Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9 (2024)

Verdict

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9 is a fantastic Windows ultrabook with a gorgeous OLED display, beefy performance and fantastic battery life. It also looks and feels excellent with an aluminium frame, although its connectivity could be better.

Introduction

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9 (2024) follows a consistent pattern of recent Lenovo ultrabooks in being excellent all-rounders for their price tag with a sleek frame, fantastic OLED display and excellent battery life.

In the vein of other 2024 ultrabooks such as the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 and Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Edge, the new Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9 is Arm-based running, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X elite chip alongside 16GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD storage.

It also packs in a 14-inch 3K 90Hz OLED display and will cost £1300/$1289.99. That’s quite competitively priced against both the above two choices, and Dell’s new XPS 13 (2024) with a similar spec sheet.

I’ve been testing the Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9 for the last couple of weeks to see how well it stacks up against the fierce competition and to see if it’s one of the best ultrabooks we’ve tested.

Design and Keyboard

• Gorgeous and sturdy construction
• Meagre port selection
• Responsive keyboard and trackpad

The Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9 feels excellent thanks to an aluminium body that has the benefit of weighing just 1.28kg. It’s especially lightweight and wonderfully portable for taking on the go while remaining sturdy with no chassis flex.

As well as offering a gorgeous and sturdy frame, the Cosmic Blue colourway looks fantastic and is unique among its contemporaries, standing out among the sea of black, white and grey laptops that have become the norm.

The bezel around the 14-inch display is also thin, while the Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9 is also slender in a general sense, with a thickness of just 12.9mm.

That thickness has led to the typical sacrifice in the inputs department, though. The Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9 only comes with a trifecta of USB4 capable Type-C ports that all support display and power delivery. It’s on par with other Snapdragon X Elite laptops I’ve tested, although is bettered significantly by more affordable laptops with as beefy power, such as the Asus Vivobook Pro 15 OLED.

A USB-A or Micro SD slot at least would have been welcome here, although there is a physical privacy shutter for the laptop’s webcam.

The Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9 excels with its keyboard. It’s a quiet, tactile scissor-actuated offering with Lenovo’s typical deep-dish keycaps that feel brilliant to use for extended periods, while its bright white legends are big and easy to read. The smaller form factor is fine, too, while its white underglow backlighting provides vibrancy for after-dark working.

As for the trackpad, it’s got a glossy, smooth texture to it in a similar vein to the new Dell XPS 13, while it’s also quite large for a laptop of its size, providing your fingers with a lot of real estate.

Display and Sound

• Detailed, responsive OLED panel
• Deep blacks and fantastic colours
• Speakers are quite thin-sounding

It’s on the part of its display where the Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9 is especially brilliant, with it packing in a 14-inch OLED panel with a 3K (2944×1840) resolution and 90Hz refresh rate that offers solid brightness, sublime colours and deep blacks.

That was backed up in both my viewing of some Grand Tour episodes and viewing LG’s OLED demo test footage, as well as when using my trusty colorimeter. With this, I measured deep, perfect blacks with a level of 0.04, while its contrast ratio of 11370:1 continues what we’ve come to expect from OLEDs and their virtually infinite contrast and dynamic range.

A peak SDR brightness of 449.9 nits is solid and nearly meets the Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9’s DisplayHDR True Black 600 level, while Lenovo also says it can hit up to 1000 nits peak for HDR content, as this panel also supports Dolby Vision.

In addition, it also offers some sublime colour accuracy with 100% sRGB and DCI-P3 coverage and 95% Adobe RGB. That essentially means this laptop’s OLED panel is ideally suited for both productivity and colour-sensitive, creative workloads.

The speakers on offer here though are simply okay, offering a thinner sound that lacks much in the way of bass or precision. At least they are upwards-firing, so sound won’t be muffled by placing the Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9 on a softer surface such as a duvet cover.

Performance

• Beefy performance in CPU-intensive tasks
• Graphical horsepower is lacking
• Fantastic SSD performance in a sensible, larger capacity

The Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9, as with other Armp-based Windows ultrabooks, chooses to utilise an efficient and powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon x Elite SoC, which provided some responsive and zippy performance both in day-to-day usage and in our round of synthetic benchmark tests.

Results in the likes of Cinebench R23 and Geekbench 6 for both single and multi-core scores are in and around the likes of the Surface Laptop 7 and Galaxy Book 4 Edge, with a few points separating each of these laptops in those tests. With the Snapdragon X Elite’s 12 cores and 24 threads, it’s well-suited to CPU-intensive workloads.

Where this chip falls down in the Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9 as it does in other ultrabooks is with its graphical oomph, where its 1839 score in the 3D Mark Time Spy Test goes to prove that this isn’t perhaps the best processor for 3D rendering tasks or gaming, for instance.

16GB of RAM provides a solid amount of headroom for intensive workloads, and the 1TB SSD inside my sample is generous at its price point, offering double the capacity of other Windows ultrabooks I’ve tested recently,. It’s also a reasonably brisk one too, with excellent read and writes of 5186.65 MB/s and 4710.27 MB/s respectively.

Software

• Rather clean Windows 11 install with minimal bloatware
• Copilot+ adds some functional AI features
• Small incompatibility issues

The Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9 runs proper Windows 111, as the other more recent Arm-based Windows ultrabooks do, and against some other installs I’ve used, Lenovo’s has very little in the way of additional software. It comes with the customary McAfee antivirus that they all do, as well as one piece of Lenovo’s own software – Vantage.

Lenovo Vantage is a tool that works in a similar way to MyAsus, for instance, where you can check on settings such as the different Dolby Atmos sound modes for the internal speakers and power modes, as well as battery health and internal temperatures.

Besides this, the Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9 offers the same functionality as other Copilot+ PCs with a generous helping of Microsoft’s AI assistant easily accessible with the dedicated key on the keyboard’s bottom row for summoning when you need extra information or to ask a question, for instance.

Beyond Copilot itself, Windows on Arm with its AI features also has it baked into the likes of the Photos app for adding filters to photos or generating images, or in Paint where it can give you a hand with similar generative AI functionality for producing an image based on a description with its CoCreator tool.

There is also useful AI features with the Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9’s webcam, with nifty Windows Studio features for everything from blurring the background behind you to ensuring you always maintain eye contact even if in reality you’re looking away from the screen.

It’s also just noting the fact that there are some small incompatibility issues with Windows on Arm, with some VPN apps and games such as Dirt 5 not working at the moment. I also had the trouble of our PC Mark 10 benchmark test not working. For the most part though, the Prism translation layer has done a solid job of porting x86-based apps over to Arm alongside the decent range of Arm-based apps already built for Windows.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 16 hours 52 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for 2 working days

Despite its slim frame, the Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9 slots in a large 70Wh battery, which is significantly bigger than the cell found in the XPS 13 (2024) and inside the Surface Laptop 7. In our video loop battery test with the screen at the customary 150 nits, it lasted for 16 hours and 52 minutes, which is some fantastic endurance, and a testament to the efficiency of the Snapdragon X Elite.

This means you’ll be able to easily get a working day out of the Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9 and go deep into a second before even needing to think about reaching for the charging cable. You won’t be waiting around for too long for this laptop to charge back up, either with the 65W charger taking just 39 minutes to put 50 percent charge into the Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9, while going from zero to full took 100 minutes.

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