Intel performance in the Flex 5i 14 isn't particularly exciting and the display is still underwhelming. But the feature set — including speakers, ports, keyboard, camera shutter, fingerprint reader, and battery life — is well appreciated at this price. Check out AMD Ryzen models if you need top performance for less money.

The Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 is satisfactory as a workstation. Our model with the Ryzen 5 4500U CPU and 16GB of memory is good for multitasking and can run most applications smoothly. Also, it doesn't lose performance over extended periods under load. The NVMe SSD is amazingly fast, so large files transfer very quickly. There's a good selection of ports, including HDMI and USB, for an external monitor and peripherals. Unfortunately, even the highest-end models with a dedicated NVIDIA GeForce MX330 GPU aren't suited for large-scale or time-sensitive creative work.

The Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 is an excellent 2-in-1 laptop with solid performance, a comfortable keyboard and good battery life.

The Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 is a spectacularly fast laptop for $600, with a build quality that at last earns the price. The configuration is impressive as well — you don’t often get a 256GB PCIe SSD and 16GB of RAM for anywhere near this price. If a budget performer is your goal, then this is a great laptop.

With the AMD Ryzen 5000 hardware inside, the Flex 5 is one of the most powerful 14-inch budget laptops you can get right now. It's also a convertible and doesn't compromise on the build quality, inputs, audio, IO, or battery life, but it does come with one major deal-breaker: a dim and washed-out display with a 60% sRGB panel. That's just not for me and I'd rather pay extra or even sacrifice on the performance just to get a usable display instead. You, however, might feel otherwise, and if that's the case, you'll hardly find a better value laptop in this class. My entire experience with this notebook is documented down below.