The Lenovo G505S 59373010, 59373006, and 59378837 are 15.6-inch affordable Essential-series laptop configurations based on AMD’s computing technology. Among the trio, the G505S 59373010 has the fastest processor and biggest RAM and hard drive capacity. It is based on the AMD Quad-Core A10-5750M CPU, and has 6GB RAM memory, and a 1-Terabyte hard drive. The G505S 59373006 sports a slower Quad-Core A8-5550M, 4GB RAM, and a 500GB HDD, whereas the 59378837 includes the same and adds a dedicated video card to the mix. The latter is probably the most interesting among the three, especially for gamers on a tight budget, because it’s the cheapest notebook with a dedicated video card on the market at the time of this writing.
G505S – 59373010
G505S – 59373006
G505S - 59378837
Screen
1366 x 768-pixel resolution, 200 nits brightness
Processor
AMD Quad-Core A10-5750M 2.5-3.5GHz, 4MB cache
3,422 PassMark points
AMD Quad-Core A8-5550M, 2.1-3.1GHz, 4MB cache
3,189 PassMark points
Graphics
AMD Radeon HD 8650G integrated
AMD Radeon 8550G integrated
AMD Radeon 8550G integrated + AMD Radeon HD 8570M 2GB dedicated
RAM
6GB DDR3
4GB DDR3
HDD
1-Terabyte 5,400rpm
500GB 5,400rpm
ODD
DVD±R/RW DVD burner
Audio
Stereo 2×1.5W speakers, Dolby Advanced Audio
Camera
720p HD
Networking
Fast Ethernet LAN, 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN, Bluetooth 4.0
Ports and Slots
1 x USB 2.0, 2 x USB 3.0, VGA, HDMI, headphones/microphone combo jack, SD/MMC media card reader
Battery
4-cell, 2,800mAh, up to 5 hours
Dimmensions
15.0″ x 10.2″ x 1.0″
Weight
5.3 pounds
OS
Windows 8 64-bit
Warranty
1-Year
Price
$580
$480
$470
The speed difference between the AMD A10 and A8 isn’t significant and they have PassMark CPU benchmark scores of 3,422 and 3,189 points respectively. They’re on par with Intel’s popular Core i5-4200U dual-core, which has a lot lower power consumption: 15W versus 35W. Intel is a clear winner when it comes to performance-per-Watt ratio, but affordability is on AMD’s side. Having four cores doesn’t help much in this case, because total number of computing threads per core is only one on the AMD chips, whereas the Intel Core-series supports two.
Regarding Radeon graphics processors in the G505s models, we have no useful benchmark results, but it’s obvious the AMD Radeon HD 8650G with 384 shader cores is significantly better than the 8550G with 256 cores. On the other side, the 8570M has also 384 cores, but it has its own video memory, instead of using main RAM of the laptop. All of these are not gaming-class graphics processors, but they can be used for playing with low graphics settings and resolutions. If you’re into gaming, the G505s 59378837 is certainly a better choice than the 59373010 and especially 59373006, because of the dedicated GPU and the lowest price. You can see the GPU in action here and check out the benchmarks here.
Speaking of resolution, the G505s has the mediocre 1,366-by-768 pixel count and also mediocre brigthness of 200cd/m2. These specs, however, are common on the budget laptops. The screen coating is a glare-type one. Other aspects of the notebooks also indicate the G505s is a low-cost laptop PC. The chassis is made of plastics, which doesn’t mean low quality, since it looks and feels sturdy and durable. The notebook doesn’t provide premium features such as keyboard backlight, built-in subwoofer bass speaker, or solid state drive-based cache for faster storage performance, but it offers an admirable connectivity and networking feature set with Bluetooth, three USB ports, and HDMI included. Some users will appreciate presence of physical click buttons on the trackpad, which are usually missing on modern laptops.
According to Lenovo, these G505s configurations can run up to five hours on a single charge.
The systems weigh 5.3 pounds and that’s an average weight for the category they belong to. A good thing is that Lenovo has slimmed down the chassis when you compare it to the older Essential G-series. It’s now 1″ thin versus previous ~1.3″.
You can get the 59373010 and 59373006 via Best Buy, while the 59378837 can be found at Newegg.
