 Originally, this was gonna be a fairly standard overview of the Lenovo Flex 14 2-in-1 sponsored by Lenovo. Thanks, by the way. And that would have been fine because it's a really decent little piece of kit, especially for just 550 bucks on Amazon. But then something unexpected happened. Our test results came back and the little AMD Ryzen processor in this thing absolutely shreds. Like after the first round, we just assumed that maybe Windows updates were running in the background on our Intel comparison machine or something. But no, the Ryzen 5 3500U looks like it could potentially change the budget thin and light notebook landscape. So let's take a look at how it stacks up against its closest rival, the Intel Core i5-8250U, featuring, of course, the Flex 14 2-in-1 from our sponsor, Lenovo. Now, before you do anything with a Flex 14, make sure it's up to date. These Ryzen mobile processors are still pretty new and the last BIOS and chipset update gave us, I kid you not, a 100% increase in single-threaded performance. There seemed to be an issue where the processor wasn't boosting except in multi-threaded tests. So unsurprisingly, this fix made the Flex 14 2-in-1 feel way snappier. Now, multi-threaded land is typically where Ryzen shines, but they usually have the advantage of bringing more cores to the fight at a given price point. So we thought that four cores versus four cores might not be such an easy victory. We were wrong. In Blender or Cinebench, the Ryzen 5 3500U pulls out ahead of the Core i5 in every test by over 10%, meaning that if you wanna get better performance on your thin and light machine, if you need to use it for photo editing, video encoding, or rendering here and there, you'll be choosing Ryzen. In Cinebench single-threaded, Intel does put up a better fight, hoping dearly that it can still hold onto this crown, which it did by a whole one point. Come on, Team Blue, you're gonna have to do better than that. And in some cases, they actually did. In PCMark 10, Intel pulls out their first convincing victory with a 13% higher overall score in our tests, which at first might seem like a pretty solid win for Team Blue, given that these are the kinds of tasks that you'll be performing all the time, like loading a Word document, opening a new browser tab, or filling out data in Excel. These are tasks that you really want to feel snappy. But the interesting thing is that our Intel CPU reported consuming up to 40 watts of power on occasion while our AMD chip never broke 20. Now, I don't want to say for sure that this will result in better battery life. Sometimes getting a task done quickly with a nice jolt of power is more efficient overall than taking longer and using less power. But given that the Flex 14 2-in-1 is rated for eight hours of use on just a 43 watt hour battery, it seems like going Team Red worked out pretty well for them in this design. Now it's time to test out the integrated GPU. The Vega 8 graphics processor in our Flex 14 2-in-1 promises to leave Intel's onboard graphics in the dust, to which I will say it darn well better, given that it steals two gigs of your system memory. Well, that, believe it or not, is where yet another Team Red advantage comes into play. Lenovo has an Intel version that's similar to this device, but at a higher price and with eight gigs versus 12 gigs of RAM. So we actually still come out up on the deal with 10 gigs of usable memory here. Back to the performance then. Those eight graphics cores handle games at, well, okay, it's mostly low settings or maybe medium high if it's an older title. So it's not an amazing experience or anything, but hey, at least there is an experience. The 3500U delivers a crushing 40% improvement over the i5-8250U. On the Intel chip, you're looking at ultra low to unplayable frame rates for new games, maybe low settings for older games, and in most situations, you're just not gaming. So yeah, I mean, if you plan on primarily gaming, the Flex 14 2-in-1 probably won't make your short list, but if you want something that's super portable and you wanna be able to knock out a casual game of Rocket League while you're on the go, hey, at least you've got the option. The final knockout punch for the 3500U is actually something I just alluded to, the price. The Flex 14 2-in-1 sporting the Ryzen 5 3500U is $90 less than the Flex 14 2-in-1 with the i5-8250U. Now, of course, AMD's dominance in this regard probably won't last forever. 10th gen Intel chips are making their way to the market and they do look rather promising with a big boost, especially in graphics performance, but for the time being, they've mostly been featured in high-end notebooks. So in the here and now then, what the 3500U and the Flex 14 2-in-1 with it bring to the table that is so special is that they hit that magical point of good enough performance for most people at a price point that would have been difficult or impossible to hit before without a deep discount or buying something secondhand, which I guess brings us nicely to the Flex 14 2-in-1, a laptop that perfectly hits good enough. Want a super stiff magnesium chassis? Well, you can get a ThinkPad for that, but the plastic chassis on the Flex still has a solid feel to it that I can respect. As for I.O., with AMD and at this price point, you're not getting any fancy Thunderbolt 3 ports to plug all your daisy-chained dongles into, but it's good enough that that shouldn't matter. Two USB-A's, a Type-C, full-size HDMI, along with headphones and an SD card reader is about all you can expect in a thin and light these days. The one annoyance here is that when you store the included pen, it does make both of your Type-A ports inaccessible and it makes the power button hard to press, but okay. Glass half full here, at least you're getting a pen included unlike on the Intel model, and it's pretty decent too. You can flip the Flex 14 2-in-1 over into tablet mode for a pretty good note-taking experience, or you can throw it into tent mode for marking up some changes in a PowerPoint or heck, even doing some light photo editing. I wouldn't trust this panel to do color-critical work, but it's 1080p IPS with touch, so it hits that good enough mark, and that's something that only hit even the thousand dollar price point a couple of years ago. There are also a number of nice-to-have features, like the privacy shutter to easily disable the webcam and quick charge so you can get 80% of your battery in just an hour. So overall then, thank you, AMD. Intel has been quite good actually at advancing the laptop market forward in the high-end segment these last couple of years, but it's really nice to see the budget segment finally getting some real love too. And again, thanks to Lenovo for sponsoring this video and providing their Flex 14 2-in-1 for our mobile lightweight showdown today. So thanks for watching guys, hope you enjoyed this video. You thought I wasn't gonna do it, didn't you? LTTstore.com.