Lenovo’s Yoga Slim 7 Carbon is the lightest and one of the thinnest notebooks on the market. The Slim 7 Gen 6 features AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800U (Cezanne= 7nm Zen 3 +Vega) processor, optionally paired with the GeForce MX450. It comes with a crisp 14-inch OLED display with Dolby Vision, HDR 500, and a brightness of 400 nits. The default resolution is set to 1800p (2880 x 1800) and it covers 100% of the DCI-P3 gamut. It’s presently priced at $1,219.99 in the US and INR 124,990 on the subcontinent.
Like our usual laptop reviews, we’ll have a look at the productivity, content creation, and multi-tasking performance, followed by on-battery performance and gaming capabilities. We’ll also check the power consumption, CPU core clock scaling, and thermals.
AMD Ryzen 7 5800U Performance Testing
As is the tradition, we’ll kick off the benchmarks with PCMark 10, comparing the Yoga 7 Carbon against popular lightweight notebooks and convertibles. These include the Spin 3 (Core i5-1135G7), XPS 13 (Core i7-1165G7), and the previously reviewed Yoga 6 (Ryzen 5 5500U):
Intel’s Tiger Lake chips packing the Willow Cove cores still have a slight edge in essentials like web browsing, app startup times, and video conferencing. The relatively low boost clock (4.4GHz) of the Ryzen 7 5800U is one of the core bottlenecks here. Moving to productivity, the Cezanne APU reigns supreme here with a hefty lead over the quad-core Tiger Lake parts and its hex-core Lucienne sibling powering the Yoga 6. Content creation, a segment that benefits heavily from higher core counts strangely sees (almost) uniform performance from all four contenders. The Yoga 7 Carbon, however, still maintains an appreciable lead over its rivals.
Ryzen 7 5800U Clock Scaling, Temps, and Power
The Ryzen 7 5800U powering the Yoga 7 Carbon consistently hits the 4.4GHz boost clock in lightly threaded workloads but bounces between 3.8GHz and 4.4GHz in heavily threaded applications especially content creation.
The temperatures also remain quite toasty in line with the clocks, frequently hitting the 90-degree celsius which is quite impressive considering how well they scale.
The CPU power consumption is understandably on the higher side. In content creation, it even goes over the 100W mark while staying between 40W-60W in lightly threaded workloads.
Power Saver vs Balanced Performance Modes
Switching from balanced to power saver results in a drop of 37% in productivity and essentials and a milder 17% in content creation workloads.
With the power saver preset, the Ryzen 7 5800U mostly runs at 2.6GHz with the occasional bump up to 3.45GHz. Heavily threaded workloads including content creation mostly see the cores hovering over 3.4GHz while lightly threaded applications see a spike every now and then.
As expected, the temperature doesn’t go over 70 degrees for most of the benchmark, remaining in the 50-60 degree range in most segments. In line with that, the power draw stays between 10-15W in mainstream tasks, spiking up to 90W in content creation.
Verdict
Overall, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Carbon is an excellent notebook. You won’t have any trouble running around airports or bars with the device in one hand, and the long battery life ensures you can work from pretty much anywhere. Expect no stutters or lags. The 1800p OLED display, meanwhile, keeps eye strain to a minimum while also making the colors pop. The MX450 dGPU is rather redundant though as it’s not quite enough to run modern games well and isn’t of much use in most office tasks. The Ryzen 7 6800U should fill in this gap while also improving the bandwidth and battery life.
