Lenovo IdeaPad U260: A Stylish Ultralight Notebook
Gaming and Battery Performance
Gaming: Here we come to the Lenovo IdeaPad U260's true weak spot. You don't buy an ultra light notebook as a gaming machine obviously, and we wouldn't recommend this one for that purpose. But, if you're stuck in a hotel room and want to knock out a few missions, you might want a machine to be able to handle some level of play.
To touch on gaming performance, we chose a couple of older games that draw moderately on system resources, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and Half Life 2 Episode 2. We then ran a custom pre-recorded demo on each system at a resolution of 1280x720. The resulting performance achieved is indicated in frames per second in the graph below.
To touch on gaming performance, we chose a couple of older games that draw moderately on system resources, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and Half Life 2 Episode 2. We then ran a custom pre-recorded demo on each system at a resolution of 1280x720. The resulting performance achieved is indicated in frames per second in the graph below.
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Without a dedicated graphics processor, the U260 was one of the slowest in the bunch when it came to gaming performance. It's HD LCD does a good job of making the rendering look beautiful, but its native 1366x768 resolution isn't supported by some of the more popular 3D games.
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The Lenovo IdeaPad U260's battery worked about as well as advertised. Lenovo promises up to 4 hours of battery life with its 4-cell battery and our Battery Eater test showed it died after 222 minutes, or 3.7 hours. The battery allowed us to continuously watch movies, unplugged, for over three hours as well.
The U260 performed reasonably well against other netbooks/ultralights we recently tested. But others also advertise longer battery life. Lenovo's own 11.6" U160 netbook sports a 6 cell battery for up to seven hours of life and the larger 14" U460 can last up to 6 hours with its 8 cell battery, Lenovo says. The sacrifice for weight had to come somewhere, and part of it came from battery size and life.
