Windows on Arm is finally maturing to the point of being truly usable, and the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7X Gen 11 only helps its case. With a fantastic build quality, great performance, and a gorgeous screen, this is one of my favorite 14-inch Windows laptops I’ve ever used.

8/10

Operating System

Windows 11 Home

CPU

Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Plus/Elite

RAM

16GB/32GB

Storage

512GB/1TB

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7X is the part of the second-generation of Snapdragon-powered laptops. Packing either the Snapdragon X2 Plus or Elite SoC, you’ll find plenty of power to get you through the day. With all-day battery life, an OLED screen on every model, and USB4 40Gb/s ports, this laptop has everything you need to handle whatever life throws at it.

Pros & Cons

• Gorgeous OLED display
• Fantastic webcam quality
• Solid typing experience
• Large trackpad
• Three USB-C USB4 40Gb/s ports

• 60Hz on all but the highest end model
• Speakers leave a little to be desired

Price and specifications

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7X starts at $1,140 and is available for $1,425 as tested directly from Lenovo. Best Buy also offers select models, but they have much higher price points than purchasing directly from Lenovo.

Lenovo delivers a gorgeous and color-accurate OLED

With build quality to match

I absolutely love the design of the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7X. While a lot of laptops focus on light and bright appearances, I adore the darker blue colorway that the Slim 7X comes in.

The screen is also pretty great. While only 1080p (technically 1200p, as it’s 1920×1200), the display is still pretty crisp and great. This comes from the fact that it’s only 14 inches, so the lower resolution doesn’t play into it as much.

The display is also helped by the fact that it’s OLED with the ability to hit 400 nits brightness typical, 500 nits for HDR, and that has a 100% DCI-P3 coverage. Whether I was watching YouTube, Plex, Netflix, or playing games, the screen definitely didn’t distract me in any way.

The one thing that I will note about the screen is that it’s only 60Hz. I know that putting a high refresh rate display might have cost a little more, but, at nearly $1,500 for the model I tested, I really would have liked to see at least a 120Hz refresh rate. 60Hz just feels so janky after coming from 120Hz or higher screens, which is all I use at this point.

There is one model that comes with a 2.8K 120Hz 1,100 nit OLED display, but it clocks in at over $1,700. It’s nice that Lenovo does offer the high refresh rate option, but I really just wish it was available on lower tier models at the 1200P resolution.

But, the overall experience definitely left me with a premium feel. The keyboard is a little more squishy than I’d like, but I definitely had no problems typing on it, and the massive trackpad is a huge bonus. Lenovo gets props for the build on the Yoga Slim 7X for sure.

Get through your entire workday without having to plug in

Lenovo really does mean all-day battery life

Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek

Lenovo claims that the Yoga Slim 7X can achieve all-day battery performance—and I definitely wouldn’t doubt that. In my testing, it definitely lasted me all day on normal workloads. If I was doing a lot of gaming or more creative workflows, it would die a bit sooner, but I could almost always get through an entire workday without plugging in.

This comes from the 70Wh battery and the Snapdragon X2 Elite processor. It’s no secret that Arm chips are power-efficient, and that’s definitely leaned into heavily here.

Not only does the laptop last all day on battery, it can easily be recharged with almost any USB-C charger. It ships with a 65W USB-C charger in the box, but in my usage I saw it draw around 30W when charging most of the time. It would definitely boost up to 65W when needed, but, even when playing heavier games, it only drew about 20W to keep itself charged once it hit 100%.

Unless you’re really pushing this laptop to its limits, expect to be able to unplug when you leave the house, and get home with some charge left in it. I was even able to go several days with light usage on a single charge, something that most of my Intel-based Windows laptops simply can’t do.

For having limited ports, this laptop is a full package

This has to be one of the best webcams I’ve ever seen in a laptop

Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek

The port selection on the Yoga Slim 7X is actually pretty great. While there’s no Thunderbolt 4 or Thunderbolt 5 here, that’s kinda to be expected. Thunderbolt is typically an Intel technology (outside of Apple), so with this being an Arm laptop, I didn’t expect it to have it.

However, it does have three USB-C USB4 40Gbps ports on it—two on the left, one on the right. Though, that’s all the ports this laptop offers. There’s not even a headphone jack on it.

On the righthand side, you’ll see the power button as well as the e-privacy webcam shutter switch. The webcam shutter switch electronically disables the camera, but doesn’t physically block it, sadly. That’s all the ports and switches it has.

As for the camera, it’s actually pretty solid. It’s a 9MP MIPI Webcam with an IR camera built-in as well. This enables Windows Hello authentication, and it gives you a pretty high-quality image too.

Being 9MP, you should get a full 4K output from the webcam (4K is about 8.8MP). However, in my testing, I only ever saw up to 1440p output from the camera. Don’t get me wrong, that 1440p is probably among the best laptop webcams I’ve ever seen. However, I do wish it was the full 4K.

With the Windows camera app, I was actually very impressed with the quality that the webcam output. I would have no problem attending meetings from this laptop. In fact, I’d even use the laptop as a camera for recording content for YouTube or Instagram videos without hesitation.

It was a little under exposed in the Windows camera app, and a little over exposed in OBS (which required some camera tuning and balancing). But, the resulting camera samples were very impressive to me.

The microphone and speakers are also in that same vein. I’ll say that the microphone itself is just like any other laptop microphone. I wouldn’t use it for voiceovers, but it’s definitely good enough for video calls. The speakers are decent, but leave a bit to be desired, especially in the low-end department.

I feel like there’s hardly any bass response on the laptop. I’m not expecting it to sound like it has a dedicated subwoofer, but I would like to hear a little more bass response. It’s not terrible, and I’d definitely be fine watching some YouTube videos on the built-in speakers. But, for watching a movie, I’d use headphones without a doubt.

It’s not a full gaming rig, but it has plenty of horsepower for everything else

The Yoga Slim 7X can easily do some heavy lifting when needed

Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek

I wasn’t sure what to expect for performance going into this review. This is the first Windows on Arm laptop I’ve ever used, even though I have had an Arm-based M1 Max MacBook Pro for the past five years.

However, I was quite impressed with the overall performance. I was a bit let down to see that I couldn’t play Apex Legends (or any other game that requires an anticheat), but that’s due to Windows on Arm, not the Yoga Slim 7X itself.

The games I could play, however, ran fairly well. I ran No Man’s Sky at the default settings that it chose on startup, which is basically standard across the board. I was easily able to hold 60 FPS at a lock with very few dropped frames or stutters. Even though it was only on standard graphics, it was still a very enjoyable experience.

I was able to get into a few Sentinel fights without worry. In fact, if I wasn’t looking at the laptop screen, I wouldn’t have realized I was playing on a laptop. To that point, if someone handed me this laptop with no stickers on it and told me to play No Man’s Sky on it without messing with the settings, I’d have thought it was a very solid experience, and possibly even thought that it had an entry-level to mid-range dedicated graphics card.

The No Man’s Sky experience was really great. On the other hand, Minecraft was a little bit of a mixed bag. I know, Minecraft can run on almost any system, and the Yoga Slim 7X is no exception. Normal non-modded Minecraft runs pretty great.

I’m a modded Minecraft fan, and right now, I’m obsessed with the Just Create Season 2 modpack. So, playing on a Just Create Season 2 server with no shaders, the experience left a lot to be desired. It worked just fine, and I was able to play for quite a while.

There were just a lot of stutters, shakes, and tons of lag in certain areas. Create is a known heavy mod though, and I’ve even experienced lagging on my desktop with a Ryzen 9 7900X and RTX 3080 12GB, so the fact that this little Arm-based laptop can handle a big modpack like Just Create Season 2 at all is impressive.

Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek

With that out of the way, I did want to provide a few synthetic benchmark results. I started off the synthetic benchmarking with Forza Horizon 5’s built-in benchmark, which surprised me quite a bit. Using recommended settings, which are quite low, all things considered, the system achieved a 47 FPS average. That’s very playable, and the lowest it hit was 39.6 FPS, which is extremely solid, given that there’s no dedicated graphics card in this system.

Using the built-in 7Zip benchmark, at the default 32MB dictionary size, the Yoga Slim 7X achieved a compression score of 129.231 and a decompression score of 124.238, which is quite respectable.

GeekBench was where things started to surprise me a bit. The GeekBench 6 CPU score put the Snapdragon X2 Elite in the Yoga Slim 7X at a single-core score of 3,752 and a multi-core score of 20,496. That’s actually ahead of the 16-inch MacBook Pro with a M3 Max, and only slightly behind a Mac Studio with a M4 Max in it. When compared to other Snapdragon X2 chips, it’s a decent bit behind the X2 Elite Extreme, which is to be expected.

On the Cinebench 2024 side of things, the Snapdragon X2 Elite in the Lenovo Yoga 7X saw a multi-core score or 1,326 and a single-core score of 150. For comparison, the X2 Elite Extreme has a multi-core score of 1,649 and single-core score or 139, and Apple’s M1 Max has a multi-core score of 791 and single-core score or 113.

All that to say, this tiny laptop packs a pretty big punch in the performance department. It’s become my go-to machine when I leave the house, with my M1 Max MacBook Pro staying home and docked at my desk unless I have a need for macOS on-the-go, which is rare since I also have an iPad.

Should you buy the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7X?

Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7X is a pretty fantastic laptop, all things considered. With a starting price of $1,140 and the unit I am using coming in at $1,425, it really ticks all the boxes that I would look at in this price point.

It offers solid performance across the board, beating many of Apple’s computers in several benchmarks. It handles mid to light gaming fairly capably, though it won’t play most AAA titles that require anticheats until Microsoft fixes that issue. However, outside of that, I really have no complaints about this laptop.

So, if you’re looking for a lightweight, well-built Windows on Arm laptop with solid power, then the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7X is a fantastic choice for you.

8/10

Operating System

Windows 11 Home

CPU

Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Plus/Elite

RAM

16GB/32GB

Storage

512GB/1TB

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7X is the part of the second-generation of Snapdragon-powered laptops. Packing either the Snapdragon X2 Plus or Elite SoC, you’ll find plenty of power to get you through the day. With all-day battery life, an OLED screen on every model, and USB4 40Gb/s ports, this laptop has everything you need to handle whatever life throws at it.