Lenovo 720S Laptop: 13" 1080p, Ryzen 5 2500U, 8GB DDR4, 512GB SSD Expired

Fair warning, folks...I highly advise against buying this laptop. I've owned four (yes, four) of these laptops, because I really love the form factor, thin-and-light style, matte display and the smooth trackpad. I kept trying to make it work, thinking maybe it was just my specific unit, but the problems kept coming. I eventually gave up and went over to Acer's Swift line instead.

Long story short, there are two big, glaring issues with this machine: the CPU's thermal profile and the WiFi card. The former is a much more severe problem than some reviews let on. Not only did I catch it idling at 55-60C more than once in a cold room, but thermal throttling kicks in just a few degrees above this idle temperature, and a thermal protection shutdown kicks in a few degrees past that. Since the unit only vents out the bottom, if it's on any surface that isn't perfectly flat (like a couch cushion or bed) it will very rapidly suffocate itself and lock up completely due to the heat.

The second issue, the WiFi card, is more inexplicable. I had a number of instances where I was just putting along in Windows, doing basic web browsing, and the WiFi card would shut off entirely. Sometimes it would snap back on its own, but in a few cases, rebooting was the only solution to bring it back. Every driver was up-to-date and I was often within 20 feet of my AP in the same room. Out of curiosity, I also dual-booted Ubuntu for development work and found that the WiFi card is completely undetected there; attempts to hack around this suggested by forum searches yielded no dice.

I *want* to like this little laptop so much, it's just exactly the size and shape of laptop I need, but either Lenovo must've cut corners in weird ways (or, as one review said, tried to take an Intel-ready machine and haphazardly slap a Ryzen APU in it), or AMD is just not ready to occupy this thin-and-light 15W TDP space yet.

One of the best laptop deals here in a long time. This is seriously a steal.

the ryzen chip itself is an awesome value, but in this specific computer it is downright awful. Intel version is ok, but strongly recommend against this version as you will definitely notice it's flaws during normal use.

ryzen is typically faster than Intel HD graphics, here it is about half as fast due to no option for dual channel memory and clock throttling to reduce the thermal envelope.

1x1 wifi antenna is awful and should never be put on a computer in this price range.

again, thermal throttling is a huge issue on daily performance. not the chips fault, but the chassis was not properly adapted for AMD.

a few small engineering changes and this computer would be a steal with the ryzen chip. as is, you've been warned.