Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i Gen 9 (14″ Intel) review: our full review –

In the laptop market, new processors always mean… a small refresh of the range! Here we are facing the 9th generation Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i, or “2024” as we will call it, whose main novelty is quite simply to take advantage of the Intel Core Ultra range. A new NPU then, but what about the real evolution of the machine and its place compared to its competitors?

Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i Gen 9 (14″ Intel) Technical sheet

The machine is on loan from Lenovo for this test.

Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i Gen 9 (14″ Intel) Design

In terms of design, Lenovo is not really shaking up its formula with this new version. And he didn’t necessarily need it. We still find the main lines specific to the manufacturer, in particular the orientation of its logo and the description of its brand in portrait format to recall a cover of paper rather than a computer once closed. Or its very rounded lines, which correspond well to the convertible Yoga range although here, we are in the presence of a rather traditional laptop PC.

Source: Chloé Pertuis for Frandroid

Source: Chloé Pertuis for Frandroid

Source: Chloé Pertuis for Frandroid

Aluminum chassis, weight of 1.5 kg, 1.56 cm thick at the withers… “The elegance” promised by the manufacturer is there, as a bonus of increased respect for the planet with many parts of the computer made from 50% recycled materials. Everything is going in the right direction, even if this Yoga Pro 7i has difficulty standing out from the crowd or simply justifying its “Pro” insert on paper.

Keyboard and touchpad

On the keyboard side, we still find the rounded keys on the bottom of the manufacturer, which gives it its charm. The switches are really good, with an activation distance greater than the average of competitors on the market as well as haptic feedback which successfully balances bounce and firmness.

The touchpad is also of very good quality, with a very wide diagonal, although we would have liked it to be well centered on the chassis rather than slightly offset to the left. If we understand this for computers integrating a numeric keypad, the choice is more difficult to justify here.

Connections

On the left side we find a full format HDMI 2.1 port, a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 and a Thunderbolt 4 port. On the right, we can benefit from a USB A 3.2 Gen 1, a combo jack, the button of power supply, as well as a switch to electrically turn off the webcam.

Source: Chloé Pertuis for Frandroid

Source: Chloé Pertuis for Frandroid

Here again… The selection is quite average, neither excellent nor bad, but it is difficult to understand why this machine earns the attribute of “professional”. The configuration is simply basic, and will satisfy the majority of users without opening up to the specificities of professionals and creatives.

Webcam

The 1080p webcam doesn’t sparkle either, with dull color rendition and a spike eaten up by noise. All good for videoconferencing of course, but certain devices (notably from Dell) have been able to surprise us on this point in recent times.

The audio experience takes us back in a good direction. The speakers on both sides of the keyboard provide successful staging and above-average sound quality. That being said, for the rather good bass reproduction on such a small format, the balance was pushed a little too far on the treble, and the mids are totally crushed by the rest. There’s still some fine-tuning to do, but the foundation is solid.

Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i Gen 9 (14″ Intel) Screen

The Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i benefits from a 14.5-inch IPS LCD panel supporting a display definition of 3072 x 1920 pixels, or a 3:2 ratio. It also offers a maximum refresh rate of 120 Hz, for a glass coating that still reflects a lot of light.

Under our probe and with the DisplayCal software, we find coverage of 143.8% of the sRGB space for 101.9% of the DCI-PO3 space. Maximum brightness is measured at a very good 438 cd/m² for a contrast ratio of 1268:1, which is quite convincing for IPS LCD.

On the calibration side, the average color temperature is found at 6435K, almost perfect, with an average Delta E00 of 0.39 for a maximum difference of only 1.36 on red tones. It’s quite simple: it’s calibrated to perfection for creative use. It’s a shame that the rest of the configuration doesn’t quite follow, since this screen is really perfect apart from a very slight lack of brightness for outdoor use.

Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i Gen 9 (14″ Intel) Software

We sadly find the usual clichés of adware to be uninstalled as soon as you get the device. Above all, we are pleased to see Lenovo Vantage in a cleaner and easier to use version, which has the merit of properly guiding the user and offering a very large number of options to personalize the behavior of its computer.

It is a real success and a pleasure to use on a daily basis.

Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i Gen 9 (14″ Intel) Performance

The Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i of 2024 owes its “9th generation” to the fact of integrating the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H into our test model, the latest addition to the blue team that we are starting to know well. This SoC integrates 16 cores – 6 performance, 8 efficient and 2 ultra efficient – ​​for 22 threads, and can turbo up to 4.8 GHz. It is supported here by 32 GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and 1 TB PCIe Gen 4 storage.

If Lenovo’s website heavily highlights the availability of a configuration equipped with an NVIDIA RTX 4060, which would have helped justify the “Pro” in its name, this does not appear as for sale on their platform and it is not the one we received for testing. In which case, we are still facing a very traditional ultrabook here.

Benchmarks

The Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i has at least one advantage: it knows how to do it with the Core Ultra 7 155H. We find a score of 17209 points in multi core for 1791 points in single core under Cinebench R23, or 981/106 under Cinebench 2024, which clearly shows us that we are on the most powerful version of the SoC, and that this power is indeed sustained.

Even more so when we talk about artificial intelligence, where our Procyon test under OpenVINO gives us the now traditional score of 278 points for the integrated Intel NUC. The latter comes away with an honest score of 103 in the image generation benchmark under Stable Diffusion 1.5, a score once again expected for this chip. Nothing fancy about the creative aspect in all this, but a real use of the potential of the Core Ultra which is nice to see.

And this while SSD storage doesn’t care about us either. PCIe 4.0 is well respected with scores of 7161 MB/S in sequential reading and 6410 MB/s in sequential writing. A manufacturer who does not make small savings on this point is always a good point.

Heat and noise

The same goes for heating, where the Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i never really makes itself heard and does not really exceed 42°C on the chassis. Here, we are still starting to see the signs of a PC that was really supposed to accommodate a GPU that it does not have in our test version.

Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i Gen 9 (14″ Intel) Autonomy

The Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i integrates a 73 Wh battery, which recharges via USB-C using a 100W power supply supplied. The latter uses the Power Delivery standard, meaning that any charger using it will be able to restore juice to this computer regardless of its wattage.

And on autonomy… Small disappointment. We get nothing for nothing: in office use, with the brightness set to 50%, we find a lifespan of between 7 and 8 hours. That’s honest, but it’s also very little considering the number of computers now capable of exceeding 10 hours, including with the Core Ultra which can even reach 15 hours. The new Intel SoC and its 2 ultra-efficient cores are not yet completely mastered by most manufacturers, and Lenovo is unfortunately one of them.

Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i Gen 9 (14″ Intel) Price and availability

The Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i is already available in France, at a starting price of €1,399.01. The configuration we are testing is sold for 1499 euros, a very fair price.