Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 features 2.1GHz AMD Athlon 2 M320 dual core processor and a ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4550, marking Lenovo first cooperation with AMD .The specialties of Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 is lower price, stable performance and practical appearance design.

Plain and Sober Appearance Design

Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 almost stay the same as Lenovo G450 in appearance design which is simple but sober. “Lenovo” Logo appears  in the top left corner, and the matte housing feels smooth and comfort. Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 owns a 14.1-inch screen with a ratio 16:9 and resolution at 1366×768 pixel, and a built-in 0.3MP webcam is also equipped to help users with video chat.

Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 appearance design

a built-in webcam

Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 screen frame adopts the main trend of piano paint process which makes it not that dull as a whole. The top and bottom frame are fairly wide for Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 16:9 ratios. And “Lenovo” Logo also appears under the screen. Sunken hinge is designed in Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 making the max open angle up to 160 degree. Although the body  is relatively thick, it doesn’t influence the portability of Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320.

Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 housing design

Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 whole appearance design

Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 we review is the grey model, so the dominant hue in keyboard area is deep grey.  To cut the cost, Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 use the total plastic material in the housing, adding wire drawing stripe to promote visual effects.

Meticulous Detail Design and Workmanship
Though there are not many decorations in Lennon IdeaPad G455A M320 appearance design, the details design inherits many good characteristic; One of them is High-sensitive keyboard, which is favored broadly by the consumers. Reasonable design in key regulation and key distance makes the handle of pressing keyboard comfortable.

Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 keyboard design

High-sensitive keyboard design
In touchpad, Lenovo uses one-piece design with smooth surface as the palmrest design. And its sunken design makes the touchpad more obvious which can avoid users’ misoperation. The left and right button uses two-piece design with short key regulation and hard handle, and makes a clear sound while pressing. The clicking handle is also fairly good.

Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 weight with battery 2.348kg

Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 weight with battery and AC adapter 2.805kg

Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 weight with 6-cell Lithium battery is 2.348kg, while 2.805kg adding AC adapter, which is almost no differences among the same kinds of products. Though Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 doesn’t have advantages in thickness,  Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 indeed thinks about the portability of users for example as the slimming of AC adapter.

Practical Design in Ports and Other Details
As a practical laptop, Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 left side has security lock catch, RJ-45 port, VGA port, double USB 2.0 ports. While Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 right side are power jack, DVD optical drive and a USB 2.0 port. The ports of Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 are not many but are frequently used in daily life. So it reveals the design principle – practicality which not only meets the daily demand of users but also cuts the development cost to a certain degree.

Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 left side

Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 right side

In the front of touchpad, there are four status indicators to facilitate users to check the laptop’s operation situation like stating up, battery charging, wireless network, hard disk reading. There is no innovation of setting the power buttom on the top left corner and no built-in indicator as well, but the indent design is very suitable for the finger pulp.

Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 power button and recovery button design

An recovery button is in the right side of power button, which can rapidly recover system while system crash.

Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 left side in the front

Hard-switching of wireless network and audio input/ output port and five-in-one card reader are built in the right side of the front.

Hardware Configuration and Tigris Mobile Platform
Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 is the first laptop cooperated with AMD with AMD“Tigris” mobility platform and VISION technology in Lenovo consumption products.
Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 boasts Athlon 2 M320M ULP processor, RS880M chipset motherboard, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4550 dedicated graphics card,1GB DDR2-800 memory, 250GB 5400RPM SATA－II hard disk and 802.11b/g/n WIFI in pre-installs Windows Home Basic OS.

Fresh main stream laptop platform “Tigris”is released by AMD in Sep 2,2009. Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 owns unique advantage in graphics capability and playing HD video with AMD ULP processor and ATI independently graphics. It’s announced by AMD authority that “Tigris” can promote the video transcoding by 43% and greatly raised the wireless downloading speed exceeding 60%, and increase the battery life around 1 hour than the last generation.

Brand-new AMD VISION Technology
Supported by VISION technology, Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 makes the video and photos clearer and sharper, gets melodious song from HDTV 7.1 audio and HDMI while extending the battery life at the same time.

CPUID information

AMD Athlon 2 M320 dual core processor bases on 45nm craft with dominant frequence2.1GHz, bus frequency 1600MHz, second level cache 2×512KB, TDP 35W, and supports Virtualization technology. AMD processor is different from Intel processor in architecture. Intel processor should exchange data through memory controller locating at NBC of motherboard, but AMD memory is integrated in CPU which shorten data exchange period between CPU and memory, greatly raised the process efficiency, because CPU can directly visit memory without via Northbridge.

Cinebench R10 test result

The single and double core test of Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 processor is 1807 and 3488, which is between Intel Celeron dual core T3000 and Pentium dual core 4300.

Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 uses a Seagate 250GB 5400RPM SATA-II hard disk. After complete test, the transmitting speed is around 60.3MB/S, which is  quite perfect  in 5400RPM laptop hard disk performance.

Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 3D Performance Test
Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 gets the result of 4.5 in Windows 7 experience index, and memory is the same, while the highest result is game graphics, and  the results of processor, graphics and hard disk performance is balanced.

Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 result in PCMark05

Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 performance result in PCMark Vantage

Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 results of main hardware is above 4000, meaning that the performance of the whole Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 is equality. Additionally, all the testing results of Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 in PCMark Vantage which focuses on application shows that Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 is fairly good in overall performance.

Testing results of Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 1366×768 resolution in 3DMark06

Testing result of Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 in 3DMark Vantage in Entry mode

ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4550 belongs to the medium product of DirectX10.1 mobility graphics. Its final result 3477 means that Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 performance in 3D graphics is excellent among the same kind of laptop.
Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 1024×768 resolution result in Entry mode in 3DMark Vantage is 4124, and the CPU 4467, indicating that Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 is quite enable to run 3D game like WOW with fluent medium image quality.

ATI HD4550 Actual Combat of 3D Games
We play the 3D game Street Fighter 4 in Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 to test its actual performance in game graphics.

Game scene of Street Fighter 4 in Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320

Game scene of Street Fighter 4 in Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320

After gorgeous PK scenes, the final score of Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 ranks D (the highest is A) with the resolution 1366×768 in the mode of original image quality without Anti-aliasing. The average frames 34.53FPS can basically run this game.

The final score of Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 in DEMO ranks C (the highest is A) with the resolution 1024×768 in the mode of original image quality without Anti-aliasing. The average frames 40.81FPS allow this game run more fluently, which can meet the general player’s demand. What’s more, players can change other settings to meet their different demand.

Heat Elimination and Battery Life
Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 uses 45nm AMD Athlon 2 M320 ULP processor based on Star K10 architecture supporting HT 3.0 bus, 128 Bit FPU,128Bit FPU and SSE4A order set, which not only promote the performance, but also greatly cut the power dissipation. The reduction of power enables to help the heat elimination inside Lenovo G455A, also facilitate the whole stable operation situation and our comfortable feel in operation.

Highest temperature in operation area

bottom highest temperature

In 24℃ temperature, we run each kind of testing software and play game for three hours, and then continue use FurMark in extreme torment mode in the condition of the resolution 1366×768 pixel  and 4X Anti-aliasing for 2 hours. Then the whole Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 heat distribution is in the above picture deteced by Heat Vision.

Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 is equipped with a 11.1V 48Wh 6-cell lithium ion battery, which offers about two and a half hours battery hours. Meanwhile, Lenovo also design a system specializing in battery management which extends the battery life by controlling each part of Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 performance and power dissipation. In addition, system provides four pre-set usage modes to meet users’ different demand.

Summary
Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 marks Lenovo first corporation with AMD. Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 appearance, similar with Lenovo G450, is simple and sober highlighting Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 steady and practicality and conforms to Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 market orientation.
Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 owns Athlon2 M320 ULP processor and ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4550 Graphics based on AMD “Tigris” mobility platform and AMD VISION technology, which enable to promote the graphics performance and to own greater advantages in the same kind of laptop. What’s more, Lenovo IdeaPad G455A M320 is also good in overall heat elimination control.