Review of the Lenovo U410 Ultrabook

The overall design of the Lenovo U410 Ultrabook is similar to that of the U310, with rounded corners that make this Ultrabook look very cute. The back of the machine is a one-piece design, smooth surface without any screws, and the material is the same as the top cover, the same aluminum alloy sandblasted surface.

This 14-inch Ultrabook differs from the 13-inch in that, due to its increased size, the U410 is equipped with a discrete graphics card to ensure that the Ultrabook can also play big games. The U410 is not particularly good at controlling its overall thickness, but this is a balanced approach that takes into account heat dissipation and performance. In the next article, we'll take a brief look at the internals of this ultrabook, and test its battery life and cooling.

Sleek design with plenty of interfaces

The Lenovo U410's keyboard adopts the popular chocolate design, and the key layout maintains Lenovo's consistent style of high-touch keyboards, with clean and sharp keys and accurate feedback. The palm rest and touchpad are made of engineering plastics, effectively saving costs, but the surface paint coating also has a frosted texture, which makes up for the lack of materials. The wide touchpad is a one-piece design, and the left and right keys are separated by a vertical line, which makes touching and pressing the keys feel more comfortable.

Lenovo U410 overall appearance design rounded

Meanwhile, the machine is equipped with a large touchpad, support multi-touch function, while the touchpad integrated commonly used left and right buttons in one, in order to ensure the integrity of the function of the premise added a lot of simple fashion sense. On the front of the touchpad is the function indicator area, which represents the power status and battery status respectively.

Equipped with a chocolate keyboard and a large integrated touchpad

Interface configuration, the Lenovo IdeaPad U410 is equipped with a small number of interfaces, but commonly used interfaces are complete. The layout of the left side of the fuselage is relatively simple, from the left Lenovo One Touch Recovery button, cooling vents and two USB2.0 ports.

Left side interface configuration

Compared to the right side of the interface layout is more compact, this side of the card reader, two USB3.0, HDMI high-definition interface, RJ-45 ports, as well as the rightmost power connector. From the body interface settings, Lenovo IdeaPad U410 although not many interfaces, but to meet the basic needs of the user interface are fully equipped.

Right side interface configuration

It is worth mentioning that the Lenovo one-key recovery function button, this function button in the Lenovo many series of products are equipped, the main function of the user to provide system backup, restore the factory system and other first aid measures, through the function of this function button you can not have to go into the system to operate.

Simple disassembly to view its internal structure

The back of the machine adopts a unibody design, without any screws on the smooth surface, the material is consistent with the top cover, the same aluminum alloy sandblasted surface, adding a row of cooling vents, so that if you put it on your lap, you may feel the temperature of the notebook. The screws on the back are hidden in rubber feet, which can be removed to disassemble the machine.

After removing the bottom panel, you can see a full view of the internal ports

Two memory slots are available for upgrades

Processor location and cooling fan design

A full view of the U410 after removing the battery

After briefly disassembling the U410, we can see that the processor is located in the middle of the notebook, and it's connected to the discrete graphics card through a copper pipe, so we can conclude that the main power source is the graphics card, which can be used to generate power. Therefore, it can be concluded that the main heat generation location of the machine is the left side of the body (front). But while the processor and graphics card have their own cooling fans, the Southbridge chip, Wi-Fi and memory are not so lucky, as they are located on the right side of the case.

Battery life of more than 5 hours

The teardown reveals that the Lenovo IdeaPad U410 is equipped with a lithium-polymer battery with a capacity of 59Wh. To test the battery life of the Lenovo IdeaPad U410, we chose PowerMark, which, like PCMark and 3DMark, is also developed by FutureMark.

It runs a set of test scripts in a constant loop, including four common applications: Internet browsing, document processing, video playback, and 3D gaming, to get as close as possible to what the majority of users will actually be doing.

Packed with a 59Wh lithium-polymer battery

Battery life test results

The final test result was 5 hours and 19 minutes, which shows that the Lenovo IdeaPad U410 Ultrabook can continue to run for nearly 5 hours under low to medium workloads. The U410 is not only larger than the smaller U310, but with discrete graphics it will also be more power hungry, while the U410's increased battery capacity makes it possible to keep the overall battery life intact.

Surface temperatures in normal use

Surface temperatures under high load

The surface temperatures of the Lenovo U410 Ultrabook are acceptable in normal use. The temperature of the palm rest is not uniform, the main heat comes from the hard disk under the right palm rest, most of the heat in this state is distributed in the keyboard area, while the main heat in the keyboard area is concentrated in the right position. The temperature distribution on the surface of the machine under high load is similar to that of normal use, with the right side area being a bit warmer than the left.

Review Summary:

Lenovo IdeaPad U410 discarded the whole machine alloy material, palm rest and screen bezel for high-strength engineering plastics, without affecting the appearance of the premise of the whole, reduce the production cost, followed by a small increase in weight and thickness, but also allows the design of the heat dissipation of the design cost is further reduced, and the U410 also has a complete interface configuration as a result.

Configuration-wise, the U410 utilizes a low-capacity SSD+HDD combination and supports Intel's fastboot technology, which ensures operating system boot time while keeping costs down. The processor is an Intel Low Voltage processor with a GT610M discrete graphics card, which delivers a decent performance to meet most of the life's entertainment needs.