Many Lenovo Slim laptops have come our way over the years, and the Lenovo Slim 7i 14 Gen 9 (starts at $1,099.99; $1,240 as tested) now crosses our test bench with Intel’s Core Ultra processors in tow. A compact aluminum build, an OLED display, long battery life, and snappy performance make this an appealing ultraportable for general or professional use at a pretty fair price. Previously with the Slim Pro 7 Gen 8, Lenovo managed to include a GPU for roughly the same price, and competing laptops offer high-resolution screens for less money. The Slim 7i does have more RAM and storage as configured, but it’s not exactly essential in this class. The Asus Zenbook 14X OLED (Q420), our latest Editors’ Choice award winner in this class, remains a better deal overall at $999, but this nicely made machine does have its advantages.Simplicity is often king, a philosophy the Slim 7i 14’s design team seems to agree with. This laptop is a virtually unadorned simple silver slab, and that’s not at all a bad thing. The exterior is aluminum, which gives it a high-end feel, and the minimal style fits right into the same vein as an Apple MacBook Air or similar ultraportable.
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(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The Slim 7i 14 is super compact and—you may have guessed from the name—thin too, underpinning its portability. It measures 0.59 by 12.28 by 8.7 inches (HWD) and 3.15 pounds, so while it perhaps could be a touch lighter for a 14-inch laptop, it’s still a relative featherweight. That footprint is admirably small, able to fit in any bag or under your arm with ease. The competition falls into the same range: Asus’ Zenbook 14X OLED is 0.67 inch thick and weighs 3.44 pounds (with a larger 14.5-inch screen), the Acer Swift Go 14 is at 0.73 inch thick and 2.9 pounds, and the latest MacBook Air (smaller at 13 inches) comes in at 0.44 inch thick and 2.7 pounds. Hybrid 2-in-1 PCs are often heavier, but Lenovo’s own Yoga 9i Gen 8 comes in at 3.09 pounds; you can clearly expect modern 14-inch laptops to land in this ballpark.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
On that note, this system’s 14-inch OLED touch display may turn your head. It doesn’t go all-in on resolution, sticking to a reasonable 1,920 by 1,200 (full HD equivalent for a 16:10 panel). That’s sharp enough at this size, and its glossy finish is attractive, but I wouldn’t blame you for wanting a bit more. The Asus Zenbook and the Acer Swift Go 14 both run a 2,880 by 1,800 resolution, while the MacBook Air sits at 2,560 by 1,664 pixels. Again, the picture is clear in person (it’s not as if it’s a 720p screen), but if pixel count is important to you, you can find higher-spec alternatives in this price range. The OLED technology ensures this is an especially vibrant and colorful screen, but OLED alone isn’t a unique feature these days either—the Zenbook and Swift boast OLED panels, too.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The rest of the build isn’t too remarkable, but the tried and tested Lenovo keyboard ensures comfortable typing sessions, and I have no complaints about the touchpad. There’s no room for a number pad or many extras on this trim chassis, so what you see is what you get. (The Zenbook, for example, hides an LED number pad in its touchpad.) The physical connectivity goes beyond the basics—the laptop houses two USB Type-C ports (both with Thunderbolt 4 support), a USB Type-A port, an HDMI connection, and a headphone jack. Some particularly thin notebooks include only USB-C connections, so it’s nice to offer full-size USB, and a video-out alternative. The laptop also supports Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
There’s also a physical shutter switch on the right edge, which activates and deactivates an E-shutter for the webcam. This is a 1080p webcam with IR support, and the video quality is sharp and clear, which is good news for mobile professionals. Having that physical switch provides an extra feeling of confidence that your camera is turned off when it’s meant to be. The webcam is situated on a raised bump-out, which also helps raise the laptop lid from a closed position.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Testing the Lenovo Slim 7i 14 Gen 9: ‘Ultra’ on ParThe first generation of Intel’s new Core Ultra platform, named “Meteor Lake,” continues its rollout across systems here in 2024. Particularly deployed in thin and light laptops like the Slim 7i 14, these processors come in Core Ultra 5, 7, and 9 tiers like their long-running “Core i” counterparts, and it’s the first two that are available as options in this laptop. These chips have an onboard neural processing unit (NPU) for handling local AI tasks, even if the use cases for this are still thin on the ground for now.The Slim 7i 14’s base model comes with an Intel Core Ultra 5 125H, Intel Arc graphics, 16GB of memory, and a 1TB SSD. The same display described above is used in all configurations, and this model comes with Windows 11 Pro. The list price of this base model is $1,099.99, though it’s on sale for $899.99 at the time of writing, and Lenovo is almost always running some type of discount on its site.You can customize a few of the spec selections from there, and our review configuration includes a Core Ultra 7 155H chip and 32GB of memory, along with integrated Intel Arc graphics, and Windows 11 Home for $1,240. There are no discrete-graphics options, and the memory (soldered on) and storage max out there. The 155H is a 16-core (six Performance cores and eight Efficient cores), 22-thread chip that’s proven quite quick in our previous testing, and as you’ll see below, that’s the case again here.We put the Slim 7i 14 through our usual benchmark suite to test this configuration, and compared the results against the following systems…
First up, the Acer Swift Go 14 ($1,099.99 as tested) and the Asus Zenbook 14X OLED ($999.99 as tested) are similarly priced OLED ultraportable alternatives. Apple’s MacBook Air is always relevant in this weight class and price range, even if this latest M3-based model ($1,499 as tested) is a bit more expensive than the Slim. Finally, the 2023 Lenovo Slim Pro 7 Gen 8 ($1,199.99) uses an extremely similar chassis despite the “Pro” name, but packs a very capable component set for its price—in fact the new Slim 7i looks worse for lacking a GPU with its higher price.Productivity and Content Creation TestsWe run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL’s PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.Our other 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 Geekbench 5.4 Pro from Primate Labs 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).Finally, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems, 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.
While its memory advantage may be helping too, the Slim 7i and its Core Ultra chip stack up well against the competition. There aren’t many big performance gulfs in this group, but where there are, the Slim 7i is sitting near the top, not the bottom. This is a quick and efficient notebook for this class, suited to everyday multitasking and some light media work. You don’t want to rely on it as a true media creation and editing workhorse if that’s your primary need—bigger and more powerful laptops will be much quicker—but this is a more-than-capable portable option.Graphics TestsWe test the graphics inside all laptops and desktops 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).To further measure 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 chip’s Intel Arc graphics provide more oomph than past integrated solutions (see the comparison against the Asus’ Iris Xe), but it’s still rather limited compared to discrete solutions. The entry-level Nvidia RTX 3050 GPU in the other Lenovo laptop and Apple’s bespoke M3 solution are clearly a step beyond the others. You shouldn’t look to do any 3D or graphics work with the Slim 7i, but it is capable of low-grade gaming, and some light editing if you’re willing to wait.Battery and Display TestsWe test each laptop and tablet’s 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.To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows 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 battery result is a real positive here, behind only the MacBook Air. This comfortably falls into the “all day battery life” range, so you don’t have to worry about working off the charger, taking this laptop with you, or constantly looking for the nearest outlet. On the display testing, the color coverage is very good, and this is a bright panel.Verdict: A Quality Portable PickThe new Lenovo Slim 7i 14 deploys a peppy Intel Core Ultra chip to good effect inside a nicely built, compact metal body. This is more or less exactly the experience you’d expect from looking at the laptop—a travel-ready and long-lasting system that feels good in hand. The OLED screen is vibrant, though a higher resolution may be expected at this price, like those seen on its competition. And there’s also no discrete graphics to sweeten the pot, unlike Lenovo’s own 2023 Slim Pro 7 Gen 8, which included one for less.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Still, it doesn’t err in any major way; the Acer Swift Go 14 is a close comparison, swapping a better screen for more RAM and storage. The roughly $200 price difference over the Asus Zenbook 14X OLED can be explained by the doubled RAM and storage, but neither is especially necessary in this category, and the Zenbook boasts a higher-resolution 120Hz display at $999. Asus’ machine remains our Editors’ Choice pick for the category, but if you like its upgraded specs and metal chassis, the Lenovo Slim 7i 14 is a worthwhile alternative.
Cons
Less compelling value than some alternatives
Its 1,920 by 1,200 resolution is beaten by the competition
The Bottom Line
This sleek ultraportable touts an OLED screen and a quality metal build, with snappy-enough performance and long battery life leaving little room for complaint. It’s beaten out on value, though, by some of its classmates.
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