Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro, Watchband Hinge And Intel Core M Deliver Thin And Light Performance

by Dave Altavilla — Wednesday, November 26, 2014, 09:29 AM EDT

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HD Video Playback and Battery Life

As a quick check on multimedia performance, we decided to fire up a few HD video movie trailers to get a sense of how the Yoga 3 Pro handle the workload and also to get a look at how Intel's Core M CPU behaves when it's decoding from a Youtube stream or locally. Here's what things looked like when we fired up a 1080p Guardians of The Galaxy clip...

As you can see, Intel's Core M 5Y70 isn't scaling up to its top clock speed here and CPU utilization is hovering around a modest 16 percent. We've seen lower, frankly, from previous generation Intel HD integrated graphics but then again, there are probably a few driver tweaks and optimizations likely on tap in the coming weeks for Intel's Core M line.

There are some laptops currently available that can get through the day on a single charge, and many more that will give you several good hours of work before needing juice.

Battery Eater Pro and Web Browsing Tests

Battery Life Testing

We run two tests to give you a sense of how long the system will last under light and heavy use. Our web browsing test is a light-use scenario in which it refreshes a webpage over a WiFi connection until the battery is exhausted. The Battery Eater Pro test gives the laptop a much heavier workload to simulate the kind of stress you might put on the machine with multiple resources engaged, including CPU, GPU, memory and hard drive.

Sure enough, Intel's power-sipping Core M processor on board the Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro, affords the machine great battery life, whether under light-duty or heavy-duty use. In fact, this machine lasted the longest of any we've tested to date under either of the two test conditions. Dell's slightly emaciated Inspiron 11, with its 7 Watt Intel Pentium N processor, comes in a close second in the Battery Eater test. However, even a premium machine, like the Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus, with its 4 cell battery and 3lb frame, versus the 3 cell battery and 2.6lb specs of the Yoga 3 Pro, gets edged-out by Lenovo's new thinness.