Disassembly and Teardown

To open the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3 15IRH10, you have to unscrew the seven T5 Torx heads. Flip the machine and open the lid. Place a thin plastic tool in one of the upper corners near the display hinge cover. This will create a small gap, which is a perfect spot to start prying the side with another tool. From there, continue to pop open the other sides. Don't rush the process. Slide the plastic piece and pop the panel slowly.


Turn the laptop upside down and check if the plate is fully detached. If it's not, just give the bottom a slight push upwards where needed.


A metal socket that protects the zone directly over the RAM is part of the inside of the bottom cover.


The notebook that we are showing you has the more modest 50 Wh battery. Lenovo also provides an optional version with an extra 10 Wh of capacity.


To take it out, push the connector to the left and undo the pair of Philips screws on top. Once that's done, lift the front of the battery and slide it towards the back of the laptop. This unit has enough reserves for almost 4 and a half hours of 4K YouTube video playback.


For storage, you can rely on two Gen 4 2242 M.2 slots.


The preinstalled NVMe drive has a thermal pad underneath.


This machine is offered with 8 GB of soldered RAM. Not all hope is lost because there is a DDR5 SODIMM slot compatible with up to 32 GB RAM sticks rated at 4800 MT. The Raptor Lake-H processors support up to 96 GB, so you may be able to successfully install even bigger modules.


No soldered Wi-Fi cards, which is good news for budget buyers.


The thermal system looks simple with its single fan, one heat pipe, decent-sized heat sink, and small heat spreader. The basic cooling is easy to remove. You just need to undo a total of seven Philips head screws—three around the fan and four that secure the small metal plate on top of the CPU. The fan connector should be pulled out, too. Also, take care to nudge aside the cables around the fan.


Carefully lift the cooling unit.


Here's the bottom view of the fan.


This is how the device looks when the cooling is taken out.


That 45 W CPU certainly looks substantial!