Intel Panther Lake laptops have been rolling out for a couple months now and
you know it's nice to see Intel sort of return to form. So we've got a bunch of
designs with nice battery life, powerful cores, we got new XE graphics cores in
there and it's enabling some pretty nice
thin and light Windows laptop design. So Lenovo Yoga and Intel sponsored this
video so we could take a look at the Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition.
Now Lenovo did send us the engineering sample
before the launch of the laptop so I'm not sure whether the packaging will look
exactly like this for you but for us it comes with this 65 watt adapter the
USB-C. See how long that is.
Oh oh whoa it's even longer than what is that? That's 6 feet at least.
But yeah that's 65 watt and you can plug that into any one of the three
Thunderbolt 4 ports that is on this thing which we'll take a look at now.
Okay as for the laptop itself let's take
the wow that's very nice. All right let's take a look
see here. Okay I'm getting thin and light feel from this. I feel like I
could flip this around. I could I could do a little
immediately I notice this very thin edge. I mean you know it tapers
obviously a little bit like the the laptop is not actually as thin as a
USB-C port. In case you're wondering the specific thickness is 13.9 mm that way.
And in terms of weight I mean like I said it doesn't feel super heavy. It is
apparently 1.14 kg or about 2 and 1/2 lb
and Lenovo says that's thanks to the aluminum alloy construction that they
got going on here. This is the lunar gray colorway but apparently it comes in
seashell if you like a little bit more pop. Okay let's see what we're dealing
with in terms of ports. On this side we got two Thunderbolt 4 ports and activity
light or some kind of LED there. On the other side, we've got another
Thunderbolt 4 port, the power button,
and a physical switch that controls the
e-shutter on the camera. So, it doesn't have a physical shutter that covers the
camera, but it has an e-shutter, which will like electronically disable the
camera. Now, on the bottom, we've got a nice big grill here for fan intake, and
then it will exhaust out the back of the unit. We've got speakers pointing
downwards. These are the woofers. There's four speakers on board, two
woofers there. Uh we've also got the nice like rubbery feet here. And then
we've got two tweeters
up here. And up here we can we can also see a nice big trackpad, too. I like
that the Windows laptops have gone in that direction. And then we have the
keyboard, which
yeah, feels feels pretty nice. Got a got a satisfying tactile bump there. There is
a little bit of flex there, which you can see, but you know, that's always
going to be a bit of a trade-off uh with a thin and light laptop. If you want a
big chunky indestructible thing, then yeah, you you know, you're going to have
less of that. There's three available processors that you can get with this
one. We have the Intel Core Ultra 7 355,
but you can also get the Ultra 5 325 or the Ultra 5 322. So, we got the upgraded
one with the touchscreen, Pure Sight Pro OLED 2880 by 1800 display, and at 14 in
that gives us a 16 by 10 aspect ratio.
We got a 120 Hz display here, which to me is is immediately obvious when I move
around this Dota 2 icon. That's my standard test. And it's capable of 500
nits in SDR mode, but it's a nice OLED
display, you know, it supports HDR, and you have to plug in to get HDR, but once
you do that and enable it, it gets up to 1,100 nits. And apparently, Labs did a
bunch of testing on the color, and they think that the HDR mode is pretty good.
So, I'm going to take a look at that in a little bit. Some other things about
the system, the one we have has 16 GB of RAM, and we've got a 1 TB SSD in here
that's a PCIe 4.0 model. Now, with
internal hardware in mind, as much as I want to talk more about the display and
how it's beautiful, and we will talk about that in a second, we're going to go through the Labs results first. First
up, we got Puget Bench scores for Photoshop and Premiere Pro. In
Photoshop, we got 6230, and in Premiere Pro, 21,883.
Now, those are not going to be at the very, very top of the stack, but for a
thin and light laptop, it's pretty respectable numbers. And we're seeing
those Intel Panther Lake chops coming
into play here. Speaking of Intel chops, the Core Ultra 7 355 in this laptop
comes with four XE cores, which I believe are classified as just Intel
graphics, not as an Arc GPU. However, uh
in Intel graphics software, it does have a drop-down here for XESS frame
generation override. So, if you want to use their latest Intel XESS multi-frame
generation to maybe try and push a little bit more out of the hardware, you
can. However, this is what our Labs team found without doing any of that fancy
stuff. In Rocket League at max settings, we got an average FPS of 99. You can
play Rocket League on this thing, no problem. Dota 2 is uh maybe a little bit
more demanding. We got 71 for an average FPS on there. And to throw a heavy
hitter at it, we got Cyberpunk 2077 at medium preset, and we got under 30 FPS,
but 28, pretty close. I don't know if I would try it here. You got the
multi-frame gen though, maybe worth giving it a shot. It's not a gaming
laptop, but it can game, depending. And
it'll run AI features if you're running those locally uh fairly well, with up to
100 tops of performance shared across
the NPU, GPU, and CPU. Whatever you're
doing though, one big advantage of Intel Panther Lake is pretty good battery
life. This thing has a 70 watt hour battery in it, and our Labs team, during
our standard battery test, this thing lasted for 12 hours, over 12 hours,
streaming a 1080p video off of a Plex server, which is not bad. I mean, we see
high-powered laptops in our test getting like 10 hours or less, so 12 hours, it's
a testament to these new Panther Lake E cores that they got in here. And the
story is not too shabby for charging time as well. This thing took 1 hour and
57 minutes to charge from 0 to 100% according to Labs. I'll also just say,
before we get on to the color and the speakers, that this thing comes with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. Panther Lake
kind of bringing those standards up to par for the current day. Okay, finally,
this beautiful OLED display. I want to see my favorite crabs on it and listen
to the speakers. So, we've got this board here. The Labs team was like,
"Please play audio on a hard surface. It'll It'll That's what it's meant to
be. In the wild, laptops play audio on these." It's so the mat doesn't dampen
the speakers as much, and we get a more accurate understanding. All right, come
at me, crabs.
Okay. It's not blowing my socks off, but
there's like a healthy amount of volume there. It is an interesting setup
they've got with the woofers pointing down and the tweeters pointing up.
That's pretty good. And I mentioned that the colors of the trees and the bodies
of my friends here looked pretty good. And Labs found that this display is
actually very impressively color accurate. Now, it's pretty easy to
change the color profile that your laptop is in using the Lenovo Vantage
app. Labs says that the default color profile that it comes with, colors are
all going to look pretty nice out of the box. However, according to their
testing, the best modes to use if you want to use in SDR mode are going to be
the sRGB or the P3 D65 mode. Now, they
said color accuracy in both of those modes are going to be the best for color
accurate work if you want to do Photoshop or Lightroom or whatever on
your laptop. When you switch to those color profiles, it'll default right to
65% brightness, and that it will be the brightness at which everything is the
most color accurate in SDR mode. This is an HDR compatible screen. You have to
plug it in for HDR to work, and you have to enable HDR in Windows settings. But,
once they did that and had content brightness at an appropriate level, they
said the color accuracy is very impressive in that mode as well. And
that's nice for me to hear because I'm always looking for laptops with, you know, nice color accurate displays. I
occasionally have to do a a bit of Photoshop work. I really appreciate
people treating laptop displays as something that needs to be color
accurate and pretty and beautiful. Your camera might be Oh.
Well, there we go. I went to test the uh the camera and the microphone, but the
e-shutter is on, so it's not letting me have anything. Didn't even mean to test
that, and I guess it works. Haha. Looking pretty sharp. This is only
5 megapixels, but oh yeah, I can see I think there's some computational
videography going on here. This is more than enough for uh you know, video calls
and checking your makeup. This particular model of this laptop with the
Core Ultra 7 355, 16 gigs of RAM, 1 TB
SSD, and 2.8K OLED display comes out to
1,590 USD. However, if you drop from 1 TB to
512 and drop from 2.8K down to the 1200p
option, which is still an OLED, that'll get you down to 1400 for this one, and
Lenovo says that some Core Ultra 5 models are coming out soon that, at
least in the US, will start at $1,200. Which, you know, in today's economy,
you can make the decision for yourself, but for a laptop that is thin and light,
it's pretty to look at. You know, it's capable of dipping into whatever
productivity stuff you might need to do, and it might even be able to game a
little bit. There you have it, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition. I felt
like we've We're Aura farming this whole time, you and me together. You most of
all though. Hey, subscribe to ShortCircuit for more videos like this.
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