hey everybody it’s la inside and we’re taking a look today at the yoga 9i14 this is the generation 7 model i believe and this one is powered by one of the new 12th generation intel chips and we’re going to take a closer look at what this really nice looking machine is all about in just a second but i do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure this is on loan from lenovo so we’re done with this it goes back to them all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own no one is paying for this review nor has anyone reviewed or approved what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this new laptop is all about now this one starts at under 1300 for a base level configuration the one we’re looking at today is kind of on the higher end of the configuration spectrum it has a 14 inch oled display this is running at a 4k resolution 3840 by 2400 and this is in a 16 by 10 aspect ratio so it is taller than some of the prior generation laptops in this yoga 9 line and it’s better for document editing and that sort of thing because you do have a little more vertical screen real estate you will see some letter boxing when you’re watching movies on it but it’ll be a very thin black line on the top and bottom but with the oled here with how black the blacks get on it it should look fine the maximum brightness here is 400 nits it covers all of the dc ip3 color spectrum for photo and video
editing and color accuracy and it is running at 60 hertz now as i mentioned this has a 12th generation intel processor on board this is actually the first computer that i’ve looked at with one of those chips installed and we’ve got an i7 1260p on this one now this is a 12 core processor but eight of those 12 are called efficiency cores so they don’t run as fast as the other four that are on it that said you actually do get a pretty good bump in cpu performance on this one and a little bit earlier i ran the geekbench benchmark test on this new alder lake chip and we got a score of 1734 on the single core test the multi-core test came in at 10 477 and the performance here at least on that benchmark lines up pretty close with what you’ll get out of the apple m1 that you’ll find on the 13-inch macbook pro at the moment along with the macbook air so intel is trying to catch up on paper here with what we’re seeing out of the mac processors but i still think you will have better battery life on those macs but the performance level here is getting much closer than what it was on the prior generation now our loaner model here came with 16 gigabytes of ddr5 ram it is not
upgradable though it is soldered on so you have to choose your ram at the time of purchase it does have a one terabyte nvme ssd inside and you can upgrade that but you’ll have to unscrew the bottom here including removing this rubber strip to get at it so it’s not the easiest thing to access but it is upgradable but that ram is soldered on now the weight on this one is just over three pounds or 1.4 kilograms it’s one of the nicer lenovo designs that i’ve seen in a while it is all metal you’ve got these nice rounded edges to it as you can see and they’re nice and shiny this is a two in one so it will work as a laptop but you can also turn it into a tablet if you want or run it in display mode here with the keyboard facing downward or put it in tent mode they built the speakers into the hinge here as you can see so they will angle a little bit as you are moving things around i found it sounds the best in laptop mode because those speakers are directly firing at you but when you have it in display mode here they’re not quite angled all the way down to the desk so you do get good sound in all of the different orientations in addition to the two speakers in the hinge here you also have two woofers on the bottom which add a little bit of base to the mix it sounds really good actually i was very pleased with the overall audio quality and the build quality in particular here is really really nice it’s also very well
balanced so when you lift the display up the keyboard stays put i was also very pleased with the keyboard on this one it’s got very nice solid keys they’re well spaced even though it’s a pretty thin device you’ve got decent key travel on it and it has some helpful keys here on the side including one that can change the performance level on this this does have a fan on board and if you want to keep the laptop quiet they have a key here dedicated to switching the performance modes which i thought was handy in the past used to have to hit function q to switch it around into those different modes they also have another button here which we’ll look at in a second that will automatically blur your background on the webcam which was kind of handy and then you’ve got your fingerprint reader and audio controls here as well the keyboard is backlit it’s got a nice back light to it nice and bright you can adjust that brightness a little bit if it is too much for you but i thought it looked pretty nice on it and the trackpad here is much larger than prior versions very responsive and accurate and altogether the design of this one is just again one of the nicest i’ve seen out of lenovo to date there are some ports on this one not many but useful ones you’ve got a full size
usb 3 port here on the right hand side it’s very shiny here so it’s hard to get the details brought out you also have two thunderbolt 4 ports here on the left hand side these are full service ports so they’ll do power video and data and it’s always nice to have a set of those at the ready especially full on thunderbolt ports on the other side though you just have a usb type-c port so this one is not thunderbolt just usb but it is full service for power video and data i would have liked to have seen thunderbolt ports on both sides but again usb only on the right hand side your power button is right here and then you’ve got a headphone microphone jack this also comes with a pen which we’ll explore in a few minutes it’s standard in the box but there’s no place to dock it on this machine we’ve seen prior yogas where you can pull the pen out of a little garage that stores inside of the laptop itself this one the pen will be separate but as we’ll talk about in a few minutes it’s a really nice feeling pen and i’m actually okay with it being external at least in this case now the webcam on this one is 1080p it resides here at the top you’ve got a physical shutter which will cover up the lens on it additionally this supports windows hello so you can use your face to unlock the computer the video quality is not bad 1080p is definitely an improvement
over 720p that we’ve seen on prior iterations of these yoga laptops so that’s a nice improvement there and they do have the key that i mentioned that will blur out the background and it will do this irrespective of what app you’re using so even if the app doesn’t support background blurring it will work here because this is part of the camera’s software and hardware so you don’t have to go through your zoom settings to get a blurry background here you just hit the key now battery life on this will vary based on the display technology that you choose this one again has the oled display that consumes more power than the led version so if you have the brightness turned down a bit stick to the basics like word processing spreadsheets email video playback and that sort of thing you could probably get about eight or nine hours out of this on a charge on the led version of the display you’ll get closer to 10 hours because it is more power efficient but the oled looks a lot nicer and if you’re doing creative work you’re going to want to go with this oled display and just be aware of the battery penalties there this will of course run a lot of those more basic tasks on the processor’s efficiency cores which will run those applications just fine with less power consumption but then if you switch on a video editor or something like that that will of course bring in those high performance cores into the mix so let’s take a look now and see how it performs i’ve got youtube up here first for some basic web browsing tests and as you can see we’ve got a 4k 60
video file playing back from my youtube channel haven’t had any drop frames there was two right when it got started but after that it settled right down and was able to play back that video just fine using google chrome we’ll take a look now at the nasa.gov homepage and as expected everything loads up here very very quickly and renders very quickly and that’s of course because we are on a high-end machine here with a brand new intel processor along with its wi-fi 6 radio so i don’t think there are going to be any performance issues here doing all of the basics and the oled display here also supports dolby vision for apps like netflix and others that support it and on the browserbench.org speedometer benchmark test we got a score of 255 and this as expected exceeds what we saw out of prior generation intel chips and also gets very close to the apple m1 max and they’ve made some real improvements here with the pen the pen itself is all metal it’s got a nice solid feel to it what really surprised me though was how much nicer the pen feels on the screen here it’s got some resistance to it so it feels more natural like you’re actually putting ink to the page and as you can see there’s very little latency with it i’m running now with the new microsoft journal app which allows you to do all sorts of cool things with text here if i circle my name i can select it and move it around the pen also supports pressure detection so you can see that line getting
darker as i push down harder and lighter as i just lightly touch against the screen and all together the pen here feels fantastic one of the best windows pen experiences that i have seen very much up there with what we saw out of a samsung device a few weeks ago and i think this will also do well for basic video editing we’ve got a 4k 60 project loaded up here in davinci resolve and everything seems to be rendering in pretty quickly even when you’re doing some changes to the transitions here in real time not a lot of lag here and i think you could do some basic editing kind of like what you would do for this youtube channel on something like this if you do more advanced work like a lot of color grading and more high-end video rendering you’re going to want something with a discrete gpu but i was very impressed with the performance for basic editing even at high resolutions and frame rates out of this new intel hardware so let’s take a look now at some gaming this is fortnite running at 1920 by 1200 at medium settings and we’re getting about 40 to 60 frames per second usually it’s hovering in the upper 40s to low 50s and they did make a lot of improvements on this new intel hardware to the cpu but the gpu side of this chip is about the same as it was in the prior generations you’re not going to see a huge bump in graphical performance like we saw with the cpu performance a little bit earlier that will benefit some games but not all so if you were looking at a 12th generation upgrade over an 11th generation for the graphical side of things you’re not going to see a huge improvement here this is red dead redemption 2.
We were running this one also at 1920 by 1200 at the lowest possible settings the game looks great even at those low settings on the oled here and like the prior generation intel chip we were getting around 30 frames per second here very very playable and then we also ran an older game the witcher 3 which we’ve run on a lot of prior generation hardware and here at 1920 by 1200 also at the lowest settings we were getting about the same frame rate we typically do around 50 frames per second and of course you can adjust settings to get it closer to 60 by going down to a lower resolution and on the 3d mark time spy benchmark test we got a score of 1920 and as you can see here the graphical scores are about the same as the prior generation i7s but the cpu performance is dramatically improved because we do have more cores available to us so overall a nice bump in performance on one side of the chip but not the other i suspect that the 13th generation intel chips might see that graphical boost and on the 3d mark stress test we got a score of 94.8 percent 97 is passing on that test and that means you will see this machine throttle down a little bit in order to keep itself from getting too hot you’ll likely notice that the most when playing games you’ll see some frame rate variations with that we noticed it a little bit in our testing and that’s not unusual for these really thin and light machines there’s just is not a lot of
room for air to flow and there are different mitigations that have to come into play in order to keep the heat at bay but i think for most tasks you won’t notice too much of a variation in performance here one thing to note is that it does have a fan on board which you will hear especially when you’re using the video editing applications or other things that really attacks the processor normally it’s pretty quiet when it’s idle or when you’re using a web browser or word processor or something so the fan noise will only be there when you’re really pushing it and of course you can adjust the performance modes to make it not turn that fan on as frequently but that does of course come at the cost of performance all right one last thing to take a look at and that is its linux support we booted up ubuntu the latest version that was available at the time i’m recording this video and everything worked okay but we did not get wi-fi or audio detected so that’s something that will likely require you to go out on a driver hunt for at least until some of these distributions get updated now this has on board an intel ax 211 wi-fi card and real tech audio i’m not sure which version of the realtek hardware it has it didn’t indicate that inside of the system manager here but i suspect that we’ll see those drivers get rolled into ubuntu and other popular distributions as things get updated for this next generation of hardware so i think the linux compatibility will get better over time but right now no wi-fi and no audio so overall this is a really solid offering from
lenovo i love the build quality on this it is super solid it feels really high quality a nice bump over the prior editions great pen support here awesome oled display and great performance out of this new intel processor what i think you’ll like about these new intel chips is not only do they perform better versus the prior generation you’ll probably get less fan noise when you’re doing basic tasks because of those high efficiency cores and that also means you’ll get a little better battery life out of one of these newer devices versus an older one so all in a real winner here and we’ll take a look at of course more of these 12th generation ships as the year progresses and until next time this is lon seidman thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the london tv supporters including gold level supporters jim tannis and tom albrecht hot sauce and video games and eric’s variety channel brian parker and frank goldman ameda brown and matt zagaya and chris allegretta if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to lawn dot tv support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
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