Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i Aura Edition review: A capable all-rounder for work and play
The Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i Aura Edition debuted a couple of months ago as the brand’s latest creator laptop, packing a good amount of performance while not being too expensive for what you’re getting.
On paper, it ticks plenty of boxes for aspiring content creators and university students looking for a do-it-all laptop. Naturally, when Lenovo offered us one to check out recently, it didn’t take us long to say yes so that we ourselves can see if it’s just as good in practice as it sounds on paper.
Not particularly sexy, but still well built
Lenovo seldom does sleek and sexy laptops, and the Yoga Pro 7i Aura Edition is more of the same. It’s an understated grey laptop that won’t look out of place in any office or meeting room, and features an aluminum top and bottom for what is a sensibly built machine.
Look away though if you need the lightest laptop around, as the Yoga Pro 7i weighs in at 1.59kg, and is a little bulky too at 16.7mm thick. I’m not a huge fan of the bump around the webcam up top, but perhaps the weirder design choice to me is that the bottom half of the laptop has curved edges while the top lid has flat sides. Design is subjective of course, and some of you out there might actually prefer this look anyway.
As for the display, you’ll find a 15.3-inch OLED display, pushing a WQXGA 2560 x 1600 resolution with full coverage of the DCI-P3 colour gamut, a 165Hz refresh rate, 500nits of SDR brightness and HDR 1000 True Black certification. I quite like the display here, with accurate colours and high brightness making it great to work on when editing photos or videos. The only nitpick is that while the glare screen makes the blacks stand out well, it does make it fairly reflective too.
Once I was done working and decided to watch some content on the Yoga Pro 7i though, the audiovisual experience is again pretty good. There’s a four-speaker setup on the Yoga Pro 7i, with two tweeters and two woofers as well as Dolby Atmos and Smart Amplifier. This means that the Yoga Pro 7i comfortably fills up the room with sound.
The keyboard experience though was a bit middling for me. The Yoga Pro 7i Aura Edition’s keyboard isn’t bad with decent travel but does feel a little bit mushy to me. As for the touchpad, it’s nice and big, and if you get the optional haptic ForcePad you can even use it with a stylus for sketching and drawing.
Packed with power
The Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i Aura Edition that we have for review comes with an Intel Core Ultra 7 365H processor, offering four Performance cores, eight Efficient cores and another four Low Power Efficient cores, running at up to 4.7GHz boost speeds with 16 total threads. It’s also been paired to 32GB of LPDDR5X memory, a 1TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 Laptop GPU.
While these are just its ‘base’ model specs, what I ended up experiencing was that it actually packs quite a punch. The Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i Aura Edition has more than enough performance for my day-to-day tasks, which includes word processing, photo editing and multiple Chrome tabs and windows open while researching on top of the various other stuff like Spotify and Discord in the background.
Indeed, it also does well in benchmark scores, and perhaps my favourite part is that it also packs enough performance in it to run games at native resolution, though you’ll definitely be able to make more use of the high refresh rate if you’re willing to lower some settings or the resolution to 1080p. Pretty impressive for a 50-class GPU.
As for the battery life, the Yoga Pro 7i got me about 6-8 hours of regular use; not particularly impressive, but considering the hardware at hand it’s acceptable enough. It comes with an 84Wh battery, and I also like that it comes with a USB-C 140W charger. Also, it’s worth pointing out that fan noise is generally not too loud unless you’re putting it under heavy load like when in-game or benchmarking it, and it doesn’t get too hot till the keyboard is warm either.
Lastly, I like how much I/O the Yoga Pro 7i Aura Edition comes with. There’s a HDMI 2.1 output with two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports and a full size SD card reader on the left, while on the right are two USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports and a 3.5mm audio jack.
Solid MacBook Pro alternative
Priced at RM8,999 for our review unit’s configurations, the Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i Aura Edition positions itself as a reasonable and solid choice in a sea of creator-focused laptops, such as the ProArt PZ14 and the MacBook Pro.
Taking the latter as an example, the 14-inch model starts at RM6,999 but bump it up to the 15-core M5 Pro chip with 24GB of memory and 1TB of storage and you’re at the same RM8,999 mark as our Lenovo that we have here today. The MacBook Pro almost certainly has the edge in battery life, but the Yoga Pro 7i does have a larger display and support for Windows apps as well as gaming capabilities, which may matter more for students and gamers.
Overall, there’s honestly not much wrong with the Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i Aura Edition, and considering the current memory crisis it’s not that badly priced either. If you care about Windows compatibility or need a portable workstation for both content creation and gaming, then the Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i Aura Edition is certainly worth taking a look at.
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