. There's only 1 RAM and 1 SSD slot, so you'll have to replace whatever's there now and pay for a 512GB SSD or 16 GB stick - both separately are well over $150 themselves. $200 for both is a decent value - and less hassle. The upgrade over the i7 is just a bonus.

Unless I missed it, I don't think B0B said the MX150 is gimped on this one. I know it is on the Asus UX431UN, but this one seems to be fine.

After having this for nearly 2 months now, the fan has become a nonissue to me. At least on mine, it seems like it'll spin up and down quickly, but eventually tapers off to either a constant spin after awhile. I'm currently compiling some plugins for a vuln scanner - a pretty cpu intensive task. Not even hearing the fan now with it mostly done. Speed's amazing too doing it in a VM. On my older HD based laptops, it could easily take upward of 1-2 hours to compile the plugins. Now I just did it in about 15-20 minutes.

 

Yes, I have found a way to calm this fan down. I was in advanced power options and noticed that 'Maximum power frequency' was set to '0 MHz' for both the 'On battery' and 'Plugged in' profiles. I simply changed these to my processor's native maximum power frequency of 2000 MHz. Once I did this, the fan has really calmed down. I am anxious to see if this fix has worked for others.

 

Does that prevent hitting the 4.0 GHz turbo at all, or just give it a hard ceiling for the base clock?

 

Well, I can tell you it is not a hard cap.

For what it's worth, the frequency I used matches Intel's specified 'Configurable TDP-up Frequency' for my i7-8550U.



EDIT: Configuring the 'Maximum Processor Frequency' setting down to '1800 MHz' will in fact disable Turbo Boost. This means the processor will never go above this frequency. If all else fails in the quest for fan control, you can disable Turbo Boost.

 

Does anyone have the 15.6 inch IdeaPad 720s with Nvidia GTX 1050 TI MAX-Q graphics? Impressions? It does seem to be well priced thin and light machine with a good battery capacity. The squished in numberpad is a shame, however.

 

Hello everyone, I'd like to ask for clarification for 720s machines and what is clear status for RAM upgrade. Unfortunately in my region there isn't option to buy 16Gb version ( neither i5 or i7 ) so I would like to know if i5 or i7 ( Kaby Lake Refresh ) do have possibility to upgrade memory. My current understanding is that i5 have got memory soldered onto board and i7 have slot ( so upgrade is possible ).

Thank you.

 

I actually don't have the option to change the frequency, just the percentage, which is strange. But I guess I can do the same thing if I reduce the percentage a bit.

This makes me wonder if I need to update my drivers or install a windows update or something?

 

Hi guys,

Just to let you know that I opened a thread in the lenovo forums about the fan noise.

If you guys want to add your voice to the protest, you are most welcome.

Let's see if Lenovo listen.

https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Lenovo...-720s-unbearable-fan-noise/m-p/3963209#M52695

Thx

PS- Some guys there are suggesting trying this : https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Lenovo-Yoga-Series-Notebooks/Yoga-920-loud-fan/m-p/3898386#M58633
It didnt work for me but...

 

Hi all
I saw someone on the first page mention that their turbo boost is disabled in the bios. However Im seeing recent posts with clocks exceeding the cpu's base frequency. Are users with the 720s / mx150 able to please check whether its originally enabled or disabled?
Thanks for your help