Lenovo Yoga C930 laptop
Is Lenovo’s latest convertible as flexible as ever, or have its new changes bent it out of shape?
The Lenovo’s Yoga series has a premium pedigree to lean on, but in a space as competitive as the 2-in-1 convertible scene, you need more than just good quality components to stand out. The C930’s headline feature is a new hinge design that manages to maintain smooth, fully-rotatable functionality, while incorporating a set of Dolby Atmos speakers. This novel hinge speaker design is perfectly positioned for general laptop audio, but it also manages to improve speaker positioning when in tent, picture frame or tablet modes.
The Yoga C930 doesn’t just look business ready, it’s also got a nicely weighted 10-keyless keyboard and a dedicated fingerprint scanner that offers enhanced productivity and security. The trackpad is soft to touch and there’s also a stylus that resides in a sealed charging compartment in
the rear of the device, so you’ll always have it handy.
These finer details are all desirable perks, but the premium Yoga brand has been built on a solid foundation of powerful components. The Yoga C930 we tested wasn’t the top of the line configuration, but it was still running a powerful Core i7-8550U quad-core processor. While this efficient chip did get a little hot at 980, it performed surprisingly well in testing, outpacing some higher clocked Core i7-8560U CPUs and even some devices with larger RAM allocations. In PCMark 8’s Work accelerated benchmark the Yoga C930 scored 4793, which was around 8% better than the average premium ultrabook running a quad-core i7. This means it’s more than capable of breezing through general work and home tasks.
On paper the battery capacity of the Yoga C930 is 60Wh, 10Wh lower than the Yoga 920 we tested last year. Considering the two share the same processor we expect this to equate to around a 1 hour and 20 minute reduction in FullHD movie playback lifespan form the Yoga 920’s 8.5 hours. This is a considerable cut and the only real sacrifice on the updated Yoga, but even with this the Yoga C930 is still one of the longest lasting professional laptops available. Since we tested the FullHD version of the Yoga C930 rather than the power hungry 4K model, the 1080p movie playback lifespan was actually longer here, lasting 9 hours and 17 minutes. Comparing apples to apples however, you’ll see a 15% overall reduction in lifespan.
A lot of premium 2-in-1 devices boast a 4K screen, and you can configure the Yoga C930 to have a 4K display for an extra $210, but the 13.9-inch 1920 by 1080 pixel display will look vibrant and will be detailed enough for most users. This is in part because of a Dolby Vision HDR colour enhancement that has been applied to both screen variations, giving a much wider overall colour gamut and more vivid colours. This combined with the glossy screen and compact bezels make the FullHD screen excellent for working on.
The Yoga C930 has gone backwards on battery life and most models come with only 8GB of RAM, but equivalent devices are about $350 cheaper than their predecessors. A fair trade as far as we’re concerned. On the other hand there have been some considerable improvements to the speakers, the stylus and the display, so we’d say on the whole it’s a step in the right direction.