Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7i Pro Review

Among Lenovo's multiple laptop brands, the IdeaPad family is decidedly the one designed for consumers: people who want decent performance at a reasonable price. Consider, then, this laptop a paragon for the pickier members of that crowd. With a 14-inch touch-enabled display, a comfortable keyboard, an Evo-certified Intel Core i7 11th Generation CPU, and the latest Windows 11 operating system, the IdeaPad Slim 7i Pro ultraportable ($1,199 as tested) is a slick mainstream machine at a bit of a premium price, and quite capable for everyday tasks. It's got the looks, and the performance; what it doesn't, and what holds it back from higher honors, is battery life.

Nicely Configured, But No Custom Options

Because the Slim 7i Pro we tested is sold as an off-the-shelf unit at Costco, it’s not customizable. What’s in the box is what you get, but what you get is very nicely configured.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

The CPU is a 3.3GHz Intel Core i7-11370H with Intel Iris Xe graphics. The laptop has a hefty 16GB of RAM, more than the 8GB that’s sometimes offered at this price, and the boot drive is a spacious and fast 1TB PCI Express NVMe SSD. At 2.86 pounds, the 14-inch laptop isn’t hefty at all, and its Slate Grey aluminum case makes it stand out from the staid black chassis of many similarly configured laptops that Lenovo and other vendors offer. The Slim 7i Pro isn’t cheap, but you are getting reasonable component value for your bucks.

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Going beyond the price tag, the Slim 7i Pro delivers additional features that we appreciate. The sound system is Dolby Atmos-tuned, offering an elevated listening experience with compatible audio content. While you aren’t going to ever get concert-hall quality out of a laptop, the Slim 7i Pro does deliver decent audio from its internal speakers, which vent out the chassis' bottom.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

The screen quality is likewise excellent. The touch screen's 400-nit brightness, while not blindingly bright, is easily viewed in bright daylight, and it offers a 16:10 ratio that reduces the letterbox effect on widescreen movies.

One welcome feature that's quickly proliferating on midrange and high-end laptops is Flip to Boot, which powers up the laptop automatically when you open the lid. Coupled with Windows Hello face recognition logins, the system is ready to use quickly.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Along with its light weight, the Slim 7i Pro is also quite transportable, measuring a svelte 0.67 by 12.3 by 8.7 inches (HWD). This small footprint does have a downside, though: It doesn't leave room for lots of ports. The right side of the laptop sports only a single USB Type-A 3.2 port, along with the power switch and headphone jack…

(Photo: Molly Flores)

The left side is just as sparse, with two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports that offer DisplayPort output (which allows you to attach an external display or video projector) and power delivery for quickly charging your other mobile devices…

(Photo: Molly Flores)

The laptop itself charges quickly, over one of these ports. Lenovo claims you can get two hours of use after a 15-minute charge. No slot for an SD or microSD card is provided, something we always like to see on a laptop at this price. Nor is there an HDMI port, though as mentioned the USB-C ports can output video with the right cable or adapter.

Most ultraportable laptops (and many others as well) have eliminated the RJ-45 port that let you connect to wired Ethernet. For most, that won’t be a problem as the Slim 7i Pro offers both Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) and Bluetooth 5.0 as wireless connectivity options.

Testing the IdeaPad Slim 7i Pro: See How i7 Runs

For our benchmark charts, we stacked up the IdeaPad Slim 7i Pro against three competing 14-inch ultraportables: the business-minded Dell Latitude 7420 clamshell and Lenovo ThinkPad 14s Yoga 2-in-1, as well as the XPG Xenia 14. All have Intel 11th Generation “Tiger Lake” Core i7 CPUs and similar configurations to that of the Slim 7i Pro. You can see their basic specs in the table below. 

Productivity and Media Tests

We put our IdeaPad Slim 7i Pro through a stiff battery of benchmark tests to see how it compares with the others. The first of these is UL's PCMark 10 suite, which simulates a variety of Windows apps to give an overall performance score for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. This test is particularly important, as these are the most common tasks to which many buyers will put the Slim 7i. 

We run both the main benchmark and PCMark 10's Full System Drive storage subtest, which measures the program load time and throughput of the boot drive (almost always a solid-state drive rather than a hard drive nowadays). Both tests yield a numeric score. When looking at the results, higher numbers are better.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

In the main PCMark benchmark, the Slim 7i easily bested the comparison systems, with a score that’s almost 30% higher than the Dell and XPG, and 25% higher than the ThinkPad 14s Yoga…

It didn’t quite boast the same performance differential on the full system drive subtest, but still managed to turn in a score that was higher than the other three machines. The Core i7 in the Slim 7i Pro runs at a somewhat higher clock speed than the CPUs in the competing systems, which could explain part of the Slim 7i Pro's advantage when it comes to CPU-intensive benchmarks.

HandBrake is an open-source video transcoder for converting multimedia files to different resolutions and formats. This test gives you an idea of how well the Slim 7i Pro will perform on tasks such as converting video into different formats. We record the time it takes, rounded to the nearest minute, to encode a 12-minute 4K video to a 1080p copy. This is primarily a CPU test, and on this one, lower times are better. Again, the Slim 7i Pro did better than the others, almost twice as fast on this benchmark than the Dell, though somewhat closer in time to the XPG and ThinkPad 14s Yoga.

Another test of CPU performance is Maxon's Cinebench, which uses the company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, delivering a numeric score (higher numbers are better). We use the multi-core benchmark that fully exercises all of a processor's cores and threads. As with HandBrake, the Slim 7i showed the best score, though the Lenovo ThinkPad 14s Yoga’s score was also substantially higher than the Dell’s and XPG’s. Rendering is a CPU-intensive process and Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU when rendering complex workloads.

Primate Labs' Geekbench is another benchmark that runs a series of CPU workloads designed to simulate real-world applications ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. We recorded its multi-core score; a higher score is better. As would be expected from the other CPU-intensive benchmarks, the Slim 7i turned in the highest score. The differential between the laptops on this particular benchmark was somewhat closer.

Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop uses Adobe's popular image editor to measure Windows and macOS computers' performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It executes a broad range of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, resizing, rotating, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters including Lens Correction, Smart Sharpen, Field Blur, and Tilt-Shift Blur. The overall score is a numeric value based on a 50/50 split between the general and filter tasks. As with many of the benchmarks we use, higher numbers are better. And, as with most of the benchmark tests we ran, the Slim 7i aced it.

Graphics Tests

UL's 3DMark is a graphics test suite for Windows that contains a number of benchmarks for different GPU functions and software APIs. We run two DirectX 12 tests on all PCs. Night Raid is appropriate for laptops with integrated graphics. And while the Slim 7i Pro isn’t considered a higher-end graphics PC, we also ran the Time Spy test, which is more demanding and more suitable for high-end PCs with the latest dedicated GPUs. The XPG did not run the 3DMark tests, but the Slim 7i once again turned in a better score on both of these tests than the pack, with the Latitude not far behind.

Our other gaming test, GFXBench, is a cross-platform GPU performance benchmark that stress-tests both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. We run two tests, both rendered off-screen to accommodate different display resolutions. Both Aztec Ruins (1440p) and Car Chase (1080p) exercise graphics and compute shaders, but the former relies on the OpenGL application programming interface (API) while the latter uses hardware tessellation. We record the results in frames per second (fps). On both of these tests, the Slim 7i’s higher numbers are impressive.

Battery Rundown Test

Battery run time is a particularly important test for a laptop, which is frequently used away from an AC power outlet. PCMag tests laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file with screen brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100% until the system quits. Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting are turned off during the test. 

While the Slim 7i aced all of the performance benchmarks, it stumbled somewhat on the battery run time, turning in a time of just a hair over seven hours. Lenovo claims a substantially greater run-time, but some of the difference may be in the actual tests used for this measurement. Still, even the next poorest performer ran for two hours longer, and the Dell Latitude ran more than twice as long as the Slim 7i Pro before it finally gave up the ghost.

Runs Fast, But Not Too Far From the Plug

In pretty much all of our benchmark tests other than battery life, the IdeaPad Slim 7i Pro brought in excellent scores. And that’s fine, if most of the time you are going to be tethered to an AC outlet. Still, while seven hours of battery life is not very impressive for an ultraportable laptop, it's way better run time than what you would have gotten just a few years ago. And that’s for a machine that’s eminently usable for most tasks, even for modest gaming on the go. And that performance won’t cost you and arm and a leg, with a list price of just over $1,000.

The Slim 7i Pro's keyboard is comfortable and lends itself to fast typing, something we’ve come to expect with Lenovo keyboards, though the IdeaPad lacks the little red joystick in the middle of the keyboard that many of the company's ThinkBooks and ThinkPads offer. It makes up for this by being backlit, and you can adjust the light intensity between two settings, or turn it off completely.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

At the same time, there are a few things we weren’t particularly enthused about with the Slim 7i Pro. We were a bit less satisfied with the touchpad. It's plenty large enough, but we felt it was too sensitive, and we kept dragging items on the screen by mistake. This is a setting that is largely a matter of personal taste, and the sensitivity can be adjusted. Once we did that, tracking accuracy improved.

The one area where we were really disappointed was in the number of ports. While some compromises must be made to keep an ultraportable light and thin, we would have liked at least one additional port available when you're working on wall power, as well as a reader for an SD card. Look past these small complaints, and the IdeaPad Slim 7i Pro is a laptop most folks would be happy to own.