Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 (14in, AMD)
N Not the highest quality la laptop, but at £700 the Ryzen 5 version is great value if f sp speed is your priority
SCORE SC
PR PRICE £691 (£829 inc VAT) fr from currys.co.uk k
As I wrote in last l month’s la laptops group test ( see iss issue 319, p74), models go out of stock qu quickly due to the unprecedented de demand for mobile machines this past ye year. To prove my point, the exact model of the Yoga Slim 7 that Lenovo sent in for review – identified by 82A20016UK – is no longer on sale, but variants are. For instance, you can buy this exact same specification but in purple from currys.co.uk.
This might not be such a bad move because my grey model offers all the visual excitement of a radio play. I also question Lenovo’s naming strategy on two counts. First, Yoga suggests this laptop’s screen can push back all the way to 360°, turning this into a tablet – in fact it goes to 180° and doesn’t have a touchscreen. Second, it’s more “Quite Slim” than “Slim”, measuring 17.2mm thick at its midriff and 19.4mm at the rear (where a ridge of plastic acts as a foot).
Still, it’s a highly portable laptop. Lenovo keeps the bezels slim and the footprint compact, and combined with a fine battery life of 12hrs 21mins in our video-rundown test, I’d be happy to sling it into a bag for a day without the USB-C power supply. That’s good because this weighs 324g, on top of the 1.3kg of the laptop itself, but is also cumbersome due to its traditional design; Honor ( opposite) wins with its phone-style adapter.
While the construction isn’t up to ThinkPad levels, I’m confident that it could survive a commuter’s life: the lid and base are made from aluminium alloy, y and even though g there’s some flex – you can feel this in the lid and the palmrests – it’s not life-threatening.
The other sign that this is no ThinkPad is the keyboard, which is a mundane offering with minimal travel and no resistance behind the keys. The only positive I can muster is that the keys are large and that it has an effective backlight. The trackpad is again more Ford Fiesta than Porsche 911, with no glass coating and clicky buttons, but it will get you from A to B perfectly well.
Then there’s the 14in Full HD screen, which flatters to deceive. It performed well in our technical tests, covering 98% of the sRGB gamut with a 106% volume, and its average Delta E of 0.35 is nothing short of exemplary. A peak brightness of 403cd/m2 is strong, while a contrast ratio of 1,788:1 is again tough to criticise.
So, why not extol its virtues? Because it has two things going against it: first, poor viewing angles for a modern IPS panel. This is most obvious when you’re looking at a white background, with a drop-off in apparent contrast as your gaze shifts towards the edges, but I suspect it contributes to an overall drabness that belies the figures. Second, I’m not a fan of the anti-glare covering Lenovo adds, which gives text a grainy look.
The speakers are better. Lenovo mounts them on either side of the keyboard and that produces enough of a soundstage to make stereo work. I wouldn’t make the Yoga Slim 7 my top choice for music playback – the sound is too brash – but it’s fine at
“The AMD Ryzen 7 4700H chip devours multicore tasks, as shown by 5,673 in Geekbench 5 and 7,314 in Cinebench R23”
quiet t volumes and with tunes s that don’t demand much h bass.
They’re hey’re fine for lightweight weight gaming too, which h is fortunate because the seven-core even-core Radeon graphics hics built into AMD’s Ryzen n 4000 processors are good rather than great. It peaked ed in Dirt: Showdown, averaging aging 75fps at its native ve resolution, and 56fps in the GFXBench Car Chase hase onscreen test is respectable. able. Metro: Last Light proved more re challenging, with the average g dropping opping to 36fps, while the more recent t Metro Exodus proved a step too far with ith an average of 11fps.
My review sample ample included a Ryzen 7 4700H processor with eight cores (and eight t threads), and in tandem with 8GB GB of non-upgradable RAM it hit a high gh of 213 in our tests. This chip devours urs multicore tasks, as shown by 5,673 in Geekbench 5 and 7,314 in Cinebench R23.
Still, most people will be equally delighted by the performance of the six-core Ryzen 5 4600U that’s in the £700 version of this laptop (available direct from Lenovo). The biggest downgrade to note on that machine is its 256GB SSD compared to the nippy 512GB SSD (2,866MB/sec writes, 1,543MB/sec reads) in the more expensive version.
There’s a microSD slot on the side for emergency storage rations or data transfers, and it’s accompanied by two USB-A ports. Over on the left Lenovo includes two USB-C ports, one of which is for power delivery alone, a 3.5mm jack and an HDMI output.
It adds up to a solid if unexciting laptop, and isn’t a patch on the Asus ZenBook UX425 ( see issue 319, p80) for overall quality. But it’s fast, and if that’s more important to you than a top-quality screen then both the Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 models offer good value.