Review Summary
Expert Rating
Lately, there has been an influx of high-performance thin-and-light laptops, thanks to Intel’s Core Ultra range of processors that bring excellent performance and efficiency to the table. To no one’s surprise, major laptop vendors have incorporated these chips into their premium laptops. The latest one to come to my desk is the new Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i. On paper, the laptop has all the markings of the perfect machine. But do the specs translate well to real-world usage? Let’s find out in this review.
Table of Contents
Design
I’ve reviewed my fair share of thin-and-light notebooks, and the Yoga Slim 7i’s design is the new benchmark to beat, at least in my books. To that end, the laptop is equally functional and stylish. From afar, it may appear as a business notebook you’d find tucked away in the corners of an IT department. Up close, though, the laptop will surprise you with its regal aesthetics, including its all-metal frame that feels luxurious to the touch.
It also features rounded-off corners, similar to what you may have seen with the Dell Inspiron 14 Plus and the HP Envy 14 x360. This, in turn, furthers the laptop’s ‘Slim’ branding and makes it appear even sleeker than it already is. To that end, the laptop measures 0.59 inches, and weighs just 1.39kg. Needless to say, the device will not weigh your hands down when you’re using it on the go.
The laptop is also highly robust, and its frame doesn’t squeak when you open the lid or rest your hands on the keyboard deck. I couldn’t get the chassis to bend or flex by applying pressure on its edges or toward the middle of the keyboard deck, either. Since we’re on the subject, you should note that the laptop has been tested against the MIL-STD-810H standard, too. This should further bolster your belief in the laptop’s durability.
The Yoga Slim 7i is available in only one colour – Luna Grey. The colour sports a matte finish and doesn’t attract too many fingerprints. That said, it does feel somewhat dull, especially when pitted against devices like the Envy 14 x360, which is available in a vivid Navy Blue colourway.
Display and Audio
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i’s 1200P screen may not be the sharpest among its competitors, but it’s still quite impressive. Quite frankly, given how the pixels are packed across a 14-inch canvas, it appears sufficiently sharp to me. That’s not all, as the display is of the OLED variety, too. Needless to say, colours simply pop on the screen, and the display overturns inky blacks that’ll make your movie-watching escapades much more enjoyable.
The display can reach a peak HDR brightness of 500 nits, so you can easily use the laptop outdoors or in well-lit rooms. Funnily enough, I rarely nudged the brightness above 60 percent as the screen felt too bright to my eyes. In addition, the panel is superbly colour-accurate and covers 100 percent of the DCI-P3 colour gamut. As such, you can use the laptop in creative workflows, including colour-grading photos and videos.
As for audio, the laptop ships with four top-firing speakers. The setup gets quite loud, so you won’t have to worry about replaying a scene because you couldn’t catch a dialogue. The speakers offer a wide soundstage, too, and the audio output feels rich and layered and not hollow and bleak.
Ports and I/O
For its size, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i manages to cram in a decent number of ports. The left fascia of the laptop houses two Thunderbolt 4 Type-C ports and an HDMI 2.1 connector. The right side features a USB 3.2 Type-A port and a 3.5mm combo audio jack. Now, I would’ve liked to see at least one more USB Type-A port. But, given how some thin-and-lights offer even fewer connectors, I am willing to give the Yoga Slim 7i a pass here.
I do find the power button’s positioning somewhat annoying. It is placed below the 3.5mm headphone jack, and I tend to press it whenever I pick the laptop up or set it down on my desk. The privacy shutter for the webcam is placed further down the laptop’s right-hand spine. The button for the privacy shutter protrudes outwards, so you can get a sense of its positioning just by touch.
Speaking of which, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i’s webcam isn’t very impressive. The 2MP sensor can record Full HD videos, although the footage’s quality pales compared to what you’d get with the Envy 14 x360’s 5MP shooter. Additionally, the laptop is equipped with an IR sensor for Windows Hello authentication but lacks Windows Studio features such as Background Blur and Eye Contact. That’s disappointing, considering you get these with most laptops in this segment.
Keyboard and Trackpad
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i has a fantastic keyboard. The keys have concave keycaps and offer a 1.5-mm travel distance. Additionally, it comes with a backlit LED with three different brightness settings, namely Auto, Low and High. You can also disable the backlit LED entirely, to conserve battery. The keyboard deck doesn’t flex, and the keys are adequately spaced, paving the way for a wonderful typing experience.
The trackpad offers a smooth surface, too, and it picked up on all my inputs flawlessly. I could comfortably use multi-finger gestures on the unit as well. It feels a tad small, especially compared to the ones on the Inspiron 14 Plus and the Envy 14 x360. That said, it is perfectly functional, so no complaints here.
Performance and Battery Life
I’ve tested several laptops with Intel’s Core Ultra processors, so I had an idea of the Yoga Slim 7i’s performance before I started penning this review. And, after spending some time with the device, I can confirm that the laptop’s performance was in line with my expectations. Spec-wise, the laptop comes with Intel’s Core Ultra 7 155H processor. The 16-core CPU gets six performance, eight efficiency and two LPE cores.
My review unit shipped with 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM clocked at 7,467MHz and a 1TB PCIe Gen4 M.2 SSD. As you may have guessed, the laptop overturned similar results as seen on competing devices with a Core Ultra 7 155H processor, such as the Dell Inspiron 14 Plus. Take Cinebench R24, for instance, which taxes a laptop’s CPU with a string of multi-core and single-core CPU workloads. Here, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i overturned 618 and 97 points, respectively. The Inspiron 14 Plus, on the other hand, logged 624 and 91 points in its test runs.
GPU-centric benchmarks from 3DMark’s suite paint a similar picture. In Fire Strike Ultra, the Yoga Slim 7i net 2,237 points. The Inspiron 14 Plus wasn’t too far behind at 1,920 points. Similarly, the Yoga Slim 7i overturned 1,858 and 26,942 points in the Time Spy Extreme and Night Raid benchmarks. The Inspiron 14 Plus, on the other hand, net 1,817 and 26,959 points.
The benchmark results imply that the Yoga Slim 7i is a highly capable machine that can easily handle most office tasks such as word processing, internet browsing, and using apps like Microsoft Teams, Excel, and Slack. I, myself had over 15 tabs open in Chrome and was using apps like AirTable, Asana and Basecamp in conjunction with the web browser. Despite that, I didn’t run into any lag or stutters on the device.
The laptop also gets a capable integrated Arc GPU that can play some casual games like Valorant and Hades. It can even run older open-world games like GTA V, Middle Earth: Shadow of War, and Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition, provided you tone down some graphics presets. Our standardised testing suite involves running GTA V and Valorant at high settings at the display’s native resolution. In it, the device overturned 55FPS and 150+ FPS, respectively.
