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Lenovo’s Snapdragon X-Powered, 2.8 Lb Yoga Slim 7x made the cut in my demanding laptop bag
Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Snapdragon
Dave Altavilla
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon I’ve written about it Snapdragon X based laptops and the platform of the past, but in this report I’ll delve into my experience living on Lenovo’s new Snapdragon X Elite-powered Yoga Slim 7x laptop, using the machine as my daily driver and travel workhorse.
Not only is this a top-end ultralight, with a beautiful 90Hz, 14-inch, 3K OLED HDR display, a 1080p Windows Hello IR webcam, WiFi 7 and 16GB of fast LPDDR5X 8,448MHz memory, but it also features a number of of the best performance I have experienced in this class of machines. And it looks great too, if Cosmic Blue suits you as much as it suits me. But let’s dive in, because there’s more than meets the eye than just a sleek design and top spec.
Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x left side edge view. Two of the three USB-C USB4 Gen 4 ports visible
Dave Altavilla
Addressing the elephant in the room: software compatibility
Let’s get this out of the way early, as this is the one area that might cause some people anxiety when switching to a Windows Snapdragon-based machine. The software ecosystem is still evolving, although Microsoft is now spending a lot of money on it, of course in collaboration with Qualcomm, and big names like Adobe are finally joining in. Regardless, there are undoubtedly some applications and games that will have compatibility issues or need to run under Microsoft’s Prism emulation mode, but my usual semi-challenging creator workflow presented no problems.
I should also point out that this isn’t a gaming machine, but if Qualcomm can work out AVX support for the platform, which is causing issues with some games, and continually update their graphics drivers with optimizations for new games, Snapdragon do that. have come a long way in terms of gaming performance and compatibility. Besides gaming, which I rarely have time for these days, my workflow is powered by a mix of Office productivity apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Chrome web browsing, as well as Adobe Photoshop for image editing and Cyberlink Power Director for video production. . A handful of additional utilities are also occasionally called upon for bulk file renaming and image resizing.
General performance experience in creator and office workloads
Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x keyboard with backlight and large touchpad
Dave Altavilla
Photoshop and Power Director are heavier lifts, but the Snapdragon-powered Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x can handle both with ease. I normally work in 4K30 or 4K60 video content and transcode to H.265 HEVC final video output from the road, when traveling to trade events and customer briefings. Browsing a video’s timeline is always smooth and fluid, and rendering for output is typically as fast or slightly faster than any previous laptop I’ve owned. I’m also now starting to use AI-generated effects and video and audio cleanup to improve production quality, and this machine handles it all very well. Although I did notice that, at least in Power Director, the AI processing is not currently offloaded to the NPU, but rather handled on the CPU and integrated GPU. Other apps, such as Davinci Resolve, do use the onboard NPU for AI-enhanced features such as the app’s Magic Mask function.
On a similar – perhaps underappreciated – note, Qualcomm has also helped solve a major problem that music makers have had on Windows PCs for years, regarding IO latency, when connecting instruments and other devices to their PCs. Qualcomm, working with engineers from Microsoft and Yamaha, helped build and test a new Audio Stream Input/Output driver so that instrument input latency is now a thing of the past on PCs. To get the full effect (around 4 minutes) of this new ASIO driver, check out the demo I captured at this year’s Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit in Maui, HI. It’s impressive stuff…
Either way, as the software ecosystem around this new class of Copilot+ PCs continues to evolve, using the best engine and the right tool for the job will only get better for Snapdragon X-based machines like Lenovo’s Yoga Slim 7x.
Maintaining performance and battery life is Snapdragon X’s secret weapon
Another underrated strength of Snapdragon While some of this has to do with the OEM configuration of the laptop, the trend I’ve seen is that Snapdragon . Let’s first see how this laptop performs in a popular 3D design and rendering benchmark called Cinebench, and then we’ll see how that performance also holds up in the battery department…
Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x with Snapdragon X Elite Cinebench benchmark results
HotHardware
As you can see, Lenovo’s Snapdragon-powered machine scores near the top in this particular benchmark, right behind the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge, which is also powered by a slightly higher-clocked Snapdragon X Elite processor. The single-threaded score is more mid-pack, but the multi-threaded score is top-tier. Conversely, Intel’s new Core Ultra 200 series (bottom of the chart), while lagging significantly in multi-threaded performance, scores particularly strongly in single-threaded throughput. However, let’s see what happens on battery power…
Comparison of current laptops on battery vs. wall socket (balanced profile unless otherwise stated)
HotHardware
As you can see, depending on how the OEM configures the machine and the power profile on the battery, the current and previous generation Intel Core Ultra laptops deliver significant performance when running on battery, while the two Snapdragon from Lenovo and Samsung here, only bleeding about 2 – 3%. Notable, however, is Dell’s Core Ultra 200-powered While I’m not showing single-threaded comparisons here, that photo looks even worse for the competing machines mentioned, but about the same for the Snapdragon Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x.
But again, this aspect of performance is somewhat dependent on the OEM configuration, battery power performance is indeed one of the superpowers of this Snapdragon X laptop.
Key takeaways and what the future of the platform holds
Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x rear cover view
Dave Altavilla
Starting at $1199, or $1289.99 with a larger 1TB Solid State Drive, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x certainly commands a premium laptop price, although I’d say my experience with the machine so far has also been accompanied by top-notch performance and a great user experience, along with a beautiful 3K OLED screen. I’d like to see more 5G modem-equipped options new Snapdragon machinesas well as a microSD card slot on the Slim 7x. It also appears that Qualcomm could help drive wider adoption of 5G connectivity in laptops, with its lineage from Leadership in 5G modems. Furthermore, the Yoga Slim 7x’s keyboard isn’t as nice as those on Lenovo’s ThinkPad range, which have historically proven to be among the best laptop keyboards on the market, although Lenovo also has the Snapdragon-powered ThinkPad T14s to address that issue. .
The search for the ‘perfect’ laptop is always a bit elusive for me, but the Snapdragon Going forward, I expect the Snapdragon The inertia behind the platform is prominent and increasing, with machines like the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x showing the full potential of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X platform.