Lenovo Yoga C940

Lenovo’s flagship convertible joins Intel’s Project Athena cohort with 10th gen CPUs that improve AI processing and battery life.

We gave Lenovo’s Yoga C930 five out of five in APC’s September edition (APC471), so this yearly update has some big shoes to fill. Like the Surface Pro 7 in this issue, the Yoga C940 is sporting one of Intel’s latest 10th generation 10nm Ice lake CPUs that bring with it Wi-Fi 6, better AI processing and a new GPU. The C940 is supposed to be one of the first laptops to be certified under Intel’s new Athena project – where Intel works with manufacturers to ensure the device has an all day battery life, instant on responsiveness and new low-power sleep states.

Lenovo is hoping to leverage the new Intel AI tech by developing a software called Q-Control which will use AI to monitor usage patterns and tweak system component power to optimise efficiency. While this software was not available at launch, Lenovo stated that it would be rolled out via its Lenovo Vantage hub before the end of 2019. Lenovo claims that this feature can extend the battery life of the FHD model to 17.5 hours. We haven’t had the chance to actually test Q-Control’s capabilities yet, but we expect its benefits to be more conservative under general usage conditions.

APC tested a Yoga C940 with a 14-inch FHD display, Intel Core i7-1065G7, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB PCIe SSD which retails for $2,996 at Officeworks. At the time of writing, Bing Lee was selling a Yoga C940 with a 14-inch UHD HDR display, an Intel Core i7-1065G7 CPU, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD for just $3 more at $2,999. Considering the latter has a Dolby Vision Vesa HDR 400 certified screen and double the SSD storage, it would be silly not to go for the better model at this price, even if it will reduce the battery life.

The Yoga C940 was between five and 21% better than the Yoga C930 in all our CPU and general performance benchmarks, averaging out to around 10% across most tasks. If we put the Yoga C940 against the Surface Pro 7 with the same i7 CPU and 16GB of RAM the two largely perform at a similar level. The C940 was up to 10% better in general workloads while the Surface Pro 7 was up to 10% better on multi-threaded CPU tests.

One thing that was worth noting is that the Yoga runs hot, with the optimised CPU regularly hitting 100-degrees. We would usually say that pushing a CPU this hard would reduce the battery lifespan, but the C940 seems to have compensated by including a generous 57Wh battery that lasts more than six hours in PCMark 8 and eight hours and 35 minutes during 1080p movie playback. Sustained exposure to temperatures of 100 degrees and above is however likely to reduce the longevity of the processor.

Since the C940 has returned with the Yoga’s clever Dolby Atmos speaker hinge, a decent keyboard, a fingerprint reader, a physical webcam shutter and a rear mounted stylus, the C940 is a good upgrade that adds battery life and better performance to an already solid convertible. Hopefully the forthcoming software improvements will add additional bonuses.

Verdict

The flagship Yoga 2-in-1 gets a performance bump, better battery life and some novel AI-powered features.