Review: Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition (Copilot+ PC)

Intel’s new Lunar Lake processor is here, and with it arrives renewed hope for the chipmaker in the battle against surging competition from Qualcomm and its Snapdragon X CPUs. Qualcomm stole Intel's thunder when its chips powered all the new Copilot+ PCs that launched earlier this year, but now it's Intel's turn to show what it's made of.

Formally known as the Core Ultra Series 2 of CPUs, the new chip generation makes some major architectural changes under the hood that will fundamentally alter the design of Intel laptops for better and for worse. What that means for anyone buying a Windows laptop foremost is that you have an even more confusing landscape to navigate.

Series 2

What’s different about the Core Ultra Series 2 versus its predecessors? Perhaps the biggest relates to memory: RAM is now part of the CPU package and not a separate component on the motherboard. While this can make for faster memory operations, it also means you’ll need to select your RAM configuration when you buy your computer, and there won’t be any way to upgrade it later (very much like Apple's MacBooks).

A bevy of other architectural changes promise general performance improvements on business apps and especially graphics tasks while significantly lowering power consumption. But most importantly (at least for Intel), you’ll get a considerable boost to artificial intelligence performance through a new neural processing unit, which means Lunar Lake systems will now qualify as Copilot+ PCs, allowing them to run all the additional AI applications Windows offers in this class of machines. Officially, Intel says that Core Ultra Series 2 processors will have more than triple the AI performance of the previous generation of chips. At least on paper. The important question is how this pans out in the real world.

With its Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition, Lenovo was the first laptop manufacturer to get a Lunar Lake system to me for review. As an introduction to the chip, it’s a good place to start: a traditional clamshell “with premium features at an attractive price.” The Yoga Slim 7i is a little jazzier than your typical Lenovo, with rounded edges and a silvery-gray aluminum chassis that boasts MIL-STD 810H durability.

The 15.3-inch touchscreen (2,880 x 1,800 pixels) makes for a unique size with Goldilocks versatility that is neither too large nor too small, though at 19 mm thick and 3.4 pounds, the machine is a bit larger and heavier than expected. (Some 16-inch models are thinner and lighter.) A slim notch sprouts from the top of the LCD and houses the webcam (and makes the machine a bit easier to open); it's the only unusual design feature.

The specific configuration on this unit is relatively entry-level, with a Core Ultra 7 256V CPU and 16 GB of RAM. A 1-TB solid state drive is standard. Two USB-C ports with USB4 support are available (one on each side; either can charge the device), along with a single USB-A port and a full-size HDMI jack. The “Aura Edition” moniker means the laptop was designed in collaboration with Intel. This includes features like multiple user modes—such as a Wellness mode that encourages taking breaks for eye health and analyzes your sitting posture—and Aura Smart Share, which lets you quickly cast photos from a phone to this laptop.

Not Wholly Remarkable

All of that is a prologue for the big question: How well does the Yoga Slim 7i perform thanks to the new Lunar Lake CPU? My results were very good—but, naturally, mixed. I’ll start with where the Yoga excels: AI tasks and graphics.

The Yoga Slim 7i had the best AI benchmark numbers I’ve seen on a laptop without a discrete graphics processor, and the unit set new high scores on graphics tests for laptops with integrated graphics. I got roughly 50 percent higher frame rates on graphics and gaming tests versus Snapdragon X Elite systems and about 20 percent faster performance than machines with first-generation Core Ultra CPUs.

However, on more general tasks, the Yoga didn’t pull through. My scores on the PCMark 10 benchmark were not markedly different than first-gen Core Ultra scores, and performance on the industry standard Geekbench 6 test was surprisingly low—40 percent below a typical Snapdragon X-powered laptop and 20 percent below the average Core Ultra 1. I didn’t notice any particularly sluggish performance while testing (and even boot-up was speedy), but power users with 100 browser tabs open at once may start to feel some pain. On the plus side, since this is Intel silicon on the x86 architecture, the system doesn’t have any app compatibility issues that Snapdragon machines suffer from on the ARM architecture.

In any case, while it’s impossible to draw a broad conclusion about the performance of a CPU based on a single laptop, this at least serves as a starting point.

The remainder of the laptop offers a solid though not wholly remarkable experience. The screen is not especially bright compared to competing laptops, but it still looks good under typical viewing conditions. The keyboard and its gently concave keys offer a snappy, responsive typing experience. The touchpad is responsive, and the four speakers (with Dolby Atmos support) sound great. Note that the fan tends to kick in quickly under load, and it can get quite loud.

Battery life deserves its own conversation: At just over 12 hours of running time on a full-screen YouTube playback test, the Yoga put most other Intel-based machines to shame. However, laptops with the new Snapdragon chips still have Intel squarely beat on this front. Fifteen hours is a common benchmark for Snapdragon X Elite systems, and one Snapdragon X Plus system even hit 19 hours of running time in my testing. Apple silicon has nothing to fear from Intel on the battery front yet.

At $1,300, the Yoga Slim 9i isn’t a budget system, but it’s well priced given its overall performance, design, and usability. The jury’s out on whether Lunar Lake will be the game-changer that the beleaguered Intel would love for it to be, but at the very least it’s a step in the right direction.