Lenovo ThinkPad E550 Pro Reviews

£689 ($854 in the US and AU$1103) is a reasonable price to pay for an all-round quality laptop. For that money, you should expect reasonable performance, the ability to at least run games and no areas where the design or specification is lacking. In some areas, the E550 is even better than this though. Its CPU performance is excellent for the price (that's thanks to the better efficiency from Intel's new chips) and having a discrete GPU means better gaming and OpenCL performance. There's an adequate amount of memory, the keyboard and trackpad are great and the screen is perfectly fine for a TN panel. The only thing that seems to be missing is an SSD. Even the fastest SSHD isn't as good as an all-flash storage device, and it would have meant even better performance, boot times and responsiveness. For many people, the potential trade-off in a smaller SSD storage capacity would be well worth it. Perhaps Lenovo is saving that upgrade for its pricier models. But aside from this it's hard to really criticise the E550. It ticks all the important boxes, doesn't cost the earth and is exceptionally well built. Definitely a contender for the best value laptop you can buy at this price.