You guys are blaming the wrong problem.

Thermal throttling might occur, but it's the single channel RAM that's killing game performance.

Add another DIMM for dual channel, and game performance will basically double. Ryzens powerful integrated graphics is easily bottlenecked by poor memory bandwidth.

After thermal paste swap to Arctic Silver 5, temps dropped by 3-4oC. However the throttling kicks in early (72oC) and settles at ~56oC for the rest of the tests. This is power management coding that's faulty, not the thermal design.

I spent hours today trying to test this throttling issue by running a bunch of Cinebench and 3dmark.

3dmark does minor throttling as the system gets fully heatsoaked. Not a major dropoff.

Cinebench is different. Playing around with windows power management, I got my system to run a couple of back to back 550+ scores before going down to upper 300s. Other times, it will do it from the get go.

There is probably something going on that is NOT temperature related as I am monitoring that closely via HWmonitor. I see low clock speeds (1.6Ghz) AND low temperatures (59oC). This was also seen by another reviewer (Raven Ridge Thermal Analyisis) where the total wattage used will trigger the throttling loop.

I will swap out the thermal paste anyways soon to see if this affects anything.

There it is, exactly what I was dreading - poor power management. As expected battery life of the 2500U is 3 hours vs 10 hours from the identical i5-8250U model with 48 Wh battery capacity. This makes the whole mobile AMD platform a huge no-go for me. I'll stick to the standard Intel CPU + Nvidia dGPU combo for now, thanks.

I don't get it, the i5-8250U got hotter than this laptop looking at the heat maps, and they have the same cooling design, why did the 2500U then throttle majorly? Are they configured for different TDP? Difference in paste?

The f*** is this? I mean really? Why did AMD even promote this POS? How can an OEM release this on the market, knowing that performance is HALF then what the chip can really do?
This really shows that OEMs are not willing to do any extra work, if they are not paid by the chip manufacturer. AMD needs to understand that they have to make a proof of concept notebook/design, whatever, that has great power consumption and great thermal characteristics and inforce OEMs to do just that.
Any other way won't cut it, it seems...

Single-channel RAM is not enough, Ryzen APU performance ruined with bad cooling.

Dear NBC, can we please have reviews of the Ideapad 720s 14" and 15" with Intel CPUs and Nvidia dGPUs? They've been out for 6 months now with no thorough reviews online.

That's a really high class designing by Lenovo by making the GPU gimped by 50% from the common 2500U.