🔬[REVIEW] ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 7 - Still great, despite being held back by cooling
Channel: LaptopMedia
Date: 30/10/2022

📈 💵  Specs and Prices: https://laptopmedia.com/series/lenovo-thinkpad-x1-yoga-7th-gen-2022/
👁️  Buy our display profiles: https://laptopmedia.com/review/lenovo-thinkpad-x1-yoga-gen-7/#buy-our-profiles
🔬 In-depth Review: https://laptopmedia.com/review/lenovo-thinkpad-x1-yoga-gen-7/

➡️  CONTENTS:
[0:00] Introduction
[0:24] Design and construction
[1:04] Keyboard and Touchpad
[1:24] Ports
[1:45] Display quality
[2:34] Battery life
[2:53] Performance
[3:29] Temps and Stability
[4:01] Disassembly and upgrade options
[4:27] Verdict
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🔬[REVIEW] ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 7

High-end business laptops rarely get better than the ThinkPad X1 series from Lenovo. The X1 sub-brand houses several devices, but today we’re giving sole attention to the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 7. It brings quality displays and the Alder Lake P and U-series, which seems fitting for a 14-inch device.

[Intro]

The laptop is very compact, weighing only 1.38 kg and having a profile of 15.5 mm. It’s entirely made of Aluminum, while the display up front is covered in glass. With such construction, you get incredible rigidity. The lid opens easily with one hand, which isn’t the case with most convertibles. The bezels are thin, except for the top one, which houses an FHD webcam and an IR face recognition sensor. 

The Stylus has a space inside the laptop. It works very well with the glass display, offering 4096 pressure levels of sensitivity, similar to many graphic tablets.  

[Input devices]

The base houses the keyboard, which has a backlight and spill resistance. It also works as a vent for cooling. Typing is great, thanks to the long key travel and clicky feedback. There is a TrackPoint with physical buttons above the touchpad. Speaking of it, the pad sports a glass cover, which improves the gliding, while the tracking and responsiveness are adequate. 

[Ports]

While the laptop is compact, it still has a decent port selection, with two Thunderbolt 4 ports, two full-sized USB 5Gb ports, an HDMI port, a 3.5 mm audio jack, and the stylus pen. There is an optional SIMcard tray. 

[Display]

On the front, we have two display options, an FHD+ IPS panel and a 4K UHD+ OLED panel. Here we have the OLED panel, which is fantastic, with comfortable viewing angles, peak brightness of 401 nits, and an infinite contrast ratio. The panel fully covers the sRGB and DCI-P3 gamuts. The display reached the best possible accuracy in the DCI-P3 gamut using a D65 white point. The panel is very quick, with a 3ms response time. It also uses PWM, but only up to 105 nits. 

[Battery]

With a 4K screen and a 57Wh battery pack, we didn’t expect very good results. The laptop lasts for 7 hours and 38 minutes of Web browsing, or 4 hours and 46 minutes of video playback when paired with a Core i7-1270P.


[Performance]

The laptop offers the whole Alder Lake U-series and P-series range. We tested the Core i7-1270P which has 12 cores and 16 threads. The CPU doesn’t perform as well as we thought it would, scoring similarly to a Ryzen 5 5600H from last year in 3D Rendering. The Photoshop scores are great, however, keeping the tradition of Intel chips being fantastic in short loads. 

You get an iGPU only, however, the Iris Xe Graphics G7 is a quality option for productivity and some video editing and Creator work. 

[Cooling]

The main reason for the lack of performance is the cooling. The setup consists of a single heat pipe and two fans. There are also several heat spreaders that cover parts of the motherboard, mainly the VRMs. 

The CPU spikes up its wattage temperatures and clock speeds for a few quick seconds, after which all three plummet down heavily. 

The comfort is decent, as the fans don’t get very loud. On the other hand, the whole base and keyboard heat up, due to the thin profile and limited heat dissipation. 

[Teardown and Upgradeability]

There’s no RAM upgradeability, as you get up to 32GB of soldered LPDDR5 memory. For storage, there’s one M.2 PCIe x4 slot that works with Gen 4 SSDs. 

If you want to know how to access the insides of the ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 7, check out our teardown video, which we’ll leave in the description. 

[Verdict]

What Lenovo has done with the ThinkPad X1 Yoga, is create a durable laptop with a lot of features and craftsmanship. However, the laptop was designed with the Alder Lake U-series in mind, as the cooling doesn’t seem to be capable to handle the more power-hungry P-series. If you want the X1 Yoga for your next device, we advise going with a 15W CPU, which should improve comfort and even battery life. 

For a more comprehensive look at the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 7, check out our written review, which is way more detailed.