Series Yoga from Lenovo for a long time it was a kind of testing ground for new and bold ideas, bringing with it new technologies and unusual design features.
The line itself has many sub-series – there are laptops, ultrabooks, and convertible laptops (they are also 2 in 1). Today we will meet one of the representatives of ultrabooks – Yoga Slim 9i 14which is built on a new platform Intel Evo, whose main feature is the latest mobile processor family Tiger lake with new graphics Iris Xe. These ultrabooks belong to the premium class “expensive and rich” – the price for the minimum model starts at 160,000 rubles.
PACKAGING AND COMPLETE SET
Externally, the ultrabook packaging resembles a shoebox with a split cover that can be removed from the top.
Both the lid and the base of the box are made of thick cardboard, but differ in terms of the facing surface and color.
The lid is dark gray with a rough surface, and the base is covered with a glossy silver film that shimmers in various bright colors when a light source hits it. Of the designations, the manufacturer engraved on the box only the Yoga logo and its standard nameplate with a golden glossy surface.
Inside you will find the ultrabook itself, which is protected from dust and dirt from all sides by a neat cloth bag. Under it is a secret compartment with two boxes. One contains a 65 W power supply, and the other contains a network cable. Fast charging is great, but the power supply and mains cable do not match up to such an expensive device. Why it was impossible to put the power supply unit in the form of a large plug with a USB-C connector and an advising wire is not clear to us. And everything weighs almost 300 grams.
APPEARANCE
This is where the developers really invested in the looks and materials. Yoga Slim 9i 14 looks very strict and premium. It turned out to be thin (11 mm at the widest point of the case, excluding legs) and light (1277 grams) – with a very high-quality assembly and attention to design details. Especially if you look at the lid, which is covered with black genuine leather. We did not set it on fire, but it smells exactly like natural, and very pleasant tactilely.
On the lid in one corner is embossed the inscription “Yoga”, and in the other the traditional logo of Lenovo. The body itself is made of black metal. At the bottom, in addition to the rubberized feet, there is a perforation for air intake, behind which two small coolers of an active cooling system are slightly visible. The air is blown out through the grate, which is located under the hinge that connects the cover to the main body.
All connectors are presented on the side faces of the base. The power button is traditionally located in the corner of the right side of the ultrabook and has a small LED that signals the activity of the device. The manufacturer decided to abandon the standard USB Type-A in this solution – there are as many as three (2 left and 1 right) USB Type-C Thunderbolt 4 connectors on the sides, through which you can charge the Yoga Slim 9i 14 and connect external screens, disks, hubs, etc. the like. Also on the left side there is a hybrid audio jack for connecting headphones / microphone / headset, and on the right there is a switch to turn off the camera, or rather to turn it off completely, since when this switch is activated, Windows ceases to understand that it is on board at all.
The Ultrabook, despite its light weight, can be easily opened with one hand; on the front edge of the lid you can see the embossed inscription “YOGA 9 SERIES”. It seems like a trifle, but nice. The lid can be opened up to 180 degrees.
Inside, the case around the keyboard is metal. However, the wrist rest and touchpad are a single panel made of glass and neatly blended into the body. You don’t immediately notice that this is a separate element until you touch it. The glass has a glossy surface dotted with many dots, and the small touchpad (103 x 65 mm) is highlighted with a matte satin finish. The entire panel is easily soiled – there are touch marks on it, which is natural for glass, but they are easily erased with the same hand.
The touchpad does not have physical keys and does not squeeze in the corners, but it has tactile feedback, the vibration response of which depends on the force of pressing.
The keyboard is recessed into the body. It is convenient to type on it, as the stroke is soft and quiet. The keys are made of soft-touch plastic. There is a backlight with two levels of brightness, which can be adjusted using the FN + SPACE keyboard shortcut, as well as many quick commands available in the top row of buttons.
SCREEN, CAMERA AND SOUND
One of the main features of this ultrabook is its screen. It is touch-sensitive and covered with glossy glass. It glares on the sides, but if you sit right in front of it, then there is no problem. The frames around are very small – from 5 to 7 mm at the top in the camera area, 4 mm at the sides and about 11 mm at the bottom.
The screen here uses a 14-inch 10-bit IPS-matrix with a resolution of 4K (3840 by 2160 pixels) and a refresh rate of 60 Hz. Brightness is 500 nits and contrast is 1600: 1. DCI-P3 has a 90% color gamut. The display is VESA DisplayHDR 400 certified as well as Dolby Vision support.
There were no highlights on black, and with such a brightness, you can easily use the Yoga Slim 9i 14 outdoors in sunny weather. The screen sensor responds clearly and accurately.
For comfortable work with a display with such a high resolution, we recommend using the scaling of the Windows interface at a level of at least 150%, although the operating system itself recommends 300%.
The WEB-camera for those who cannot live without conferences and video calls via ZOOM and Skype has a 720p resolution. On the sides of it you can see an IR camera, a TOF sensor for adjusting the range of the image, an ambient light sensor (ALS) for automatically adjusting the brightness of the keyboard and two microphones. The image quality of the camera is generally poor, which is typical for laptops, but sufficient for conferences.
As we said above, on the right side there is a physical switch to disable the camera. The solution is really good compared to the standard curtains that we have seen in other models of the brand, since this function not only hides the image, but also turns off the microphone, so that you are not only not seen, but also not heard if you are afraid for your privacy … The camera, thanks to the presence of the corresponding sensors, supports the Windows Hello face recognition function, which quickly and clearly unlocks the system.
Two speakers of 2 W each with Dolby Atmos support are responsible for the sound. They are located on the sides of the keyboard, which means they are not blocked by anything.
The speakers turned out to be very loud and sound really good and spacious for a laptop. Dolby Atmos sound settings can be made through the specially installed Dolby Atmos Speaker System application, where many settings are available for different content. In general, the local sound solution is enough for watching videos on YouTube, for movies, as well as for listening to music in the background while working.
FILLING, BATTERY, OPERATION AND TESTS
The Yoga Slim 9i 14 that came to our test is based on the new 10nm Intel Core i5-1135G7 processor, operating at a frequency of 2.4 GHz. The processor is 4-core and runs in 8 threads, with 8 MB of Intel smart cache, and the maximum frequency is 4200 MHz. Responsible for the graphics is the built-in processor core of the new generation Intel Iris Xe Graphics with 1 gigabyte of memory allocated by default.
The system board contains 8 gigabytes of LPDDR4x dual-channel RAM with a maximum frequency of 2133 MHz. There is no possibility of its expansion. The internal storage in the test sample was played by a 512 GB NVMe SSD from Samsung. There are no additional slots for drives, but the installed one can be replaced if desired. To connect to the network, the ultrabook received a Wi-Fi 6 module – Intel AX201, as well as Bluetooth 5.1 for wireless connection of devices.
The laptop comes with a 63Wh non-removable lithium-ion polymer battery. A full charge will last for 10-11 hours in everyday use (surfing the Internet, working with documents, watching videos and listening to music) with 50% screen brightness. The laptop fully recharges from the complete charge for about 2.5 hours.
When not loaded, HWiNFO displays the following average temperatures:
- CPU – 45 ° C
- GPU Core – 44 ° C
- SAMSUNG MZVLB512HBJQ-000L2- 41 ° C
Under maximum load in tests, the processor warmed up to 81 ° C, and the graphics core to 70 ° C. At the same time, the body of the device in the area of the upper half of the keyboard became slightly warm, while the rest of the body remained cold. In standard operating mode, the ultrabook operated almost silently, and under load it was possible to fix the maximum noise level in the region of 40 dB.
The disk speed in Crystal Disk Mark was 3519 MB / s for reading and 2971 MB / s for writing. The AS SDD test, as usual, shows much more modest results – 2662 MB / s for reading and 1211 MB / s for writing. Turning on the laptop took about 10 seconds, which is within the standard values for a solution on an SSD M.2 drive.
It is expected that such a compact and thin device is completely unsuitable for running and comfortably passing modern top-end games, but Intel advertises its Iris Xe graphics accelerator as capable of running games in Full HD – probably here it means that only at the minimum graphics settings.
Traditionally, we tested the hardware in two benchmarks. In the Superposition benchmark test on the Unigine 2 engine at 1080p at medium settings, the system showed 15 to 23 frames.
In the Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition benchmark, the laptop at low configurations at the same resolution was able to score 2178 points and get a low performance score. We also tried to launch a couple of games from Game Pass. DOOM Eternal immediately gave information about the lack of GPU support from Intel, and then about the lack of video memory. Forza Horizon 4 crashed during loading immediately after long optimization and loading of the game itself. In addition, when rendering 3D scenes in Cinebench r20, this laptop managed to achieve 1814 points in the multi-core test and 512 points in the single-core test.
RESULTS
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i 14 is a great executive Ultrabook that boasts a tremendous focus on looks, autonomy, performance for day-to-day work tasks, and nice details like vibration feedback in the touchpad. I especially want to praise the touchscreen 14-inch 4K-screen, which is pleasing to the eye, as well as very decent sound for laptop standards. On the downside, I would include a poor package for such an expensive device and a not very compact and heavy bundled charger, which in general can be replaced with something more convenient with the same power from other brands.
Author: Sergey Dyakonenko (Madnfs)
Photo: Alexey Olkin
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