the forgotten thinkpad - E525

i ordered thinkpad E525 and started looking for more info but to my surprise, there's almost none that google can find!

E525 seems to be extremely rare perhaps cuz it's got AMD A4-3300M APU - something no one seems to pay attention to, i reckon.

does anyone know where i can find the reviews, if any?

I'm mainly interested in two things

1. everything other than performance (build quality, physical layout, etc) should be identical to E520 with sandy i cores?

2. is A4-3300M APU roughly compatible to sandy i3 core?

3. Does A4-3300M support SATA3?

thanks!

 

1) Yes, the build is exactly the same as the Lenovo E520, you can find a review of the E520 here and E425 review here, which kind of gets you there as far as finding a review of the E525 -- just pay attention to the design / build portion of the E520 as that's what the E525 will have and then the benchmark and performance of the E425 as that's the type of performance you should expect with the AMD A4.

2) The A4 is kind of close to the Core i3-2310m 2.10GHz processor, which is (or was) the budget entry for the Intel line of Core i3.

3) Unsure on that one.

I don't think Lenovo sells many of the E425/E525 configs compared to the Intel's, which explains the lack of reviews and discussion.

 

1. Yes, they are identical.

2. Yes, roughly. It also has the advantage of including a much stronger igpu than the HD3000. Also, the A4, like any other Llano APU, can be overclocked as high as 2.7GHz (baseline freq) which yields a nice performance increase. OC'ing will vary from APU to APU. Also, since the APU is socketed, it can easily be upgraded to an A6/A8. I recommend FusionTweaker for over/under clocking as well as over/under volting as I find it easier to learn and use compared to K10STAT.

3. E425/E525 use the A60M FCH chipset. SATA2 (3Gb/s) or SATA3 (6Gb/s) HDDs or SSDs will work. The CD/DVD bay is SATA2.