Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 14" Review (AMD Ryzen) By MobileTechReview

This is Lisa from mobile tech review, and this is Lenovo IdeaPad slim 7. , I believe overseas is going to be called the yoga 7 or is so. This is pretty exciting. This is the year of AMD they're rising up. Sorry, I couldn't resist the pun. It has AMD Ryzen 2 inside otherwise known as Renoir, otherwise known as the dozen 4000 series.

U-Series CPUs, that really rock. Besides that it's very slim metal, chassis, nice, build, you know with Lenovo the seven series is pretty high, there's a nine series above it that's the most expensive and fancy pants, but this is often where the meat is for a lot of people getting a really nice build quality and good specs, but without spending you know, fifteen hundred or two thousand dollars. In fact, with AMD inside this one is list price of nine hundred dollars, and you might find a little cheaper at retailers. Now there is an intel version as well and that one is a thousand and fifty dollars, but we're just looking at the am done. We're gonna look at it now, so this is a 14 inch Ultrabook.

It's a conventional laptop design, clamshell, it doesn't do the 360 degree thing or anything like that. In fact, it doesn't even have a touch screen. It has a very pleasing full HD IPS glossy display, though, and we'll talk about the display quality a bit, but it's pretty darn nice, especially for the price inside. We have an AMD Ryzen series: 4700u, that's an eight core, eight thread CPU, which is a lot in an Ultrabook. That's what AMD's been doing this year.

They have really been blowing the top off of performance thanks to their seven nanometer architecture that has less heat. It uses less power all those good things now. Interestingly, ours actually has the dozen 7 4 800 unit and not the seven 4700u. So we got a little more performance and a little more heat. The 4700 might actually be better.

He was ram, is soldered on here, and it is phenomenally fast. You can see the specs on screen, because AMD does really fast ram. Soldering on eight gigs is what I see on Lenovo's site right now, but our particular unit is 16 gigs, so I'm hoping that'll be available for you, power users out there who might want it as the usual m.2 NVMe SSD slot, and you get 512 gig SSD for that 900 dollar price tag. Ours is a SK Unix one and the benchmarks pretty well. So I'm fine with that also what's nice is besides that dozen's, typically perfect on battery life as well, as you know, light to moderate work.

Let's be fair here, you're not trying to play Skyrim or edit video, or something like that. But you know your average normal light business, personal kind of use. We have a 60.7 watt hour battery inside which is pretty darn big for a 14 inch Ultrabook. It's also quite light three pounds which is 1.4 kilograms, and how thin is it 14.9 millimeters? Yet they do find room for some legacy ports here, like USB-C ports, you get two of those. We have USB-C, two of them no thunderbolt, three on the AMD version, I'm probably hailing back to the fact that that was intel's.

Intellectual property, though now is opening up to everybody. If you do go with the intel version of this, you do get thunderbolt 3. Anyway, two ports, one of them, is used by the 65 watt charger. Well, when you need to charge it, of course, you have a headphone jack on board as well, oh, and you also get HDMI and a micro SD card slot. So if it's not this thin and light, it's got all the ports that you could need to actually get work done or get school work done.

Pretty nice stuff build quality on this is very good. It's rigid, it's metal. The color that we have is the only color that's available. So that's fine on the display on this again. It's full HD, it's an IPS type of display, and it's quite good.

They claimed 300 nits. We actually measured a little above that you can see the metrics on screen. Contrast is better than average on this, and the color gamut's pretty respectable, especially in this price range to see. You know when you're pushing 80 to 84 for adobe, RGB and p3 color gamut. Subjectively speaking, it looks very nice, it is glossy there's some glare, but it's not hideously glossy.

The laptop has a window, hello IR camera, and this interesting presence detection thing that it does. It's not the first time we've seen this on laptops. So if you walk away it dims, if you walk close it wakes up and then hopefully it'll use the window sir camera to well log, you in Lenovo often does a good job with audio, and while this might not have a fancy rotating soundbar, it does have up firing, stereo speakers that surround the keyboard, and they're surprisingly loud and full actually they're, quite good great for watching movies. Certainly the keyboard on this is your typical Ultrabook short travel. It's not a thing pad folks, but it's not too bad.

It has a nice key return to it. Furthermore, it makes it feel, responsive, crisp and firm without being harsh on your fingertips. We have a Microsoft precision trackpad on board as well. Okay, so that's all the basics. What about the performance on this and that dozen CPU inside it is crazy, just even if you just look at the benchmarks, let alone real world use on this thing benchmarks.

Look more like a six to eight core intel, 45 watt CPU! You would find on a gaming laptop or a mobile workstation. That's the level of performance that we're seeing out of these dozen CPUs, and this is a 15 watt. Ultrabook CPU, with radon, graphics, radon graphics are pretty good too. If you go with the intel version, they give you a mx350, NVIDIA low-end dedicated GPU there. Well this one benchmarks ever so slightly higher than the average for that NVIDIA mx350, just on the radio and graphics.

So it's all very good. So if you're looking for 14 Ultrabook, that can do a little more than the usual stuff you might think of like office web serving Zoom calls streaming video. This can do it. The only caveat is because it's so thin, 14.9 millimeters, even though it has two fans inside when you're pushing it really hard, and you can see here on the benchmark graph where it goes into the more CPU intensive parts. This thing will hit the thermal ceiling, we're talking 101 centigrade now under normal use.

It doesn't get nearly that hot. The CPU core temperatures are absolutely fine, 40s 50s, sometimes 30s, but don't get this thinking you're going to cheat your way into getting the equivalent of a Lenovo ThinkPad x1 extreme, because it's not built to take that kind of heat for eight hours on end or four hours on it. If you get my draft, but it has enough power there and enough spiking and hump to that. If you do need to do some videos, a lot of people now are doing videos for presentations or for school. That sort of thing you've got the horsepower here, where usually on an Ultrabook video editing, especially if you get to 4k, can be a little slow and tedious battery life on this is well.

You might guess good because AMD seven nanometer CPU is very efficient, and we have a relatively speaking quite large battery for 14-inch Ultrabook and the Lenovo always has these crazy claims like 17 and a half hours of battery life or something obviously real world you're, never going to see that sort of thing, but I actually got through a complete work day with this. That means from 9 00 am to 5 pm, never shutting the laptop off letting it sleep occasionally sure, but so yeah you can do eight to nine hours with this, unlike to moderate use again, if you are editing, video or doing Skyrim play or something like that, then obviously it's going to be shorter, but that's another win there and probably the intel one isn't going to be quite as good with the intel 10 gen CPU. So we don't have it in preview. So I can't say that for sure to take off the bottom cover just unscrew the torn t5 screws, they're all visible, nothing hiding under the rubber strips or anything like that and pry it off, and it has some tenacious rubber clips attached to that metal. Bottom cover particularly these over here, so if you feel like it's grabbing in the middle, that's why it's these metal clips right here.

So once we get it off here, our internals mostly filled up with the relatively speaking very large for a laptop to size, 60.7 watt hour battery pretty much everything else here is soldered on. We have ram soldered on board. Here we have the m.2 SSD, which is an m.2 pocketed NVMe SSD, ours happens to be a 512 gig SK Unix SSD installed there benchmarks pretty well, I am assuming the Wi-Fi card is soldered on as well. I really can't see any antenna leads. Perhaps these would be it here unless it's on the other side of the motherboard uh.

That is what it is, and we have a good Wi-Fi six cards there from intel. So no worries about that two fans, which is very unusual to see in an Ultrabook and as you've heard about the thermals on this. It really does need those and our kind of typical Ultrabook size, heat sink here and some heat tape shroud stuff going on over here. So that's the Lenovo IdeaPad slim 7, and what a nice Ultrabook for the price, particularly if you get that AMD CPU inside, because the performance here is just crazy bonkers way better than Ultrabooks should ever be. Yes, you got to keep an eye on your thermals and on the heat and stuff like that, the chassis doesn't get that hot to touch, but those core temperatures could get a little up there.

But overall nice package, very good. Full HD display good set of ports, and did I say dozen's fast, I'm Lisa from mobile tech review be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more cool tech videos and hit the notification bell. So you know about them too.

Source : MobileTechReview