Brilliant 1,100-nit OLED, but unexpected quality issues - Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 14 G10 review

Above all, the new Yoga Slim 7 14 G10 impresses with its brilliant OLED display, which, aside from its enormous brightness in HDR mode, offers impressive picture quality in conjunction with a 120 Hz refresh rate and excellent color profiles. Although it uses PWM flickering, its frequency is super high and at the same time, its amplitude is very low. Its reflective surface may, however, become an issue when the laptop is used outdoors. Moreover, its good display harms the device's battery life, where the competition generally offers an advantage.

The performance of its AMD Ryzen processor is good and, thankfully, stable, so together with its 32 GB RAM, there are no problems in this discipline. The two faster energy profiles, on the other hand, are almost identical and we would have liked to see a bigger difference between them. If desired, the laptop's fans can stay quiet under load, too, and its performance is still on par with Intel's Lunar Lake processors when using the most frugal mode.

The biggest issue lies in its case quality. Although it's lightweight and compact, our test device is plagued by clearly noticeable creaking noises. This is especially so for its lid that creaks every time it moves, in turn vastly reducing how good-quality the laptop feels. On the flip side, it features all modern connectivity standards and its keyboard is super comfortable.

The version of the Yoga Slim 7 with the AMD processor isn't available to order yet in the USA. It has an MRSP of around $1,450.

After we recently already tested the current Yoga Pro 7 14 from Lenovo, it's now time for us to take a look at the slimmer Yoga Slim 7 14 which, aside from a thinner case, additionally uses a different OLED screen. It again uses the AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 as a processor in combination with the Radeon 860M iGPU and 32 GB RAM.

The Yoga Slim 7 14 is a slim 14-inch laptop with an aluminum case that comes in turquoise or gray. Our turquoise-colored test device looks high-quality, but this impression quickly dissipates when you take the device into your hands. As soon as you open the lid or adjust its angle, it lets off clear creaking noises every time. We also managed to elicit some subtle creaking noises from its base unit, which usually isn't typical for the Yoga series at all. Moreover, the screen hinges are a little too loose and the display bounces when you adjust its opening angle. All-in-all, not a very high-quality impression.

Weighing in at 1.22 kilograms, the Yoga Slim 7 14 is the lightest laptop in our comparison field. In addition, it takes up the smallest footprint, whereby the differences aren't all too big in this case. In short, the Yoga Slim is a pretty portable device which should fit effortlessly into most bags/backpacks. At 188 grams, its 65-watt power supply is also quite lightweight.

The Yoga Slim 7 14 comes with all the most important connections, including USB-C 4.0, a regular USB port as well as an HDMI output. These connections are spread out between the two sides at the back. In addition, the device comes with a modern Wi-Fi 7 module, which achieved very good and stable transfer rates during our standardized WLAN test using our reference router from Asus. Its webcam features an eShutter as well as an IR module for facial recognition via Windows Hello. Its picture quality is generally fine, although there are lots of devices with better webcams on the market these days. Thanks to the AMD processor's fast NPU, the device is classed as a Copilot+ laptop, so it also supports all of Microsoft's advanced AI functions (e.g. Studio Effects for the webcam, live subtitling). It isn't fitted with a card reader.

The Yoga Slim 7 14 G10 meets a number of environmental standards (Carbon Neutral Certified, Energy Star 8.0, EPEAT Gold) and its packaging is fully recyclable. However, no information is provided on its CO₂ footprint or the proportion of recycled materials used.

Lenovo offers all the familiar energy profiles, which you can easily switch between via the Fn+Q key combination. We ran the benchmarks in Performance mode, but we would have liked to see a greater spread between Auto and Performance. The performance of the three profiles remains identical in battery mode.

The AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 (Krackan Point) combines four fast Zen 5 cores (max. 5 GHz) with four more efficient Zen 5 cores (max. 3.5 GHz, less cache). Its overall performance is very good and during our test, the Yoga was only beaten by the IdeaPad Pro 5, inside which the Ryzen AI 7 350 can also consume 65 watts. It clearly outperformed the Lunar Lake chips from Intel, especially when it came to multi-core performance.

During everyday use, the Yoga Slim 7 is a super fast device, and its synthetic benchmark results underlined this. We noted no stability issues during the course of the test.