The Lenovo ThinkPad E490 (starts at $656; $981 as tested) is the company's 14-inch budget365beplay体育手机 for business buyers. It features the same exterior design as its predecessor but gets a component upgrade to Intel's latest "Whiskey Lake" 8th Generation processors. The metal-and-plastic chassis supplies the durability needed to survive daily workday abuse, but the weighty system is a better choice for office dwellers than frequent fliers who spend more time on the road than in the office. The ThinkPad E490 may look identical to last year'sThinkPad E480, but the two models sound quite different—the frequent fan noise of the E480 is blissfully absent on the near-silent, cool-running E490. Businesses with strict budgets will want to check this one out.
Heavy Chic
The E490's design remains unchanged from last year's model—and very similar to ThinkPads of 10 or 12 years ago.
The chassis adheres closely to Lenovo's traditional, sturdy-slab aesthetic, measuring 0.78 by 13 by 9.5 inches and weighing 3.9 pounds. The more costly 14-inchThinkPad T490, by comparison, is thinner (0.7 inch) and lighter (3.2 to 3.7 pounds, depending on your screen choice).
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Lenovo ThinkPad T490
Two non-touch screen options are available, one with 1,366 by 768 resolution and one with full HD (1,920 by 1,080) resolution. My review unit features the latter, a $57 upgrade on Lenovo.com that's well worth the money—you not only get a crisper image but a better, more durable lid, trading the plastic top for metal. (The metal lid also makes the E490 ever-so-slightly thinner.) You also get IPS panel technology for wider viewing angles.
Apart from the lid, the chassis is made from plastic but feels sturdy. The keyboard deck is firm with little flex, even under my thunderous typing style. The laptop may be part of Lenovo's budget-minded E series, but it joins other ThinkPads in passing a series of durability tests against vibration and shock as well as tests to prove the longevity (read: ROI) of the display hinge, keys, and other components. It also underwent thermal testing to prove it could keep cool, and the biggest improvement I found over the E480 is its reduced use of the cooling fan. The E490 is much quieter in operation.
Like the E480, the ThinkPad E490 offers two color choices: silver or the familiar matte black. Mine was the latter, punctuated only by a few red accents and two silver ThinkPad badges, one on a corner of the lid and the other on the corner of the keyboard deck. Another ThinkPad tradition is the red TrackPoint pointing stick embedded in the keyboard, with its own set of mouse buttons above the touchpad.
Since the days of IBM, ThinkPads have been prized for their keyboard comfort, and the E490's keys boast a luxurious feel, combining just the right amount of travel with a springy response. Besides feeling near-perfect, the keyboard is spill-resistant so you can keep a coffee cup or seltzer nearby without too much worry. My review unit did not have keyboard backlighting, but you can add it for $30 if you work frequently at night or on red-eye flights. The optional fingerprint reader sits in the lower right corner of the keyboard deck and adds $21 to the bill.
The clickable touchpad offers a matte finish, even less glossy than the rest of the keyboard deck, that creates a friction-free surface for your fingers. It boasts a quiet, satisfying click when pressed. Nothing about this budget laptop sounds clacky or feels cheap.
1080p or Bust!
正如前面提到的,我的ThinkPad E490(以及一些英航se models, so double-check which you're getting before you buy) features the full HD screen upgrade instead of the 1,366 by 768 resolution that we consider appropriate only for 11-inch Chromebooks these days. The display's brightness is merely average but should suffice for all but the most sun-drenched offices. The limited brightness and the machine's heft limit the Lenovo's appeal for use in the field, but the screen's antiglare coating is effective against reflections from office lights.
Not surprisingly, the laptop's stereo speakers are built for more for work than play. They'll suffice for video chats, but they sound rather muddy for music playback. There's little separation between mids and highs, and bass is lacking. And they aren't very loud at maximum volume.
There's no option to upgrade the 720p webcam. With its fairly crisp image, it won't hold back your videoconferencing efforts, but higher-end ThinkPads provide an infrared camera (for logging into Windows via face recognition), or Lenovo's ThinkShutter camera, which features a manual privacy cover.
The ThinkPad's port selection is unchanged from the E480. It covers the basics for business users but it still lacks Thunderbolt 3 support. On the left side, you'll find one USB 3.1 Type-C port, a pair of USB 3.1 Type-A ports, an HDMI video output, and an audio jack. The lone USB-C port doubles as the AC adapter connector, so you can't use it to attach anything else unless you are running on battery power.
On the right side, you'll find a microSD card slot, a USB 2.0 port, an Ethernet jack, and a Kensington-style cable lock. Perhaps next year's E series will turn that outdated USB 2.0 port into a Thunderbolt 3 port.
You can outfit the system with one or two storage drives. Lenovo offers 512GB and 1TB hard drive options and solid-state drives ranging from 128GB to 512GB. My test model boasted a 512GB PCI Express/NVMe SSD. I suggest buying the largest SSD your budget allows and skipping the spinning hard drive unless you don't store data on your company's network and need a ton of local storage.
Lenovo backs the ThinkPad E490 with a one-year warranty with mail-in hardware support.
Quiet Productivity
The ThinkPad E490 offers a choice of three Intel 8th Generation Core "Whiskey Lake"-class CPUs: the Core i3-8145U, the Core i5-8265U, and the Core i7-8565U. Mine had the Core i5-8265U, a quad-core, eight-threaded processor with 6MB of cache and a TDP of 15 watts. It has a low base frequency of 1.6GHz but can zoom to 3.9GHz in turbo mode.
I compared the system's performance to that of theMicrosoft Surface Laptop 2, which features an older Core i5 chip, and three other laptops with Core i7-8565U power: the ThinkPad T490, theDell Latitude 7400 2-in-1, and theVAIO SX14. Their core components are outlined below.
总的来说,E490处理常见的Windows的任务with ease, from running office apps to multitasking with dozens of browser tabs and apps running at the same time. It cruised through these real-life scenarios without skipping a beat—or needing to employ its cooling fan with any regularity. The bottom of the system got a bit warm but not overly so. The only times I heard the fan engage were during our 3D graphics tests. Speaking of which, let's get to the benchmark results.
Productivity, Storage, and Media Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, Web browsing, and videoconferencing. The test generates a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.
PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a Storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the boot drive. The result is also a proprietary numeric score; again, higher numbers are better.
The ThinkPad E490 acquitted itself well in PCMark 10. Its score was much closer to those of the three systems with the same-generation Core i7 chip than the Surface Laptop 2 and its previous-generation Core i5. In PCMark 8, all five systems were closely grouped together thanks to their speedy SSDs.
Next is Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
The E490 stumbled a bit here, falling behind the Surface Laptop 2 to finish last among the quintet.
Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video-editing trial, another tough, threaded workout that's highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads. In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video (the open source Blender demo movieTears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) to a 1080p MP4 file. It's a timed test, and lower results are better.
Handbrake was basically a draw, with all of the systems save the speedy VAIO SX14 completing the test within a minute or two of one another.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and, at the end, add up the total execution time (lower times are better). The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost.
The E490 struggled in this event, finishing well off the pace of the other portables. The system can handle the occasional media-editing chore, but creative pros using intensive graphics apps day in and day out will need to spend more for a powerful Core i7 processor and more memory.
一个专门的图形处理器也可能帮助你content creation efforts, but all of the budget or mainstream laptops here rely on Intel integrated graphics. As you'll see in the next section, none of the laptops was able to distinguish itself with graphics and gaming pursuits.
Graphics Tests
3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff. The results are proprietary scores.
Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes. In this case, it's rendered in the company's eponymous Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload scenario than 3DMark, for a second opinion on the machine's graphical prowess.
没有3 dmark或叠加的分数ny of the laptops here that will turn gamers' heads. These systems are built for productivity apps and light media editing rather than intensive 3D games. With no option for dedicated graphics, the ThinkPad E490 cannot be configured as a budget gaming rig. At the end of the workday, its only recreational outlets are casual or browser-based games and streaming media.
Battery Rundown Test
After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop into airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p version of the sameTears of Steelmovie we use in our Handbrake trial—with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system conks out.
The E490's three-cell, 45-watt-hour battery topped the 11-hour mark in our demanding battery-drain test, giving you enough juice to get through the longest of workdays but still falling short of the outstanding runtimes of the Dell and Microsoft laptops. For its part, the VAIO's 4K screen was a detriment to its battery life; a 4K display consumes much more power than a 1080p panel.
Durable and Affordable
The ThinkPad E490 represents a big, silent step forward from last year's E480 despite receiving nothing more than a spec bump. Lenovo trots out the same chassis without any attempt to trim weight from the system (that's what pricier models such as the ThinkPad T490 are for) and makes a minor update by moving to Intel's latest line of processors. But in adapting the "Whiskey Lake" CPUs—at least in the case of my Core i5 test system—the thermals become much more manageable.
The constant whir of the cooling fan was my chief complaint about the E480, and such noise is all but gone from the E490. The laptop ran silently for most of my time with it, even under various multitasking scenarios. Only intensive graphics chores caused the cooling fan to start spinning.
It's still a bit tank-like, but for business users who need a workhorse notebook for the office rather than the road, the ThinkPad E490 delivers durability and affordability along with the best-in-class ThinkPad keyboard. Just be sure to spring for the display upgrade.
Lenovo's 14-inch ThinkPad E490 is a bit hefty but delivers durability, all-day battery life, and a stellar keyboard for budget business buyers.
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