86 PCWorld DECEMBER 2019REVIEWS LENOVO IDEAPAD S340-15IWL
the very bottom. Indeed, the Office
performance of a laptop with a 3,500 score
on PCMark 8 won’t feel significantly better
than one with a 3,150 result; instead, they’ll
purr more or less equally while you’re web
browsing, dealing with Excel, or performing
most other daily PC tasks.HandBrake
A somewhat more demanding test than
PCMark 8, our HandBrake benchmark
measures how quickly a laptop can encode a
30GB MKV file into a format suitable for an
Android tablet. It’s a CPU-intensive test that
reliably spins up a laptop’s cooling fans, and it
favors systems with
the most processor
cores.
Again, the
quad-core Lenovo
S340 acquits itself
well, managing to
reach our HandBrake
finish line in less than
4,000 seconds (or
slightly over an hour).
That’s a score that
earns the S340 an
impressive bronze in
our comparison,
besting some pricier
laptops in the
process. Of course,
the S340 isThe Lenovo IdeaPad S340 scored well with HandBrake thanks to its quad-core
Intel i5 CPU.Lenovo ThinkPad L480
(Core i5-8250U)
Acer E 15 E5-576G -5762
(Core i5-8250U)
Lenovo IdeaPad 730S-131WL
(Core i5-8250U)
Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 6 14 (2019) (Core i5-8250U)
Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 6 14 (2018) (Core i5-8250U)
Lenovo IdeaPad 730S-131W(Core i5-8250U) L
Acer Aspire 5 A515-54-51DJ(Core i5-8265U)
Asus ZenBook 13 UX331UA
(Core i5-8250U)
Acer Aspire 5 A515+54-30BQ
(Core i3-8145U)HandBrake Total Encode Time
(Seconds)SHORTER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE3,7014,3933,8784,9733,8464,6114,1175,136
7, 6 7 3somewhat larger than some of the competitors
in our chart, and thus easier to cool.
It’s worth noting that while the S340 runs
on a Whiskey Lake CPU rather than the older
Kaby Lake Refresh chip that powers most of
the other laptops on our chart, general
performance tests have shown (go.pcworld.
com/8fst) that Whiskey Lake processors enjoy
(on average) only a tiny speed boost over
Kaby Lake Refresh systems (both are
8th-generation Intel CPUs, by the way), so it’s
not like the S340’s Core i5-8265 chip is an
unfair advantage.
Lagging far behind at the bottom of the
chart is a dual-core Acer Aspire 5 model,