Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon Review

Longtime Lenovo watchers may do a double-take when seeing the IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon ($1,219.99)—IdeaPad is the company's consumer laptop brand, but the Carbon label is famous from Lenovo's elite business flagship, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon. The new IdeaPad, like the ThinkPad, is a 14-inch ultraportable laptop. Crafted from magnesium alloy reinforced with carbon fiber, it combines ample performance with luxury features like an OLED touch screen, making it a standout value for travelers who can't afford its X1 cousin. A couple of keyboard glitches keep it from a rare 4.5- or 5-star review, but the IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon earns a place on our list of Editors' Choice award winners.

The Real Slim 7 

In Lenovo's overcrowded lineup, this notebook is the AMD-powered alternative to the Intel-based IdeaPad Slim 7i Pro, another 14-inch slimline with the same 16:10 screen aspect ratio and 2,880-by-1,800-pixel resolution. Though the Slim 7i Pro costs $20 less, the Slim 7 Carbon is the more desirable of the two—it's seven ounces lighter, has a more brilliant and vivid OLED instead of IPS display, and delivers double the battery life.

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(Photo: Molly Flores)

It also has twice as many processing cores, thanks to an eight-core, 1.9GHz Ryzen 7 5800U processor with AMD Radeon integrated graphics. The system has 16GB of memory and a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive. During our testing, Lenovo.com added a $1,509.99 model with a 1TB SSD, Nvidia GeForce MX450 graphics, and Windows 11 Pro instead of the review unit's Home. 

There's no fingerprint reader, but the webcam offers face recognition for Windows Hello logins and optionally locking the PC if you walk away. (Like a growing number of laptops, the IdeaPad turns on when you open the lid, with no need to press the power button.) Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth are standard.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Wearing a silvery hue Lenovo calls Cloud Gray, the Slim 7 Carbon measures 0.59 by 12.3 by 8.5 inches (HWD), just under the ultra-lean VAIO SX14 (0.7 by 12.6 by 8.8 inches). At 2.42 pounds, it's no burden in a briefcase or backpack—even a gram or two lighter than the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, though the diminutive XPG Xenia 14 is trimmer still (0.5 by 12 by 8 inches, 2.14 pounds). The IdeaPad feels sturdier than the flimsy Xenia, however; there's just a bit of flex if you grasp the screen corners or mash the keyboard. 

One drawback of the svelte system is that, aside from an audio jack on the left side, the only connectors are three USB Type-C ports—one USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port on either side plus a USB-C 3.2 Gen 1 on the left. The compact AC adapter has a USB-C cable that will occupy one of these left-side ports. The right edge is otherwise bare except for a webcam kill switch and the power button; there is no memory card slot. Fortunately, you'll find a USB-C dongle in the box that has HDMI and VGA video outputs, as well as a USB Type-A port.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

(Photo: Molly Flores)

A Screen That Hits the Sweet Spot 

In an unusual feature, pressing Fn+R toggles the 14-inch screen's refresh rate between the usual 60Hz and a hoppier 90Hz, not for quicker response in games—the IdeaPad is far from a gaming laptop, as you'll see momentarily in the benchmark tests—but for users who'd like slightly smoother scrolling or less lag when viewing fast-paced videos, at the expense of a bit of battery life. 

The dual refresh rates aren't really a headlining feature, but everything else about the display is. What Lenovo calls “2.8K” resolution is a great fit for its size, or a fine compromise between entry-level 16:10 panels' 1,920 by 1,200 and expensive ones' 3,840 by 2,400 pixels. And its OLED technology—meeting the VESA DisplayHDR 500 True Black spec—gives it sky-high contrast and gorgeous, rich color (covering 100% of the DCI-P3 gamut). Fine details are crisp, viewing angles are broad, and brightness is spot on.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Quad speakers flanking the keyboard and teamed with a smart amplifier produce sound that's not terribly loud but pleasant and clear. Bass is minimal, but you can make out overlapping tracks. Dolby Access software offers a variety of presets (music, movie, game, voice, and dynamic) plus an equalizer, as well as bright, dark, and vivid screen modes for Dolby Vision. The 720p webcam captures soft-focus but reasonably well-lit and colorful images without much static. 

As with other IdeaPad keyboards, the Slim 7 Carbon's board misses the near-perfection of the ThinkPad typing experience. The top-row keys, including Escape and Delete, are tiny. The cursor arrow keys are in a clumsy HP-style row—with half-size up and down arrows stacked between full-size left and right—instead of the proper inverted T. The arrow keys team up with the Fn key, in the absence of dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys, to trigger those functions. 

The typing feel is shallow and wooden, and our test unit's keyboard backlight didn't work, staying dark despite my cycling through the off/auto/low/high icons on screen with Fn+Space. The large, buttonless touchpad is more successful; it glides and taps smoothly and takes just the right amount of pressure for a quiet click.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

A Lenovo Vantage app centralizes system settings and updates, with options ranging from cooling-fan modes for performance versus battery life to Wi-Fi security. There's even a setting for taskbar and background dimming, which could lengthen the life of the OLED screen. It also offers promotions ranging from half-price Dashlane Premium ($29.99 per year) to Smart Performance and Smart Privacy utilities ($39.99 per year).

Testing the Slim 7 Carbon: Great Except for Gaming 

For our benchmark tests, we compared the IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon to four other 14-inch consumer laptops—not only its Intel Core i7 relation, the Slim 7i Pro, but also the abovementioned XPG Xenia 14 and VAIO SX14. The last, the 3.3-pound Acer Swift X, has the same Ryzen 7 5800U CPU as the Carbon. You can see their basic specs in the table below.

Productivity Tests

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage.

Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). 

Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The Slim 7 Carbon did just fine in PCMark 10, easily clearing the 4,000 points that indicate excellent productivity for Microsoft Office or Google Workspace chores. It trailed the same-chip-equipped Acer in our CPU tests but outpaced the Core i7 systems. 

Graphics Tests 

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). 

We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

The Swift X's GeForce RTX 3050 Ti discrete GPU dominated these events, with the Carbon's AMD Radeon integrated graphics putting up a poor showing. It's strictly for streaming video and casual or browser-based games, not fast-paced shoot-em-ups. 

Battery and Display Tests 

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

The IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon excelled here, lasting almost 14 hours in our battery test while its OLED screen showed spectacular color fidelity and brightness. Not only will the ultraportable cruise through a full day of work or school plus a night of Netflix, it'll be a treat for your eyes in the process.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Lenovo's Best Bargain? 

We've stated that Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon and Dell's XPS 13 OLED are the two best laptops in the world. Its subpar keyboard keeps the IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon from joining them, but it's not far behind—getting a slightly larger OLED screen and a handy dongle with HDMI and USB-A ports for $300 less than a comparably equipped Dell is surely tempting.

In short, the Carbon cross-breeding (and cross-branding) experiment, from ThinkPad over to IdeaPad, looks like a success out of the gate. The Slim 7 Carbon deserves a spot near the top of the short lists of shoppers hunting for a hot-value ultraportable.