Coming to the build first, since it is a budget-friendly notebook, consumers need to have realistic expectations if they pay less than $500 for an IdeaPad 3. It will not have a MacBook chassis at this price point, instead sporting plastic all around. The display is a 14-inch 1080p IPS LCD unit with a decent color gamut, and the keyboard deck does not have a number pad, leaving plenty of space for the keys to be spaced away from one another to avoid accidental presses. Underneath the hood of the IdeaPad 3, you get AMD’s Ryzen 5 5500U, a 6-core CPU rocking 12 threads that can run up to 4.00GHz when required. The CPU is complemented with 8GB of DDR4 RAM running at 3200MHz, plus 256GB of PCIe NVMe storage. Before you ask, both the RAM and SSD are upgradable, though there is 4GB RAM already soldered to the motherboard, so you can add another 16GB stick, totaling 20GB of RAM.
