Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition Review: A Sleek Copilot+ 15” Laptop
It's always fun to dig into a notebook and see how it ticks. When we turn the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition upside down, we can see a pretty large intake vent at the top. There are rubber feet at the front and a large rubber bar at the rear so it doesn't slide around on the table, and we can see that the bottom is held on with just five Torx T6 screws, and probably a lot of tabs. Also, we can see a sticker that warns against eating the coin-sized battery that keeps the CMOS going, which will probably disappoint anyone hungry and moronic.
Removing those screws revealed that yes, indeed there are a lot of tabs doing most of the work holding the aluminum bottom on the Yoga's chassis. However, once we get through all that, we can see that there are two cooling fans attached to the Intel Core Ultra 7 256v CPU. Right below that, we see that M.2 2242 SSD that's completely user-replaceable; you might opt for a 2 TB drive like Corsair's MP600 2242 drive for right around $200 if the 1TB maximum capacity available from Lenovo won't cut it.
Less user-friendly is the fact that the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth module are not discrete. We can also see the downward-firing woofer speakers flanking the 70 Watt-hour battery. It's not all that difficult to change out the juice box, as it's just held in with a few screws. Alright, let's put the shell back on and see how the thermal performance is.
Less user-friendly is the fact that the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth module are not discrete. We can also see the downward-firing woofer speakers flanking the 70 Watt-hour battery. It's not all that difficult to change out the juice box, as it's just held in with a few screws. Alright, let's put the shell back on and see how the thermal performance is.
Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Thermal Tests
Late into the run, we manually checked surface temperatures and noise levels. Standing the laptop up on its side, we scanned the top and bottom for hot spots, and found that the warmest section of the notebook was just above the keyboard, where it fluctuated between 100 and 102 degrees F (37.7-39 C). That's a little warm to the touch, but not in any danger of burning any skin. Even the exhaust was merely warm to the touch.
The cooler was apparently doing its job, too, as the fans did not have to run overly hard to get there. We measured between 43 and 45 dBA at different points throughout the stress test, at a distance of about 18 inches from the rear of the system. If you're hunched over a laptop to play games, you're actually sitting a little closer than that, so we're comfortable with that distance for this measurement. It's not an obtrusive sound, and it's not all that loud to begin with.
And then finally, the performance stability of the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition is pretty solid. It maintains over 98% of its first-run performance for the duration of the test. That means that it's not trying to be overly aggressive with turbo clocks early in the run, and it's not losing anything due to performance degradation, either. The cooler is doing its job nicely, and it's not overly loud while doing it. This is a great result.
Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition Wrap-Up
The Lenovo Slim 7i Aura Edition is a solid and attractive ultraportable laptop. First of all, it looks really nice in its aluminum shell, and the large, bright, and accurate display is pleasant in everyday use. We edited all of the photos for this review on it using Adobe Lightroom, and they look good on just about every other computer in the house. The keyboard is excellent as well, and the trackpad is large enough that if you can't use a mouse where you are, it's going to be just fine.There are some aesthetic choices we don't necessarily love, like the lip on the lid. This is where the infrared webcam sits, and it's a concession that Lenovo made to fit it in the display with the smallest bezels possible to keep the footprint down. It's certainly a far sight better than notching the display (LOL Apple), but other Windows notebook makers have been able to pack nice webcams into similarly-sized spaces. Just check out the Dell XPS 14 for proof of that. It's a nitpick, for sure, as is the large sticker on the bottom telling users to not eat the coin cell battery inside the laptop.
Perhaps more important is that there are only two Thunderbolt USB-C ports and a single USB-A port, and one of those Thunderbolt ports has to be used by the charger, as well. In a 15" laptop we'd really like to see a bit more connectivity. USB-C docks are pervasive, we suppose. but at least there's an HDMI port to connect to a projector without a dock.
Performance is a bit of a mixed bag. That's not entirely on Lenovo, though, and is due to design decisions that Intel made in the Core Ultra 200v series. Four performance cores and four efficiency cores it sufficient for the work that most people do day to day, but it comes up short in anything multi-threaded as some of our tests demonstrated. If Qualcomm can pack 12 high-performance cores into an SoC and stuff it into an HP EliteBook Ultra G1q, it's a little disappointing to see Intel ship a 4+4 configuration, and the Snapdragons proved that it can be done in a low-power envelope too.
Where we can use the NPU in the Core Ultra 200v series powering this machine, it performs very well. As local AI becomes more and more central to the Windows experience, this will only increase in value. It performs AI tasks much more quickly than the CPU, and doesn't require the hefty power of a discrete GPU. It's just a matter of whether those AI features are important to users, and how long it takes for them to arrive.
One thing that is absolutely not mixed is graphics performance. With the exception of Gears Tactics, our graphics performance tests showed that the Arc 140v iGPU in the Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition has a good amount of grunt. Intel's drivers have come an incredibly long way since the Arc A-series GPUs became widely available in 2023. They may not quite be where NVIDIA and AMD are in that regard, but Intel has obviously been working hard in this area and graphics is a clear strong point for this laptop.
The same is true for battery life, where the Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition is a hero. It lasted 18+ hours on a charge in our video playback tests, which we had previously thought would probably only happen with Arm-powered PCs. Lunar Lake can sip the power when it needs to and the Yoga's 70 Wh battery is big enough to get it through a long day comfortably.
Finally, let's talk about pricing. The configuration we tested is available for $1,299 at Best Buy, or $1,399 directly from Lenovo, but similar configs are as low as $1199 on Amazon at the moment. That's for the exact review configuration shown here: Core Ultra 7 256v with 16 GB of RAM, 1 TB of storage, the IPS display with a high resolution and 120 Hz refresh rate, and great battery life.
Due to the limited capacity of M.2 2230 drives, there are no higher-capacity options on Lenovo's site. The only real upgrade available is the Core Ultra 7 258v and its 32GB of memory which seems to run about $100 more. It'll run you about the same price as, for instance, an equivalent ASUS Zenbook 14S. The big difference between the two is the physical footprint and size of the display, both of which are bigger on the Lenovo.
Overall, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition is a solid, good-looking notebook with a great out-of-box experience. If you're looking for something fast enough for typical use on the road, and need both perfect x86 compatibility and excellent battery life, all while playing the occasional game, you can't go wrong and we're giving this machine a HotHardware Recommended award.
