Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Pro 16

Speaking as professionals who are paid to know this stuff, we're baffled at times by Lenovo's confusing, overlapping laptop names: While the IdeaPad Slim 7i Pro is a xiv-inch ultraportable, the IdeaPad Slim 7 Pro ($i,011 equally tested) reviewed here is a 16-inch desktop replacement. Fortunately, it's an highly-seasoned i, with a handsome 2.5K bear on screen and lively performance at a low price. When we wrote this, the unit was hard to find in stock. Simply Lenovo assures us this model is a going item, and that the availability status will change. If you happen across one by the time you lot read this, at the suggested price or anything less, it's a great find.

Both AMD and Nvidia Within

The alphabetic character "i" in the name of the Slim 7i Pro clues you in that it has an Intel processor. The IdeaPad Slim seven Pro, similar the ultraportable Slim 7 Carbon, features AMD silicon. In the case of our review unit, it's an eight-core, iii.2GHz (4.4GHz boost) Ryzen seven 5800H. The Lenovo.com sectional also sports 16GB of RAM, a 1TB PCIe solid-state bulldoze, and Nvidia's 4GB GeForce RTX 3050.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

At 0.79 by 14.one by nine.7 inches (HWD), the gray aluminum-clad IdeaPad Slim vii Pro is almost exactly the aforementioned size every bit the Dell Inspiron sixteen Plus, though a bit heavier (iv.59 versus 4.43 pounds). The xvi-inch Acer Swift 3 measures 0.63 by 14.5 by 9.3 inches and is lighter at 3.ix pounds.

There's near no flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck, and a slightly protruding webcam helps you open the lid with one hand—which, as with a growing number of laptops, awakens the laptop whether information technology was switched off or just closed to put to sleep. The webcam supports confront recognition to log y'all into Windows 11 Pro at startup, and tin also lock the organisation if you walk away. Given these cutting-edge features, nosotros tin can forgive the lack of a fingerprint reader. Sparse bezels surround the 2,560-by-1,600-pixel display, giving what Lenovo calls a 92% screen-to-body ratio.

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(Photograph: Molly Flores)

As an AMD rather than Intel PC, the IdeaPad doesn't offer a Thunderbolt port, but there'southward a USB iii.ii Type-C port along with an HDMI video output, an audio jack, and the Air conditioning adapter connector on the left border. 2 USB iii.2 Blazon-A ports join an SD carte slot on the right. Wi-Fi half-dozen and Bluetooth are standard. Lenovo says that xv minutes plugged in will give sufficient charge for 3 hours' use.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Four-Fifths the Nits

Lenovo rates the IdeaPad Slim vii Pro's screen at 500 nits of brightness. It looked closer to 400 and our test equipment (see beneath) bore that out, but that's notwithstanding plenty vivid, with good contrast and pristine white backgrounds instead of dingy or grayish ones. The IPS panel is part of an increasing crop with a slightly taller 16:x instead of xvi:9 attribute ratio; its 120Hz refresh charge per unit doubles the usual scan for smoother video viewing and lite gaming. Colors are rich and well saturated, viewing angles are wide, and fine details are nicely sharp.

The webcam is express to the usual soft-focus 720p resolution and captures blotchy but colorful images with minimal static. Information technology has no privacy shutter, but the supplied Lenovo Vantage software lets you switch it off—or, in a novel bear on, apply a green-screen event to blur or posterize the groundwork behind you.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Speakers above the keyboard produce sound that'due south disappointingly soft even at elevation volume, but clear and crisp without tinny distortion. There's next to no bass just you tin make out overlapping tracks. Dolby Atmos software offers music, movie, game, dynamic, and phonation presets and an equalizer.

The backlit keyboard has a shallow but snappy typing experience and comfortable layout, though the pinnacle-row Escape and Delete keys are small. It lacks dedicated Dwelling, Cease, Folio Up, and Page Down keys, merely y'all tin can use the numeric keypad's 7, one, 9, and 3 keys respectively or team the Fn key with the cursor arrows. A buttonless touchpad below the infinite bar glides and taps smoothly; information technology has a slightly stiff, hollow click.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Lenovo Vantage centralizes system updates and device settings, including performance, balanced, and battery-saving cooling fan modes. (Nosotros used the first for our benchmark testing.) It also advertises almanac $29.99 Smart Functioning and $39.99 Smart Privacy subscriptions. Other preinstalled software includes Amazon Alexa and Glance by Mirametrix, which uses the webcam to brand app focus follow your gaze when using an external monitor.

Testing the Slim 7 Pro: Running Neck and Neck

For our benchmark charts, we compared the IdeaPad Slim seven Pro to four other sixteen-inch notebooks. The Acer Swift 3 is within $12 of the Lenovo'southward cost, while the Dell Inspiron 16 Plus is a few hundred dollars higher. The HP Victus 16 is technically a gaming laptop but also in the aforementioned price ballpark. The content-creator Acer ConceptD 5 is more than costly at $ii,000. You can run across their bones specs in the table below.

Productivity Tests

The master benchmark of UL's PCMark ten simulates a multifariousness of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, spider web browsing, and videoconferencing. Nosotros also run PCMark x's Full System Drive exam to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage.

Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC'southward suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon'due south Cinebench R23 uses that company'southward Cinema 4D engine to return a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates pop apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to car learning. Finally, we use the open up-source video transcoder HandBrake ane.four to convert a 12-minute video prune from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are meliorate).

Our terminal productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe'south famous image editor to rate a PC'due south operation for content cosmos and multimedia applications. Information technology's an automated extension that executes a diversity of full general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The Acer Swift 3's is the only quad-core CPU in this grouping, and the 8-cadre systems beat it upward pretty badly in our benchmarks (though it easily cleared the iv,000 points in PCMark 10 that indicate excellent productivity for Microsoft Office or Google Workspace). The IdeaPad by and large trailed the ConceptD and Victus merely posted highly respectable scores in every test.

Graphics Tests

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Nighttime Raid (more than modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).

We as well run two tests from the cantankerous-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench v, which stresses both depression-level routines similar texturing and high-level, game-like prototype rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Hunt tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different brandish resolutions, practise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the improve.

The GeForce RTX 3050 isn't i of Nvidia'southward summit gaming GPUs, so the Lenovo was predictably no threat to the two RTX 3060 laptops (and the Swift'south integrated graphics were predictably nowheresville by comparison). But the IdeaPad can certainly handle some coincidental gaming, even if it's unlikely to taxation its 120Hz screen.

Battery and Brandish Tests

We examination laptops' bombardment life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender motion picture Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window) ) with display brightness at fifty% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged earlier the exam, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

Nosotros also use a Datacolor SpyderX Aristocracy monitor scale sensor and software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its fifty% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

Once again, the Slim 7 Pro didn't knock whatever socks off, but put up a fine showing, lasting nearly xi and a half hours in our battery rundown and narrowly showing the brightest if not an exceptionally colorful brandish. For a budget-priced desktop replacement, it did admirably.

A Nice Price if You Can Get It

At $one,011, the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim seven Pro is a real bargain among full-sized laptops, with a handsome 16-inch, 16:x attribute ratio touch on screen, a speedy CPU, a comfortable keyboard, ample memory, and a roomy solid-state drive. It's not a blazing gaming rig or mobile workstation, but information technology doesn't pretend to exist.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Its biggest negative is that it may be hard to find—during our review, it sold out and was marked "Temporarily Unavailable" on Lenovo'southward site. Here'due south hoping it comes back soon and Lenovo resists the temptation to boost the sticker when it realizes information technology has a winner on its easily.

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