Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5 14 laptop review: A successful allrounder with an OLED display

The IdeaPad Slim 5's competitors include other 14-inch laptops with Meteor-Lake CPUs, such as the Asus ZenBook 14, the HP Spectre x360 or the Yoga Pro 7 from the same manufacturer, of which we already tested an AMD variant.

The laptop's case looks pretty good. Beginning with its sleek design and compact footprint—although the competition offers similar values in these areas. Its moderate weight of 1.4 kg gives you no reason to complain, either, meaning you can still comfortably carry the 14-inch device about with you. Apart from some small details, its stability and build quality are good, too.

Its hinge is neither too loose nor too stiff; it is possible to open the device with one hand, although the base unit does tend to sometimes swing a little in doing so. Thanks to its relatively light color, fingerprint marks can hardly be seen. Its maximum opening angle is 160°.

Ports

There is still room for improvement when it comes to the device's ports. Although the 14-inch laptop features a total of four USB ports, even its two Type-C ports are only compliant with the 3.2 Gen 1 standard—although they do support DisplayPort 1.4 and Power Delivery 3.0. There is also an audio jack, an outdated HDMI 1.4b port and a microSD card reader. As the ports are located in the back half of the two side panels, so an external mouse can be used without (space) difficulties.

The aforementioned card reader achieved a solid performance of just under 90 MB/s for sequential reading during our test.

The laptop showed no surprises when it came to its WLAN performance, either. A metre away from our reference router, the installed Intel module (Wi-Fi 6E AX211) delivered pretty good values which oftentimes resembled those of its competitors.

Its webcam quality lies just above the—unfortunately miserable—laptop standard. The 2-MP model looks sharper than a lot of the competition, although it fails to deliver good color accuracy, as usual.

Lenovo delivers the laptop alongside a few information manuals and a compact 65-watt power supply (USB C).

Its maintenance options strongly resemble those of the Yoga Pro 7. This means its bottom plate is held on by 6 Torx screws and several brackets. In contrast to its 14-inch brother, Lenovo hasn't implemented a dual-fan cooling unit—instead, it relies on one relatively large fan. The WLAN module and SSD are covered by a film. Unfortunately, the RAM is soldered on.

The laptop is covered by a standard 12-month warranty.

Its touchpad is good, too—if you ignore the slightly rattly-sounding click areas. A size of 12 x 7.5 cm is respectable for a 14-inch device. In our test, it never had any issues with precision or gesture support. Its surface is quite smooth, meaning your fingers glide over it nicely.

When it comes to OLED displays, tastes differ. If you want to spend a lot of time using your laptop in bright rooms or outdoors, then you would be better off looking for a device with a matte finish. Our test configuration's glare surface often causes very strong and unpleasant reflections.

The IdeaPad Slim 5 is a mid-range laptop. Users should carefully decide beforehand whether 16 GB RAM is enough in the long run, as it—as previously critiqued—cannot be swapped out. Its M.2 SSD (which is also only a 2242 model) could technically be swapped out for a larger 2280 model.

The Core Ultra 5 125H is the cheaper brother of the Core Ultra 7 155H within the Yoga 7 Pro and it can handle 18 parallel threads instead of 22. Its clock rate and cache (18 vs 24 MB) are also slightly lower. Even so, the Ultra 5 125H did quite well in our benchmark tests. Although this wasn't enough for it to reach the level of the Yoga Pro 7, other laptops based on 155H, such as the ZenBook 14 or the Spectre x360, couldn't outperform it in the Cinebench loop.

Its system performance isn't bad either. 6,359 points in PCMark 10 is a good score, although the laptop's rivals are generally not far behind.