The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x is a fantastic platform for Copilot+ and the Qualcomm Snapdragon X chips. It’s a great example of how Windows on Arm can deliver a more efficient and powerful experience, while also boasting a stunning OLED display.
Specs and configurations
The Yoga Slim 7x has fewer configuration options than many Lenovo laptops, making it easier to choose the right model. The only chipset available is the Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100, paired with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. The star of the show is the 14.5-inch 3K OLED display, which is the only option and comes standard with the base model priced at $1,199. Upgrading to 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD bumps the price up to $1,313, still a competitive price for a premium laptop, especially considering the superior display.
Design
The Yoga Slim 7x is a sleek and elegant machine, even thinner than the MacBook Air M3 and the HP OmniBook X. It’s also slightly lighter than the HP, despite having a larger display. The design is refined, with a stylish color scheme, speaker grilles flanking the keyboard, and a reverse notch at the top that houses the webcam and contributes to thinner, more modern bezels. The all-aluminum construction feels robust, with a rigid keyboard deck and chassis bottom. The lid is slightly flexible, unlike some other premium laptops, but overall, it’s as solid as its competitors.
Keyboard and touchpad
The keyboard on the Yoga Slim 7x is a bit of a departure from other Lenovo designs. It features less sculpted, smaller keycaps, which actually make the spacing feel more generous. The keys offer a satisfying snappiness, a comfortable bottoming action, and just the right amount of pressure for a precise feel. While not quite as good as the Magic Keyboard on recent MacBooks, it’s still a very good keyboard. The touchpad is mechanical, which is acceptable at this price point. It’s large and precise but the button clicks can be a bit loud. More premium laptops are opting for haptic touchpads, a feature I missed on this machine. The Yoga Slim 7x’s display is touch-enabled, a feature the MacBook Air M3 lacks but is present in other competitors.
Connectivity and webcam
The Yoga Slim 7x is all-in on USB4. While the new port offers similar features and performance to Thunderbolt 4, it’s a bit of a disappointment that there are no legacy connections. The lack of a 3.5mm audio jack is another drawback, shared only by the XPS 13. There’s also no SD card reader, a feature that’s becoming less common. However, wireless connectivity is fully modern with Wi-Fi 7 onboard.
The webcam is a 1080p version with an infrared camera for Windows 11 facial recognition. It’s integrated into Lenovo’s reverse notch, which also makes opening the lid easier. As a Copilot+ machine, the Yoga Slim 7x supports the enhanced version of Microsoft’s Studio Effects software for better background blurring, face tracking, and other capabilities.
CPU performance
The Yoga Slim 7x utilizes the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 chipset, the slowest version available. Each chipset shares the same 12 cores (eight performance and four efficient), but the X1E-78-100 is the slowest at 3.4GHz and lacks a dual-core boost. In contrast, the X1E-00-1DE is the fastest, running at up to 3.8GHz with a dual-core boost to 4.3GHz, while the X1E-84-100 in the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge 16 runs slightly slower at 4.2GHz.
Benchmarking Windows on Arm laptops is still limited, with only a subset of our usual benchmarks running natively. In the two benchmarks that do work – Geekbench 6 and Cinebench 2024 – we see that the Qualcomm chipset is significantly faster than Intel’s Meteor Lake and Apple’s M3, particularly in multi-core applications. However, in single-core applications, the M3 retains its speed advantage. The Apple M3 Max chipset, with significantly more cores, is naturally much faster, demonstrating how Apple Silicon scales to superior performance. The M3 is also faster in single-core, meaning that lighter day-to-day workloads may feel more responsive on the MacBook Air.
In my testing, I didn’t encounter any applications that wouldn’t run on the Yoga Slim 7x. Apps running in emulation mode were plenty fast, and both machines were capable of handling demanding productivity tasks. It’s clear that Windows on Arm no longer suffers from a performance penalty that would deter typical users.
The Yoga Slim 7x has a fan, which did spin up during testing. While not loud, it’s noteworthy that the MacBook Air M3 is fanless and therefore completely silent. This does affect the MacBook Air’s sustained performance.
GPU performance
The Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100’s Adreno GPU runs at 3.8 TFLOPS, while the faster chipsets operate at 4.6 TFLOPS. Our ability to test Windows on Arm performance is still limited. We have one benchmark, 3DMark Wild Life Extreme, designed for lower-end graphics like Intel Arc. It doesn’t show the same extreme performance differences when compared to faster discrete graphics.
In this test, the Yoga Slim 7x performed as expected, roughly equivalent to Intel Arc but slower than the MacBook Air and Pro. This means it’s not more than an entry-level gaming laptop, and it won’t outperform Windows laptops with discrete graphics in apps like Adobe Premiere Pro that use the GPU to accelerate various processes. The Pugetbench Premiere Pro benchmark, which tests this performance, doesn’t run on Windows on Arm yet. But by comparison, the Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 9 scored 2,329 in the benchmark, while the MacBook Air M3 scored 3,633. Apple silicon is faster in this benchmark due to various CPU optimizations, not specifically because of its GPU performance. This suggests that the Yoga Slim 7x won’t be nearly as fast.
Ultimately, the Yoga Slim 7x is like its Windows x86 competition. It’s suitable for lightweight gaming and creativity, but if you’re a creator or a serious gamer, you’ll want to wait for Windows on Arm machines with discrete graphics.
AI performance
The Snapdragon X Elite features a neural processing unit (NPU) rated at 40 tera operations per second (TOPS). This is faster than the NPU in Intel’s Meteor Lake chipset (10 TOPS) and the Neural Engine (NE) in Apple’s M3 chipset (18 TOPS). Currently, there isn’t a reliable benchmark to compare the AI performance of these machines accurately. Theoretically, the Snapdragon X Elite would be the fastest in terms of on-device AI performance that utilizes the NPU. If the GPU is involved, then discrete GPUs would offer faster performance. Future chipsets, such as Intel’s Lunar Lake (45 TOPS NPU), AMD’s Ryzen AI (50 TOPS), and Apple’s M4 (38 TOPS), promise to be even faster.
It’s important to remember that AI capabilities vary across platforms. Even with a reliable benchmark, it would only tell us how a laptop performs relative to others running the same AI features.
Battery life
The Snapdragon X Elite and Windows on Arm are marketed as offering better efficiency. While they’re slightly faster than Intel Meteor Lake and the MacBook Air M3, the performance difference isn’t significant enough to make them a choice based solely on performance. However, improved battery life would be a significant advantage.
I’ve found battery life difficult to assess definitively. The Yoga Slim 7x shares the same efficient Snapdragon chipset as the OmniBook X but has a larger battery (70 watt-hours versus 54 watt-hours) and a larger, more power-hungry 14.5-inch 3K OLED display compared to the 14.0-inch 2.2K IPS panel on the OmniBook X.
In the two tests we can reliably run on Windows on Arm, the Yoga Slim 7x wasn’t as impressive. The OmniBook X had significantly longer battery life, especially in the video-looping test, and the Yoga didn’t last as long as the Asus Zenbook 14 Q425, which has a lower-resolution OLED display and an Intel Meteor Lake chipset. While battery life was better than most Meteor Lake laptops, it didn’t come close to the MacBook Air M3 in web browsing and video playback.
When running a more demanding test with sustained loads, the Snapdragon X Elite machines are even less impressive. Despite only slightly better performance than the MacBook Air M3, when all three run the Cinebench 2024 multi-core test at roughly 100% performance, the MacBook Air M3 lasted for 3.5 hours, while the two Windows on Arm machines lasted for just two hours. This is better than the XPS 13, which only lasted for 1.5 hours, but not as significant.
Overall, I have to conclude that while Windows on Arm laptops are more efficient than most current Windows laptops, they don’t match the efficiency of Apple Silicon laptops. I’m not sure they’re worth buying based on battery life alone.
Display and audio
The Yoga Slim 7x costs around $60 more than the OmniBook X, but the difference is justified by the spectacular OLED display. Simply turning it on is a different experience. OLED colors are brighter and more dynamic, and the inky blacks create a much better initial impression that carries through as you use the laptop.
My colorimeter confirmed that this is a high-quality OLED display. Colors are incredibly wide at 100% of sRGB, 96% of AdobeRGB, and 100% of DCI-P3. In comparison, the HP achieved 100%, 78%, and 100%, respectively. Both laptops have excellent color accuracy, with DeltaEs of 0.67 and 0.98 (less than 1.0 is indistinguishable to the human eye). The OLED display offers nearly infinite contrast at 16,980:1 compared to the IPS panel’s 1,400:1. The Lenovo display is also significantly brighter at 489 nits versus 325 nits. Given the similarities between the two laptops, it’s difficult to justify choosing the OmniBook X over the Yoga Slim 7x based solely on display quality. This extends to many other laptops as well, including the MacBook Air M3.
The Yoga also features a four-speaker setup with two upward-firing tweeters and two downward-firing woofers, providing louder and clearer audio than the HP’s dual-speaker setup. It’s a fantastic multimedia experience.
An even better next-gen Windows laptop
The Yoga Slim 7x doesn’t live up to the promise of MacBook-like battery life, but it’s still a new breed of Windows laptop. It still outlasts most other Windows laptops and is faster than its immediate competitors. It’s well-positioned for the future when AI becomes more prevalent. Compared to the first Windows on Arm laptop, the OmniBook X, the Yoga Slim 7x offers a significantly better OLED display. For less than $100 more, the Yoga is a much more attractive laptop and easier to recommend.
