Lenovo G570 M51BHUK review

The laptop has a DVD-RW drive, four USB ports, fast Ethernet, 802.11n Wi-Fi and a 500GB hard disk, which is rather generous at its £350 price. The processor is a 2.3GHz Intel Core i3-2350M. It’s not as powerful as the i5 favoured by a lot of mid-priced laptops, but it’s still sufficient to handle any desktop applications you’ll need and it achieved an overall score of 47 in our tests. Its 4GB of memory means you’re well equipped for the odd bit of photo re-touching as well. The integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000 processor isn’t built for gaming. It failed our frame rate test in Dirt 3 at high quality, but many 3D games should be playable at their lowest quality settings. Running Dirt 3 at 2x anti-aliasing and at low quality produced an average frame rate of 23fps. Turning off anti-aliasing entirely gave us a very playable frame rate of 30fps.

All this is extremely good value for £350. Indeed, we’ve reviewed netbooks that cost only a little less. It’s not as slim and light as ultra-portables such as the Asus X501A, which costs the same, but the Asus lacks an optical disc drive. We’re a little disappointed with the inclusion of a Fast Ethernet port rather than a Gigabit Ethernet port, but a decent Wi-Fi adaptor’s more important on a laptop. The G570 M51BHUK’s battery life of five hours and 21 minutes isn’t brilliant either, but you’ll still get a decent amount of use from this general-purpose laptop before you have to plug it in. If you have a bit more to spend, the Acer Aspire V3-571 is more powerful and has a longer-lasting battery, but the M51BHUK is a great deal in its own right, and wins a Budget Buy award.