Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x review: a slim, durable notebook with a powerful CPU

With the Yoga Slim 7x, Lenovo has launched a thin notebook with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite (X1E-78-100) chip that’s suitable primarily for the office, secondly for work that requires strong multi-core CPU performance and thirdly for consuming media. It has a beautiful 3K OLED display with Dolby Vision, which means a razor-sharp image with a 14.5-inch screen diagonal.

Thanks to a sufficiently powerful NPU – the AI chip is said to deliver 45 TOPS – the new Snapdragon notebooks are also eligible for Copilot+. However, I won’t go into these functions in more detail here.

An arm processor instead of an x86: is it any good?

Almost every major manufacturer now makes notebooks with both x86 and ARM processors. The latter – the Snapdragon chips from Qualcomm – only trail AMD and Intel CPUs in a few respects. They have a relatively poor iGPU, so they’re not made for gaming or extensive Adobe Lightroom sessions. However, the CPU can easily keep up with the x86 competition – with the exception of a few programs that don’t work yet.

If you want to know which apps are already available in native mode or require emulation, you can find an overview at windowsonarm.org.

The biggest plus of the new Snapdragon notebooks when they were launched in June was the battery life, as well as the CPU performance. However, AMD followed up in August with the new Ryzen AI 300 chips, which are just as efficient. And Intel’s also preparing to close the gap with a new CPU generation (Lunar Lake) from November.

What’s inside the Yoga Slim 7x

Lenovo’s equipped the notebook with the currently weakest 12-core Snapdragon, the X Elite X1E-78-100. Qualcomm offers the system-on-a-chip (SoC) in four variants:

Other Snapdragon specifications include support for up to three external UHD screens at 60 Hertz and hardware-assisted encoding and decoding of AV1 4K HDR videos, which helps with streaming. On the connectivity side of things, there’s Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. In theory, there’d also be a 5G modem, which you can obviously only use if the manufacturer has provided the relevant SIM. The Yoga Slim 7x, however, comes without this.

The power consumption (TDP) of the chip can be configured by the manufacturer. When asked, Lenovo specifies 22 watts for the Yoga Slim 7x. The notebook’s battery has a capacity of 70 watt-hours (WH).

You can get the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x with either 16 or 32 gigabytes (GB) of RAM (soldered), a 512 GB or 1 terabyte (TB) SSD and Windows 11 Home or Pro. My test device has 32 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage.

Swiss keyboard layout (32 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD, Windows 11 Home)

Notebooks

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x – Copilot+ PC

14.50", Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100, 32 GB, 1000 GB, CH

7

Notebooks

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x – Copilot+ PC

14.50", Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100, 32 GB, 1000 GB, CH

7

German keyboard layout (32 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD, Windows 11 Home)

Notebooks

EUR1719,–

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x – Copilot+ PC

14.50", Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100, 32 GB, 1000 GB, DE

7

Notebooks

EUR1719,–

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x – Copilot+ PC

14.50", Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100, 32 GB, 1000 GB, DE

7

Design and ports

The Yoga Slim 7x has an aluminium casing in Cosmic Blue. I like that the aluminium is matte and the dark blue tone looks almost black in low ambient light.

The surface feels grippy. Weighing only 1.28 kilogrammes, it’s ideal to carry around. The display goes right up to the edge, making it just 32.5 × 22.5 centimetres when closed, and it’s nice and flat at 1.29 centimetres thick.

The Yoga Slim 7x offers three USB-C ports – more precisely USB4 with Power Delivery 3.1 and support for DisplayPort 1.4. Two of them are on the left side, with another on the right.

The right-hand side is also home to a power button and a slider for deactivating the camera. As is common now, one of the three USB-C ports is taken up when you’re charging. The power supply delivers up to 65 watts.

OLED touchscreen with Dolby Vision and good colour reproduction

You can also use the 14.5-inch OLED panel as a touchscreen – it has 3K resolution (2944 × 1840 pixels) in a 16:10 aspect ratio. You can set the refresh rate to 60 or 90 Hertz. The surface is reflective, which is an issue in sunlight, but it makes the colours look more vibrant.

Thanks to Dolby Vision, HDR 600 True Black and peak HDR brightness of up to 1,000 nits, the display is also impressive when binge-watching. According to Lenovo, it can reach up to 500 nits with SDR content. Measuring full-screen brightness with the Calibrite ColorChecker Display Plus calibration tool, the test model comes in at 485 nits. That’s very good for an OLED display.

My calibration tool confirms the manufacturer’s claim of a colour space coverage of 100 per cent DCI-P3. DCI-P3 is an extended colour space for digital content. There are no official figures for the sRGB and Adobe RGB colour spaces, which are important for regular work and printing respectively. But I measured excellent values for them too: 100 per cent sRGB and 95.6 per cent Adobe RGB.

Keyboard, touchpad, speakers, microphone and camera

I don’t have any complaints about the illuminated keyboard. Actually, the only thing is that, like many current notebooks, it comes with an extra Copilot key. Otherwise, I quickly got used to typing. The keys have a clearly noticeable trigger point right at the beginning of the key travel (1.5 millimetres).

The touchpad is easy to use even with sweaty fingers and measures 13.4 × 8 centimetres.

As you can see in the photo, there are also speakers alongside the keyboard. There are four of them with Dolby Atmos audio certification – the sound has a wide stereo effect, but relatively little bass. I also feel like the highs are emphasised too much, so I prefer to use Bluetooth headphones when watching films.

The accessories are rounded off by four microphones, a 1080p camera and an infrared camera for unlocking via facial recognition (Windows Hello).

Excellent CPU

I tested the processor performance with Geekbench 6 and Cinebench 2024. Comparison devices included competitors with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, the new AMD Ryzen AI 300 chip and last year’s Intel Meteor Lake-H chip.

In terms of single-core performance in Geekbench 6, the Yoga Slim 7x can keep up with the Intel chips launched in December, but it falls behind AMD and the other Qualcomm notebooks. Nevertheless, 2,463 points is a good result.

In terms of multi-core performance, it’s slightly better than AMD, but not the Snapdragon competition. I’m not sure whether this is because the Microsoft Surface Pro and the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge have the slightly better Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100. The chips don’t differ in terms of maximum multi-thread frequency. It may be due to the short-term CPU dual-core boost of up to 4 gigahertz, which the weaker Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 lacks.

When I look at the Cinebench result, I’m amazed:

Although the single-core performance is almost identical, Lenovo takes the multi-core title. But why?

Unlike Geekbench, Cinebench just tests rendering 3D models. This means that the cores are evenly loaded for ten minutes, which places greater demands on the cooling. This seems to be better on the Yoga Slim 7x than on the comparison models.

Pretty disappointing graphics, as expected

The downside of the Snapdragon X Elite chips is the graphics performance. The Lenovo notebook ranks bottom in the Geekbench 6 GPU test. This is the reason a Qualcomm chip isn’t suitable for handheld gaming and manufacturers continue to rely on AMD. And it’s also why I’d advise graphic designers against the Yoga Slim 7x, despite its great display.

Impressive battery life

As I said earlier, not all software works with Snapdragon chips. Unfortunately, this also includes the Modern Office battery life test from PCMark 10, which would provide a good comparison of standardised office operations.

A little less informative, but available for Snapdragon, is the PCMark 10 video battery life test. This involves playing a video locally at a standard peak brightness of 200 nits until the battery’s empty. As we haven’t used the test in the past, I can only make a few comparisons.

Lenovo did very well in the test and took the top spot with the Yoga Slim 7x. However, it should be noted that the Asus Zenbook S 16 with its AMD chip in second place has a larger display and only a few more watt-hours. I’m not sure whether the Yoga could hold a candle to a potential AMD notebook with the same specifications.

Mostly inaudible fan

After starting up the notebook for the first time, I noticed the fan running quietly while Windows was installing updates. Otherwise, the Yoga was inaudible when doing office work, surfing, or watching films. It was a different story when I put it to full use with Cinebench. I measured the following peak values with a Testo sound level meter:

• Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x fan noise from 30 centimetres away: 44.2 decibels
• Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x fan noise from a sitting position: 41.9 decibels

For comparison, the Asus Zenbook S 16 with the latest AMD chip reaches 43.9 decibels from a distance of 30 centimetres and 41.3 decibels when measured from a sitting position. The Microsoft Surface Pro with Snapdragon X Elite – which has the fan attached to the top – reaches 45.5 and 39.9 decibels.