Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 2 (2017) Review: Nearly Perfect With OLED
ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 2 Battery Life, Thermals And Acoustics
In the following benchmarks we employ two very different battery life tests, Battery Eater Pro and a custom 1080p HD video loop test, to prove out battery life with our test group of machines. In all tests, Windows 10 Quiet Hours have been enabled and the displays are calibrated with lux meters on pure white screens to as close to 115 lux as possible. For the average notebook this is somewhere between a 45 - 60% brightness setting. Since notebook displays significantly affect power consumption and battery life, it's important to ensure a level playing field with respect to brightness of the display for battery testing. However, since many notebook displays vary in brightness at each respective setting in Windows, this calibration with the meter is critical to ensure all displays are set to as near identical brightness as possible before testing.
Battery Eater Pro wears systems down quickly with a heavy load on all subsystems, including processor, graphics, memory and even file transfers to storage. This is truly a worst-case test that will give you a sense of how a machine will hold up under heavy strain, when gaming or under heavy-duty continuous content creation workloads, for example.
Battery Life - How We Test:
Our custom HotHardware video loop test takes a 1080p HD video with a 16Kbps bit rate and loops it repeatedly, with 1 minute break intervals in between. A timer log file increments minutes of uptime every minute along with the grand total before system shutdown, is stored in the log. This is a lighter duty test that is still a bit more strenuous than many office productivity tasks, but it's not nearly the strain that Battery Eater test puts on a system.
From the first generation X1 Yoga OLED to the Gen 2 machine, Lenovo was able to pick up another 42 minutes of up-time and propel this ThinkPad into the top 5 ultrabooks we've tested to date, and that's edging out some stout competition with 1080p displays with its 2560x1400 OLED display. Strong work for sure.
Battery Eater Pro wears systems down quickly with a heavy load on all subsystems, including processor, graphics, memory and even file transfers to storage. This is truly a worst-case test that will give you a sense of how a machine will hold up under heavy strain, when gaming or under heavy-duty continuous content creation workloads, for example.
In Battery Eater, the ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 2 is still able to outpace the Gen 1 machine, but it puts up a more middling score, likely again due to its higher clock speed processor, and faster SSD that will consumer more power when continually stressed.
ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 2 Acoustics And Thermals
Lenovo's latest generation ThinkPad X1 Yoga laptop has been upgraded with Intel's 7th Gen Kaby Lake series CPUs and is measurably faster in many tests versus the previous generation X1 Yoga. However, acoustically and thermally the two machines are very similar. That is to say that the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga does have a warm spot on the underside of the machine, towards the back underneath the display hinge, but we wouldn't call it "hot." We measured a skin temperature of about 97ºF at its warmest point on the bottom of the machine. That's still fairly comfortable.
In terms of noise output, only under heavier workloads do you hear the X1 Yoga's fans spin up to audible levels and then there's generally not any point in time where the machine fans are offensively loud. All told, the ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 2, like its matte black finish, is a stealthy, cool operator.
ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 2 Acoustics And Thermals
Lenovo's latest generation ThinkPad X1 Yoga laptop has been upgraded with Intel's 7th Gen Kaby Lake series CPUs and is measurably faster in many tests versus the previous generation X1 Yoga. However, acoustically and thermally the two machines are very similar. That is to say that the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga does have a warm spot on the underside of the machine, towards the back underneath the display hinge, but we wouldn't call it "hot." We measured a skin temperature of about 97ºF at its warmest point on the bottom of the machine. That's still fairly comfortable. In terms of noise output, only under heavier workloads do you hear the X1 Yoga's fans spin up to audible levels and then there's generally not any point in time where the machine fans are offensively loud. All told, the ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 2, like its matte black finish, is a stealthy, cool operator.
