Lenovo ThinkPad E495 Laptop Review: Inexpensive office device with a lot of power, but without keyboard illumination

[Redaktion]

The ThinkPad E495 offers more power than the Intel equivalent with its AMD Ryzen SoC, but the low-priced laptop is unnecessarily slowed down by the manufacturer in terms of equipment.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-E495-Laptop-Review-Inexpensive-office-device-with-a-lot-of-power-but-without-keyboard-illumination.434877.0.html

[Brunnis]

I've been waiting for this review! Thanks! One question, though: Doesn't the Ryzen 3700U have built-in HDMI 2.0 support?

[william blake]

lenovo as usual in office segment
best design
least noise
worst screen

[lliamander]

Thanks for the review!

Definitely some good points made.  I was able to get my with Ryzen 5, nvme ssd, FHD, and dual-channel RAM for about $650USD - which I consider to be a pretty excellent deal.

Interesting that this so far seems to be the only AMD thinkpad to do worse than the equivalent Intel model.  Still, for staying within a budget of $700USD I couldn't imagine getting anything else.  Hopefully the next gen AMD thinkpads with Zen 2 cores will be even better.

[underhill]

No keyboard illumination is weird thing indeed.
Will E490 keyboard fit the AMD model? They should be the same?!

[Greg]

I purchased one of these on August 23, 2019 for $500 from a weird online retailer that had decent service. After tax it was about $550, then I bought an extra 8GB ram stick for $40 on Amazon. I also saw the E495 on Ebay for similar prices. Taking it apart was easy, and Lenovo provided good instructions for that process. I ran pcmark before and after installing the extra ram, and adding it did make a 20% difference in graphics performance. It's crazy that Lenovo ships these things with single channel ram by default when the chip requires dual-channel ram for good graphics performance. The NVME SSD is very quick, even on the 256GB model, and is the fastest part of the system (and highest rated part on PCMark).

If you're using this for games, you're crazy. But I've found it excellent for regular office work, internet browsing, streaming, and the like. The battery gives me 4-8 hours of life in normal use, which is better than I expected. The screen is decent quality but dark. If you're going to use in direct light, you'll have trouble seeing the screen. The bezel is big. The chassis is fine- not as good as the T series, but better than most options at the price point. It's not too heavy to carry around, but borderline. My biggest complaint is the wasted space- the bezel, and inside the chassis, where there's space for a 2.5" drive despite the M.2 default connector. They could have made this thing a lot smaller, and lighter, without increasing cost. They're trying to differentiate from the higher-end machines, which I didn't want to pay for, so it's up to you to decide if you want to spend extra for smaller form-factor.

I'm dual booting Mint 19.4 without problems. A couple missing drivers, but otherwise good. I had to upgrade to the 5.x kernel to unlock the GPU (and stop the annoying startup "no hardware graphics acceleration detected" warning. I've tried dual-booting on Dell XPS laptops and encountered a world of BIOS pain, so I'm glad it was so easy here.

So what do you want? It's not sexy, but cheap, effective, has lots of ports, easily upgradeable, and works great. Even a budget Thinkpad is better built than the price-equivalent Asus or Acer machine.

[Timothy William Edgin]

I noticed this review and others gloss over the memory handicapping; this model locks the memory to 1866 with horrible timings, the performance is horrible compared to my older laptop. I am not going to waste effort getting a second stick of ram if it is locked at 1866 Mhz despite Lenovo advertising 2400Mhz. This is blatant false advertisement and reviewers ignore it. It is right there in your own CPU Z print outs as well -933 Mhz RAM but you only point out the single channel vs dual channel. This memory subsystem is worse than my old core i5 laptop with good DDR3 1600Mhz.  :(

this is why I cannot trust reviewers.

[NikoB]

Timothy William Edgin
You are right, Lenovo artificially (apparently Intel brings a bag of money to her) slows down the Ryzen memory controller. I recently bought an S340-15API with the same 3500U, so it has a monstrous 119ns memory latency! Despite the fact that my old i5 processor from Thinkpad of 2010 produces AIDA64 6.00 only 115ns latency in the same test! This is monstrous and shameful for the 2019 processor! This simply can not even in theory, therefore it is pure artificial inhibition from Lenovo! At the same time, the funny thing is that they even soldered DDR4 2666 modules in cheap laptops! But they work at 2400 with monstrously slow timings! Due to such lagging memory for delays, all windows in the W10 open with a big lag! Moreover, this meanness from Lenovo seemed a little, so it also limited the TDP of the processor to 11W! I unlocked TDP by RyzenAdj and got sharply better results on 15W, at least on the processor itself, but from memory there are no improvements.

Not only that, in younger laptops Lenovo blocks the installation of 802.11ac 2x2 from Intel! Unlike T495 and T495s. Intel 9260NGW refuses to work even with the S340-15IWL on the Intel platform, which is simply nonsense! Lenovo, like HP, intrigues buyers of cheap series through a white list in the BIOS ...

[Norb]

The Vega reserves 2GB memory, so if you buy a 8GB model, you'll have only 6GB available for Windows and your apps.

[Rado]

First i bought a HP Pav 14 with 10th Gen i5.
WAS that laptop laud!!! Sent it back the next day. I was like boiling water back in the days (whistle when water boiling)
Then i saw this on sale for 499€.

Now this, what a lovely office machine  :)
I never hear it work. It is always so silent.
Does what it needs to do and I am supper happy.
Running clean Win10Pro.

[Todor Samardzhiev]

Timothy and NikoB, once you give the memory some proper load, the speed jumps to 1200. So what you're observing is most likely some power saving setting at work.

[Kyle Walls]

I can't believe you anyone would recommend this laptop much less the AMD model. I have had it for almost 2 years, extremely slow even to open Google Chrome compared to a similar spec Dell Latitudue (Intel). And this Thinkpad has a horrible problem withr the onboard Realtek wifi card. Lenovo used a cheaply constructed one that is known for failing. As a result, I am using a Cudy wifi dongle. I will never buy a Lenovo again, terrible quality and care for customers!

[shijans]

I have only one question for this laptop: What is the name of the retard who changed places between Ctrl button and Fn button?
I did not believed from the start that it was what it was and now I have only disgust...

[Logoffon]

I have only one question for this laptop: What is the name of the retard who changed places between Ctrl button and Fn button?
I did not believed from the start that it was what it was and now I have only disgust...

Three letters, I B M. Or more specifically, the original ThinkPad design team.
The very first ThinkPads (300 and 700) both have Fn key before Ctrl key because they wanted users to be able to do key combinations in the dark (by putting it in exact bottom right corner), and has been that way ever since.
https://web.archive.org/web/20111115202457/http://www.lenovoblogs.com/designmatters/2009/07/fn-versus-ctrl-let-the-games-begin/