Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 review: Powerful but inconsistent

Price When Reviewed

$1,849

Best Prices Today: Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 is a mid-range, thin-and-light laptop built around Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon X2 chips. It’s meant to be a sleek, stylish machine with ample performance and efficiency. Starting at $1,199 and reaching $1,849 in our test configuration, it’s competitively priced, especially when compared to alternatives like Dell’s XPS 14. 

The first generation of Snapdragon X laptops made a strong impression, offering serious performance and efficiency. But they weren’t without issues. This time around, the hardware still has to prove itself against steadily advancing competition.

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 tells an interesting story when it comes to performance. It has some great aspects, but others that leave a sour taste.

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11: Specs and features

• CPU: Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite X2E-88-100
• Memory: 32GB LPDDR5X-9523
• Graphics/GPU: Qualcomm Adreno X2-90
• Display: 14-inch 1920×1200 OLED touchscreen, 60Hz
• Storage: 1TB PCIe 4.0 – Micron MTFDKCD1T0QHK-1BQ1AABLA
• Webcam: 9.2MP + IR
• Connectivity: 3x USB4 with Power Delivery and DisplayPort 1.4
• Networking: WiFi 7, Bluetooth 5.4
• Biometrics: Windows Hello facial recognition
• Battery capacity: 70 watt-hours
• Dimensions: 12.28 x 8.7 x 0.55 inches
• Weight: 2.78 pounds
• MSRP: $1,849 as-tested ($1,199 base)

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 comes in a handful of configurations ranging from $1,199 to start and up to $1,899 at the high end. Configurations start out with a Snapdragon X2 Plus X2P-42-100 with 16GB of memory and 512GB of storage. Our test configuration is available from Best Buy and sits near the top of the stack with a Snapdragon X2 Elite X2E-88-100 processor, 32GB of memory, and 1TB of storage.

But its 1920×1200 OLED touchscreen isn’t quite the peak and actually makes it a disappointing value next to Lenovo’s own offering, which has the same configuration but bumps to a 2880×1800 OLED touchscreen with a boosted 120Hz refresh rate while only raising the price to $1,899. 

Lenovo also offers custom configurations, giving you the choice of the two displays and CPUs mentioned above as well as a selection between 16 or 32GB of memory and 512GB, 1TB, or 2TB of storage. In an unusual turn, the custom configuration pricing lines up neatly with that of pre-configured options. And you can mix and match as you like, so if you prefer performance and don’t care much about display, you can go for a high-end CPU without the top-tier screen. Or if you want an entertainment machine, you can opt for the high-end display while keeping the rest of the specifications more basic. You can also get our configuration for $10 less than at Best Buy.

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11: Design and build quality

Lenovo has made the most of its internal hardware to make the external hardware sleek. The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 is impressively thin at just 0.55 inches and weighs a respectable 2.78 pounds. It’s not the most impressive laptop out there for these attributes, but it’s not bad, especially for the kind of performance it aims to offer.

Even with that svelte build, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 feels solid. Keyboard deck flex is minimal, and the display doesn’t bend all that much either. The display hinge is a little wiggly after making any shift, but holds steady while typing. It’s loose enough to almost allow for a smooth, one-handed open that’s made all the easier thanks to a small lip at the top edge, but the hinge sticks a little and can lift the base up when it gets to about 90 degrees, so it’s not quite a perfect one-hander. 

The look of the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 is understated. It comes in a cool, dark blue and focuses on smooth curves. It features speaker grilles on either side of the keyboard, though sound seems to come out fairly evenly between these grilles and slits on the underside. The underside has a large grille for air intake through the system’s two cooling fans, which exhaust out the back edge. It’s a rather tight squeeze for the hot air exhausting past the display hinge, but a long rubber foot in the back at least avoids letting that heated air re-enter the laptop’s fans. 

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 has a premium construction with a metal chassis and glass display. About the only place you’ll feel plastic is the keyboard, a power button and camera kill switch on the right edge of the base, and a slim ring that borders the screen.

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11: Keyboard, trackpad

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11’s interface is solid. The keyboard has a nice clicky quality, with a gentle chatter while typing. The keycaps are well stabilized and have a nice dish that helps guide my fingers to the center more consistently. I find them a little firm to press which can make for some failed taps, but generally it’s responsive.

I was able to reach a satisfactory 120 words-per-minute at 98 percent accuracy in Monkeytype with some concerted effort, but generally fell closer to 110-115 WPM while typing more casually. The keyboard features cramped little arrow keys, as is common in this format, sadly. And though it tries to group its function keys into groups of four to help with feeling them out, the difference in gaps isn’t significant enough to easily feel.

The trackpad is great. It’s wonderfully wide for a laptop this size and has a pleasantly smooth surface that my fingers glide across with ease. Pressing it comes with a sharp physical click that feels great, too. There’s nothing particularly special about it beyond that, but it nails the fundamentals. 

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11: Display, audio

While some configurations of the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 come with a higher-end display, our test configuration is at least decent. It packs a poignant and colorful OLED panel that happily hit 405 nits, 100 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 color space, and an infinite contrast ratio with perfect black levels. It also has an impressive color accuracy measured at a max dE1976 of 1.56, making this a display you could readily do professional work on.

The downsides of the screen are that its 1920×1200 resolution isn’t as crisp as the 2880×1800 panels that are widely available in this format. The screen also tops out at 60Hz, so ultra-smooth visuals are a bust. The touchscreen is very responsive.

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 features four speakers arranged into tweeter and woofer pairs. These combine fairly well for a fuller sound. Serious bass depth is absent, but there’s at least enough depth to give some fullness to music and videos. The upper end has a solid ring to it and isn’t too harsh while cranking at full volume. The whole system outputs plenty of volume. 

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11: Webcam, microphone, biometrics

The webcam on the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 is solid. It offers facial recognition for quick and convenient log-ins. It’s also high-resolution, and it shows. In a test recording, the picture was clear and detailed. It could struggle with some softness and noise without ample lighting, but as soon as I hit my face with a bit of extra light, the picture quality was about as good as I’ve seen from a laptop’s built-in webcam. 

The microphone isn’t quite as impressive. It captures my voice well enough, but with some room echo making my sound a little distant. It at least manages to cancel out basic background noises, like a loud fan running nearby and my fingers snapping at the side of the laptop. 

The webcam killswitch on the side of the computer works instantaneously, cutting the feed from the camera. But, it doesn’t turn off the microphone. You’ll find a separate switch for that baked in as a secondary function on the F4 key.

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11: Connectivity

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 offers mixed connectivity. On the one hand, it has some high-bandwidth wired options with three USB4 ports offering power input and display output. Those ports are split up with two on the left side and one on the right, providing some flexibility on how you connect the laptop to external devices. But that’s all the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 offers. There’s not even a headphone jack. That’s a bit of a disappointing trade-off, as inclusion of extra ports surely wouldn’t have added nearly as much weight or bulk to the laptop in a backpack as a dongle will.

Wireless connectivity is strong at least with Wi-Fi 7 for high speeds and stability. Bluetooth 5.4 has the system lagging behind the latest industry standard, but the system has been at least reliable in its Bluetooth connections. 

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11: Performance

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 tells an interesting story when it comes to performance. It has some great aspects, but others that leave a sour taste. For one thing, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 simply won’t run everything under the sun because of its ARM architecture. There’s a lot it can still manage with emulation, but one of our primary performance benchmarks, PCMark 10, isn’t one of them. Generally office performance has been fine in practice, and the system runs on fast storage that makes good use of the PCIe 4.0×4 bandwidth.

But there are occasions where the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 also falls confusingly short. I found it consistently struggles with fullscreen playback on YouTube. It wasn’t just demanding streams either, like a 1080p60 video set to run at 2x playback speed. Even running a video at 480p ran into issues. There was a lot of hitching during playback.

It also locked up oddly several times, refusing to allow the keyboard to work and seeming to freeze Windows in such a way that I couldn’t right-click on the taskbar to open up task manager and see if it was a memory issue (something that seems unlikely given the relatively few tabs I had open for a 32GB system). This occurred multiple times, so it wasn’t a simple one-off. I had to put the computer to sleep and wake it back up to resolve the issue each time — why that worked, I do not know. 

Hitches are strange, as the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 is actually surprisingly high-performing.

In Cinebench R24, we can see just the kind of heights the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 is capable of with its Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite X2E-88-100. In multi-core performance, it blows even the Intel Core Ultra X7 358H and AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 out of the water. Its single-core performance is similar impressive with 150 points, putting it ahead of the other systems by a good margin. In fact, almost nothing we’ve tested can scratch its single-core performance.

But Cinebench R24 also lets us see something important: the impact of emulation. The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11’s high scores come with the ARM version of Cinebench R24, but the system is capable of running the x86 version through emulation and in that way its performance drops precipitously. It only narrowly beats the MSI Prestige Flip 14 AI+ (and only does so because MSI’s default power plan hampers performance considerably), while falling behind the Dell XPS 14 and Acer Swift X 14 AI on recent Intel and AMD chips, respectively. 

That shift in performance can hurt the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 when it comes time to handle plenty of tasks that don’t have native ARM support. Our Handbrake encoding benchmark, for instance, sees the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 again fall well behind Dell’s and Acer’s systems, and the MSI Prestige Flip 14 AI+ likely would also lead it with a higher-performance power plan.

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 also has some extra speed in reserve if it’s switched over to a Performance power plan, but it’s not very dramatic. It’s a shame too, because the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 otherwise has proven pretty capable of strong sustain in heavy workloads, but its encoding time in Handbrake simply stretches on because its emulation performance isn’t so impressive.

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 may have graphics that offer a significant uplift over the prior generation, but it’s not enough to catch Intel’s significant strides nor come close to discrete graphics. In 3DMark’s Night Raid test, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 nearly keeps up on the back of its CPU performance but still doesn’t get out ahead by much. 3DMark’s Time Spy test is more graphically demanding and sees the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 fall well behind even with strong CPU performance. It lags behind even the previous Intel Arc generation, which leapt dramatically with the new Intel Arc B390. 

All this puts the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 in a tough spot where performance is concerned. It’s a fine office machine generally, but it may not always be exceptional depending on your software, and it has shown some weird hitches. And even with the few performance leads it can snag, its competitors are still strong enough to be fair alternatives that also don’t have emulation struggles.

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11: Battery life

When Qualcomm first introduced its Snapdragon X chips for PC, efficiency was one of the big promises with the PCs meant to catch up to Apple’s laptops. While I’ve seen that work out before — in a Lenovo system, no less — it doesn’t pan out here. The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 has a decently large 70Wh battery, but it doesn’t deliver stunning battery life. Our offline video playback test saw the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 run for a bit over 21 hours. That’s good, but plenty of systems are hitting around that level. 

This level of performance doesn’t even meet the high mark set by the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 at 23.5 hours, which likely edged it out with a battery-saving display. But what’s worse is that the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11’s clearly not getting an edge from opting for Snapdragon hardware. The MSI Prestige Flip 14 AI+ blew the lid off battery life performance with a nearly 34.5-hour runtime, and it has an OLED touchscreen much like the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11’s while being no slouch performance-wise either. 

And this offline video playback isn’t the end of the story. In practice, I found the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11’s battery drains at a more typical pace. For my usual office workloads, it was on track for 8-10 hours of runtime. Battery Saver kicking in slowed the decline to help it stretch out, but it wasn’t looking like it would do anywhere close to 20+ hours.

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11: Conclusion

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 is a good computer, but it’s in a troubling position. It’s fairly expensive, and that price seems to be built on the premise the Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite X2E-88-100 chip inside sets it above the pack. While there are occasional glimmers of great performance from the chip, there are as many cases where it simply doesn’t keep up, and there will be cases where it won’t work at all. Top that all off with battery life that’s just on par with the competition generally, and the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 simply doesn’t stand out too well.

It’s nicely built, has a quality display, and fine speakers, but so do many of its competitors. And with the latest batch of Intel chips offering some stunning graphics performance and efficiency, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 isn’t quite a winner. That’s true of our configuration, anyway. Folks after a slick machine with a great display can get fair value by opting for the lower-tier chip and upper-tier display in Lenovo’s configurator.