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
GPU Performance
We’ve tested Raven Ridge before, which is the platform name for Ryzen Mobile, but that was the Ryzen 7 2700U with Vega 10 in the Acer Swift 3. The Thinkpad A285 ships with the Ryzen 5 Pro 2500U, which features the Vega 8 GPU, meaning 8 Vega cores, which means if you do want the best GPU performance you can get in a 15-Watt PC APU, you will have to get the highest-tier Ryzen Mobile.
To test the ThinkPad A285, we ran it through our GPU suite for integrated GPU laptops. If you’d like to compare the A285 to any device not shown in the graphs, please check out our online bench.
3DMark
UL Benchmark’s 3DMark offers a set of tests with varying degrees of complexity, with Fire Strike being something made for dGPU devices, and Ice Storm Unlimited the same test they offer on smartphones and tablets.
The ThinkPad A285 with its less-powerful GPU definitely takes a step back from its faster brother in the Acer Swift 3, and coupled with the lower frequency CPU, finds itself more-or-less tied with the Intel iGPU. Which isn’t really praise by any measure. AMD also hasn’t really been updating performance with drivers as quickly as hoped on the Raven Ridge platform for DX11.
GFXBench
GFXBench has been updated to version 5 on the PC, and brings with it new DX12 tests with the Aztec Ruins scenes. As such, we’ll be transitioning to these new tests as our baseline for GFXBench going forward.
Aztec Ruins offers both a normal (1080p) and high (1440p) mode, and here the Vega 8 does quite a bit better than it did on DX11 with 3DMark. The results on both level are slightly behind the Vega 10 Acer Swift 3, but well ahead of the iGPU in the Surface Pro 6.
Dota 2
For iGPU laptops, we use Dota 2 as our real-world gaming test, since it’s both a very popular game, and quite adaptable to low-end hardware. Unfortunately, there was no way to run 1366x768, on this device, so it was run at 1280x720 instead. Dota 2 is a DX11 title, and the performance of the ThinkPad is not great here compared to either the Ryzen 7 2700U, or the Intel laptops.
GPU Conclusion
There’s little doubt that Vega can offer a lot more performance than Intel’s iGPU offerings, and we’ve seen that before with the Vega 10, but Vega 8 in the ThinkPad A285 doesn’t offer quite the performance level, especially on DX11 titles, which is still the most popular API on the PC. As a result the iGPU portion of AMD's APU is still competitive with Intel offerings, but it won't offer the kind of class-leading performance that AMD is better known for.
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Evil Underlord - Wednesday, December 19, 2018 - link
It seems odd not to compare with the Thinkpad X280, esp. given how often the review notes the shared chassis.Brett Howse - Thursday, December 20, 2018 - link
We haven't reviewed the X280.Masospaghetti - Wednesday, December 19, 2018 - link
Any idea if this laptop is set up to use dual channel RAM? For the GPU performance to be so poor it looks like it's in single channel mode. The Acer Swift is set up with dual channel for comparison.I know the E series laptops can be configured either way depending on the physical RAM that installed (1 stick or 2) and Lenovo offers 8 GB as either 1x8 or 2x4.
Brett Howse - Thursday, December 20, 2018 - link
There's a CPUID picture on the first page showing it in dual-channel and it's listed in the specs as well.Masospaghetti - Thursday, December 20, 2018 - link
I see. I'm just saying that the performance is in-line with competitors with single channel memory. Maybe its a memory bandwidth problem even with dual-channel? I would be curious to see memory throughput on this compared to other Ryzen laptops. Otherwise the performance of this machine is inexplicably low.watersb - Thursday, December 20, 2018 - link
Reviews this detailed are all too rare elsewhere. I am a Mac refugee that has really gained respect for the ThinkPad product line over the past year. Keyboard is fantastic...The performance and design tradeoffs here are confusing to me. This laptop could well come in a $2000 retail, and yet does not seem competitive with other devices in this price range. An 8GB RAM single configuration seems like plenty, until I consider that our standard corporate deployment is starting to use "CONTAINERS!!! VIRTUAL SANDBOXES!!!" like that's the new XML hotness.
Heavy sigh.
Great to see a sub-15Watt AMD APU, though.
Ruimanalmeida - Thursday, December 20, 2018 - link
So, as a summary:for the moment, if you need to buy NOW a laptop, better to choose one with an Intel processor, with or w/o discrete graphics processor. Due to required cooling for AMD processors to be fully exploited ... and others. By the way, I'm not an Intel employee!
Lopez951 - Monday, December 31, 2018 - link
Every Ryzen PRO processor and Ryzen PRO Processor with Radeon Vega graphics contains a powerful, integrated security co-processor running AMD GuardMI technology helping to enable power-on to power-off protection https://krogerfeedback.me/www-krogerfeedback-com-g...Shahnewaz - Saturday, January 12, 2019 - link
So is it really down to just the standard DDR4 SODIMM memory they're using that's causing such a large battery drain?kitchen hood cleaning - Saturday, January 25, 2020 - link
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