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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DanNeely - Tuesday, December 18, 2018 - link
Just multiple copies of visual studio combined with being a tab junky in my browsers is enough to make 16gb start to chug. Generally ~20GB used is where it's no longer possible to push only unneeded stuff to swap and performance starts to chug.HStewart - Tuesday, December 18, 2018 - link
Maybe so - but in my development situation at home, I have entire lab with multiple machines - so Visual Studio is primary used for compiling code - I do occasionally use it for debugging like today - but I am old fashion and use a brief editor for writing code.It is funny how extra memory has made developers lazy with development - I remember the old days of even counting clock cycles.
YukaKun - Wednesday, December 19, 2018 - link
"At Home". The context is "Enterprise". If you develop at home, then you have zero clue what we're talking about here?And why blame the developers on management decisions on what they want to utilize inside their ENTERPRISE laptops?
And in particular for how IDEs now work, that is a completely separate discussion. They have way more nanny features, but also better debugging and helpful things as well. When you're developing complex solutions that are far from the old monolithic stuff you might remember, you need to run different flavours of applications and full platforms for testing and developing.
You're really barking at the wrong tree here.
Cheers!
Samus - Tuesday, December 18, 2018 - link
Personally I've always felt 8GB is fine in a mobile device (unless we're talking a Zbook where heavy productivity will take place)The obvious advantages of 8GB in a laptop are faster suspend\sleep\resume times, and less wear on the SSD in doing so, in addition to longer battery life (assuming the tasks you are performing aren't paging to the SSD because you are out of memory) and a lower price.
The base configuration for many PC's, even Microsoft's own Surface, is 4GB, and Windows 10 runs pretty good on 4GB with an SSD.
Again, there are obvious scenarios where 16 and even 32GB will be desirable, but MOST people will not need 16GB with current software and usage trends. I have clients with 30GB OST files and 30 Chrome tabs open on machines with 8GB and they perform great.
YukaKun - Wednesday, December 19, 2018 - link
Do you work for a big Corporation with complex infrastructure and products?I'm not really trying to be an ass, although it might come off as that, but this is one of those where you really need to see it with your own eyes to understand it. I know others know exactly what I'm talking about, so my point is just for the Author of the article to realize some "new facts" about the Enterprise world.
Cheers!
RSAUser - Wednesday, December 19, 2018 - link
That's why it should exist as an option. I no longer have a PC in my household with less than 16GB of RAM. (3 desktops, 4 laptops).For enterprise like e.g. software developers, that extra RAM is basically a requirement for most workloads. I'm currently using 9GB of RAM, 3GB of which is the IDE due to the index on it, and I haven't even started the test bench.
YukaKun - Wednesday, December 19, 2018 - link
Eclipse uses 4GB on it's own; then I have multiple JBoss'es running for different things; each sucking 2GB (sometimes doing 8GB tests) on their own and the rest of the bloatware crap our dear Company decides to pack into the machine. I'm currently with 16GB, but I'm about to ask for another evaluation of needs, because it's just not enough anymore.And this is just Java. Dot Net garbage uses even more, specially when you need to run local DBs and other stuff.
Cheers!
CurbedLarry - Tuesday, December 18, 2018 - link
20 years ago 16 megabytes was enough for office suite and web browsing... Are the machines of today really giving us 1,000 times the performance and functionality?Even mobile apps are now bigger than 90s office suites!
HStewart - Tuesday, December 18, 2018 - link
That is because with extra memory, developers have gotten lazy - I am actually surprise with how small .net executables are - but then that does not count the runtime.Flunk - Tuesday, December 18, 2018 - link
Sorta, you're also forgetting the never-ending requests for new (and quite often stupid) features that bloat codebases. Devs, users, management, everyone is to blame really.