The Lenovo ThinkPad A285 (12.5-Inch) Review: Ryzen Pro Gets Down to Business
by Brett Howse on December 18, 2018 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
- AMD
- Lenovo
- ThinkPad
- Vega
- Ryzen
- Ryzen PRO
- Ryzen Mobile
- Vega Mobile
Final Words
If you are in the market for a premium business-class Ultrabook featuring AMD’s Raven Ridge platform, Lenovo has you covered with the ThinkPad A285. The build quality is as superb as you’d expect in a ThinkPad, and it offers a great keyboard with a thin and light design. The ThinkPad look is iconic, and despite the A285 not being as leading edge as Lenovo’s X1 Carbon design, the A285 offers a great build for far less than what an X1 Carbon costs.
It would be nice to see Lenovo ditch the low-end 1366x768 TN display option, even though there is likely demand for it by people buying in bulk for other people to use. But in practice the 1920x1080 IPS should be a pretty easy upsell; it offers a much higher resolution, along with an anti-glare coating, and touch support, making it a rather compelling option. The color accuracy of the IPS display is only average, but that is likely not a huge issue for the target demographic for this device.
It’s unfortunate to see this chassis move away from the removable dual-battery system. Dual batteries were a great idea, since you could easily swap out the battery without shutting down the machine. But Lenovo likely has metrics on how often that was used, and you can generally get a larger battery in less size if you go with a non-removable model. As a business machine, parts should not be an issue either.
Lenovo offers great connectivity with the ThinkPad A285, including two USB-C Gen 2 ports, an integrated Ethernet connector, and a clever combination of the Ethernet and USB-C port to offer a docking option. There’s no SD card reader, but there’s likely not a huge demand for that in a laptop not aimed at photographers. Lenovo does cover the business requirements with a fingerprint reader, as well as a smart card reader.
The performance of the Raven Ridge-based AMD Ryzen 5 Pro 2500U is not spectacular though, and even the kind of performance advantage you'd expect from an AMD iGPU are not really there with the Vega 8 iGPU. Although on the whole the overall performance is more than adequate for plenty of office tasks. The 8 GB of RAM is enough for today for the type of tasks you’d likely perform on a 12.5-inch laptop, but it would really be nice to see a build-to-order 16 GB option on Lenovo’s site as well. The larger 14-inch A485 does offer up to 32 GB.
The biggest thorn in an otherwise solid laptop is probably AMD’s platform power draw. We’ve only tested two Raven Ridge laptops so far, but the idle power draw of each was remarkably consistent, falling within 40 mW of each other. And at over 4.5 Watts, it's just too high, causing significantly higher battery drain than their competitors. This, coupled with the 48 Wh battery in the ThinkPad A285, means that we achieved battery runtimes that were well below the category average. That’s not ideal for a device that is so easily portable. Lenovo offers this same chassis with the Core i7-8650U, and undoubtably the battery life would be significantly better with the Intel platform.
Despite the issues with AMD’s mobile platform, there’s little doubt there is demand for their products, and for those in the market for a well-built Ryzen Mobile laptop, it’s hard to look further than this. If your business is interested in devices with DASH support, AMD’s Ryzen Pro series has you covered with open-source device management, comparable with Intel’s vPro offerings. Lenovo is offering a great product featuring AMD Ryzen, with a quiet and reliable design, plenty of business features, and a laptop that is incredibly easy to travel with. Hopefully AMD can sort out its power issues soon, and make their product more competitive in such a competitive design as this Lenovo ThinkPad A285.
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Brett Howse - Tuesday, December 18, 2018 - link
The Surface Book 2 was the device I had power draw numbers from for the idle power draw graph so I have no issues including it in the performance graphs as well. The CPU is a 15W i7. The GPU is of course more powerful but that's still a valid point since people may wonder how close Vega in an iGPU factor is coming to dGPUs.But the best part is that if you don't think it's important, you can just ignore that data point and compare against all the others. Or, click the links I provide to our Online Bench database and make any comparisons you prefer. We provide all the data.
QChronoD - Wednesday, December 19, 2018 - link
I think that many of the people who were complaining about that would accept the comparison if an estimated price of each machine was given at the beginning. If you knew before looking at the graphs that one of the laptops was 2x the price and it looks like being 2x as fast then everything is fine, but if you aren't aware of the price difference then it looks like this machine is a steaming pile.QChronoD - Wednesday, December 19, 2018 - link
Just for reference if anyone actually reads the comments:Microsoft Surface Book 2 15 - $2600
Dell Latitude 13" 2-in-1 7390 - $1800
Asus Zenbook 3 - $1500
Huawei Matebook X Pro - $1350
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga - $1500
Lenovo ThinkPad A285 - $1200
Microsoft Surface Pro 6 - $1000
Acer Swift 3 R7-2700U - $700
These are just quick prices off amazon trying to get similar specs.
IGTrading - Thursday, December 20, 2018 - link
I agree AnandTech provides "all the data" and that's of course laudable.But often times you can bury a good product in all that data. Comparing a 1200 USD notebook with 2600 USD notebooks is way beyond a stretch.
The potential buyer reading the review for a 1200 USD model is reading it for a reason: because that's what he wants (a 12" portable) or that's his budget (1200 USD) .
Ok ... you compare it with other similar sized notebooks that are also similarly priced ... such as 900 ~ 1400 USD ...
But I honestly have the feeling the results of the Lenovo AMD Ryzen-based notebook are buried in "all the data" ...
Like I've said ... this doesn't look like a review at all and also it doesn't look like a Round-Up (several notebook in a certain price range or with similar characteristics) ..
Going from 700 USD to 2600 USD as a price range ... And from 12" to 15" as a size range ... makes this look like somebody wanted to make the AMD Ryzen portable look slower than a notebook which is much larger and more than 200% more expensive ....
This is how a just comparison should look like in my view (Test Product vs. Similar Products in the Same Product Range vs. 1 product from the Upper Product Range as a comparison example) : https://hothardware.com/ContentImages/Article/2690...
And Ryzen did not beat the CPU+dGPU either ... nor did it ace all the tests ... but I never had the feeling of its results being buried in "all the data" ... just IMHO
kaidenshi - Tuesday, December 18, 2018 - link
Yep, two thin netbooks/ultrabooks I've had in the past had pop-down Ethernet ports, which were the same height as a USB-A port when not in use.thesavvymage - Tuesday, December 18, 2018 - link
honestly though, why do you need an ethernet port on the device? Its kinda just wasting space since its not like you plug that in separately, it should just be connected to whatever dock you have at someone's desk. If I had to plug in power, monitor, and ethernet separately every time I sat at my desk I'd go mad.Right now at work I'm using a macbook and its pretty simple to have all that plugged into a USB-C dock
SaolDan - Wednesday, December 19, 2018 - link
In my line of work i have to be able to connect to lightin controllers and switches thru ethernet out in the field so a Ethernet por would be required.The_Assimilator - Wednesday, December 19, 2018 - link
Not to mention that you have to fork out extra for the dongle!darkich - Tuesday, December 18, 2018 - link
.. a 768p TN entry level screen?Really? My goodness
PeachNCream - Tuesday, December 18, 2018 - link
12.5 inches. At 1080p on that size screen, scaling will be a thing and some software still sucks at scaling. Scaling will also mean that basically the same quantity of information can be displayed at the same time even if the resolution is higher. The GPU will work harder and consume more power while generating more heat to push pixels that do not benefit productivity.