Design and construction

The notebook has a shiny aluminum cover with a “Yoga” logo on top and a metal “Lenovo” logo on the bottom. After you’ve opened the lid (which requires two hands), you’ll notice that the keyboard matches the finish of the chassis. The Dolby Atmos logo is also located on the left side of the keyboard. Because this is a convertible, you get a 360-degree hinge design with sturdy hinges. The Yoga 7i is also slightly slender and light, weighing 3.1 pounds and measuring 12.6 x 8.5 x 0.60.7 inches, making it a little heavier than some of the competition.

Build-Quality

The Yoga 7i is a premium-looking laptop with an all-metal design. The laptop’s top and bottom halves are both composed of aluminum, giving it structural robustness and dimensional stability. While I appreciate its strong construction, I am not fond of its 1.43 kg weight. For a 14-inch 2-in-1 convertible laptop, it’s a tad on the heavy side. Its tank-like 360-degree steel hinge provides plenty of rigidity while switching from laptop to tablet mode and vice versa. The exterior surface of this laptop features a matte anodized stamping, making it extremely sturdy and corrosion-resistant. My evaluation item is slate grey in tone, and the matte texture repels fingerprints reasonably well. The Yoga 7i has an extremely professional style to it, with small touches like the rose gold colored “yoga” emblem on the top lid giving it a premium appearance. In terms of build quality, the Yoga 7i is better than the Lenovo Flex 5i, the Acer Spin 3, and the Dell Inspiron 5000 series.

Display

A 14-inch Full HD multi-touch screen with an active stylus pen is included. It’s an IPS panel with LED backlighting and 300 nits of brightness that’s a joy to look at. Dragontrail glass is used to make the screen, which is light, flexible, and scratch resistant. It’s a glossy panel that produces brilliant images and vibrant colors, allowing videos and photos to stand out. The NTSC color gamut is 72 percent, which is significantly higher than the Lenovo Flex 5i’s 45 percent. The writing experience with the bundled active pen is, in my opinion, the best aspect of Yoga 7i. While sketching, painting, or writing, this pen has over 2000 degrees of pressure sensitivity, resulting in incredibly lifelike brush strokes.

Low latency is provided by the screen digitiser, resulting in a fantastic note-taking experience. This laptop’s brilliant 300 nit screen makes it ideal for creating digital art using the free AutoDesk SketchBook program. I recommend the Microsoft OneNote program and Windows Ink Workspace, both of which come pre-installed, for taking notes, writing calculations, and drawing diagrams. BTW, the active pen that comes with it is powered by a single quadruple-A battery that will easily last a year. It has two physical buttons that can be programmed.

Hardware Specifications

The Intel Core i5-1135G7 processor in my review unit is paired with 12GB of DDR4 3200 Mhz RAM and 512GB of M.2 2242 PCIe NVME SSD storage. This laptop also comes in a more expensive edition with an Intel Core i7-1165G7 processor, with the ability to upgrade the RAM to 16GB and the SSD to 1TB. Unfortunately, the RAM is soldered to the motherboard and cannot be increased. The PCIe NVME SSD stick, on the other hand, can be simply upgraded by opening the laptop’s rear. The Yoga 7i now comes with Intel’s EVO branding, which promises a tiny and light construction, excellent CPU and GPU performance, and long battery life. I’ve been getting approximately 12 hours of battery life, so this laptop can easily be used all day.

In the Cinebench single core benchmark, both the 11th gen Intel Core-i5 and Core-i7 CPUs outperformed AMD Ryzen 4000 and 5000 series processors. However, they lose the multi-core benchmark, which is unsurprising given that AMD’s CPUs have 6 or 8 cores while Intel’s only have four. Regardless, Yogi 7i is a fantastic performer. Internet surfing and using office productivity programs like word processors, excel, and PowerPoint are simple chores today. Complex jobs such as software development, video editing, and Photoshop are also handled by it. I also put this laptop through its paces by running a prime number extraction technique that utilized all four cores and eight threads.

The CPU first ran at a turbo boost clock frequency of 3.5 GHz before stabilizing at 3.0 GHz, which is significantly higher than the 2.4 GHz base clock frequency. Thanks to the Yoga 7i’s superb thermal design, which includes two heat pipes, a heat sink, and a decent-sized fan, the CPU never throttled or slowed down. In terms of graphics, you’ll get an integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics card, which is fairly good. It outperforms AMD Radeon integrated graphics in the iGPU FP32 benchmark. I got an average frame rate of roughly 45 fps while playing Fortnite on basic settings, which isn’t bad for casual gaming.

Webcam and Ports.

One USB 3.2 Gen 1 port and two Thunderbolt-4 USB Type-C connectors with data transfer, Power Delivery 3.0, and DisplayPort 1.4 are included. However, there is no HDMI port, SD card slot, ethernet jack, or traditional USB 2.0 port. You’ll need to utilize a USB Type-C hub to connect this laptop to an external monitor because it lacks an HDMI port. When linked to a compatible USB Type-C hub, it can drive two 4K external monitors. In the video description below, I’ve included links to some of my favorite affordable USB Type-C hubs that you can use to connect this laptop to numerous monitors. In terms of wireless connectivity, Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0 are supported. For further privacy, the inbuilt 720p webcam has a real shutter. It will be enough for video conference calls as long as you have adequate illumination.

However, if you want to improve the quality of your video, I recommend purchasing an external 1080p USB webcam. In the video description, I’ll include a link to my favorite 1080p webcam. Let’s take a brief look at the onboard speakers. These are top-firing stereo speakers with a combined output of 4 watts. Because the speakers are immediately facing you in laptop mode, they are quite loud. In tablet form, though, they don’t sound nearly as impressive.

Memory administration

After being idle for a long time, the Chrome tab would demand a reload in several instances. When Ilooked at the memory utilization chart in Task Manager, I found that this would eat up roughly 86 percent of the available RAM space. When games are added to the mix, though, things quickly deteriorate. I attempted to play Valorant while having a few Chrome tabs open in the background, and I received a “Your machine is low on memory” message on multiple occasions, which eventually grew into a BSOD.

So, unless you’re limited to small lightweight apps, 16GB of RAM is the better option. Furthermore, the SSD in our Yoga 7i is very disappointing. Both the read and write speeds are unsatisfactory in the CrystalDiskMark score, especially the latter. So I investigated other reviewers to see if there was a genuine manufacturing flaw, but it doesn’t appear to be the case. If you’re considering purchasing this laptop, make sure you run these benchmarks first.

Here are some additional benchmark results to give you a better idea of this machine’s capabilities. Anyway, while this 2-in-1 laptop lacks a separate GPU, we already know that the integrated Iris Xe graphics on the i5-1135G7 CPU are quite good.

Gaming Knowledge

As a result, you’ll be able to play a few eSports games under restricted settings. For this review, I used the Lenovo Yoga 7i to play a few popular games like Valorant and CS: GO. In Valorant, I got 35-38 frames per second at high graphics settings with 2x MSAA, and 48 frames per second at medium settings.

I achieved around 71 frames per second on average by turning down the visuals to low and turning off everything else. Similarly, with MSAA and FXAA disabled, CS: GO runs at a playable 58 frames per second. Despite the larger chassis, the cooling system is limited to a single fan. As a result, it heats up quickly, with the CPU temperature reaching 74 degrees in just a few minutes. The top-left portion of the keyboard gets hot after approximately 5 minutes, but this is bearable.

The Lenovo Vantage toolkit also has a handful of fan profiles to pick from. You should choose the “Extreme Performance” profile for the greatest gaming experience. Permit me to elaborate on this useful tool. This useful app allows you to download device drivers and control many system settings.

While it isn’t as good as the MyASUS program that comes with Asus computers, Lenovo Vantage is in another league. I really appreciate its toolbar shortcut, which shows the battery level as a percentage and contains shortcuts for cooling modes, camera/mic settings, and other things. Also, the clever “Flip to Start” feature turns the gadget on as soon as the lid is lifted, so there’s no need for a power button.

Summary

While AMD is aiming to make a comeback in the PC business, Intel has a firm grip on the premium laptop market. If you’re looking for a high-end laptop in 2021, look for one powered by Intel’s 10nm Tiger Lake processors. Today, we’ll put one of these high-end laptops to the test. The Lenovo Yoga 7 is a 14-inch 2-in-1 laptop with all of the characteristics of a great slim and light laptop. But, when it comes to premium laptops, does the Lenovo Yoga 7 have what it takes to make the cut? Stay with us and find out.