One of the main highlights of this machine is its screen. This 14.5-inch display packs in 2560 x 1600 pixels, making it a 2.5K resolution. Touch is possible, although I haven’t found much use for touch on a laptop yet. More interesting is the 90Hz refresh rate, which isn’t enough to please hardcore gamers (if that’s you, the Slim Pro 7 X is the machine you want with its 144Hz refresh rate), but it does everything otherwise pretty smooth. The screen has a 16:10 aspect ratio, giving you a bit more height than the more common 16:9. It doesn’t sound like much, but I find it useful when surfing the web. Also makes the preview pane in video editors a bit bigger.
Speaking of video editing, I did, and the Slim Pro 7 handled it pretty well. I have used both Blender on Windows and Kdenlive on Linux. I had to enable GPU support in Kdenlive before I saw a significant performance increase, but in the end I was able to render 5 minutes of 5.2K frames in just over 12 minutes. For reference, my Lenovo X14 with AMD Ryzen 7 series 6000 takes more than 30 minutes to render the same frames. The main difference? The dedicated graphics card.
You don’t need to edit video to appreciate the performance here, but if you don’t edit video or do other GPU-intensive tasks, it might be a bit overkill for your needs. At the same time, the screen’s slower refresh rate means it’s not the best option for mobile gaming, although it will no doubt serve the casual gamer Stardew Valley.
Good ports, bad camera
Good video performance like this often means poor battery life, but that’s not the case here. Lenovo have packed a 73-watt-hour battery that manages to get about seven hours of battery life in real-world use. That number will decrease the more time you spend editing video, but it’s still very impressive for a laptop with these specs. Suffice it to say, for casual use you can get almost a day’s work done, but if you’re headed to the coffee shop to edit a video, bring the charger. I should also note that the charger, while quite large for a laptop charger these days, does charge the battery very quickly. Lenovo says you can get three hours of battery life after a 15-minute charge, a claim that held up in my testing.
Photo: Lenovo