PC World - USA (2020-10)

54 PCWorld OCTOBER 2020

REVIEWS LENOVO IDEAPAD SLIM^7

handled heat over a long test. With today’s

notebooks though, actually running a CPU

encoding task on a 3-pound laptop is realistic.

The result is still pretty amazing, but we do

see that the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 doesn’t

leave its Ryzen siblings in the dust. It still eats

the lunch (and dinner) of the Intel 10th-gen

Comet Lake U and 10th-gen Ice Lake U laptop,

but the thermal limitations of a thin and light

laptop are at play. And yes, it’s really not that

much slower than an 8-core Core i7-10875H

in the Dell XPS 15 9500 either. Phew.

Besides CPU performance, AMD’s graphics

matter too. With the Ryzen 7 4800U, you get one

more graphics core over the Ryzen 7 4700U, and

you get slightly higher clock speeds: 1,750MHz

versus 1,600MHz. The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7,

however, also sports LPDDR4X RAM clocking as

high as 4,267MHz. Most of the Ryzen laptops

we’ve seen feature dual-channel DDR4/3200

memory that’s slower, but lower cost.

Graphics performance can typically use all

On a longer workload, the thermals come back

into play and the Slim 7 comes back to earth.

It’s still enough to basically make us wonder just

what Intel’s H-class laptops are doing with all that

power they have though.

Dell XPS 15 7590Core i9-998xq0HK

Dell XPS 15 9500 “Ultra”Core i7-10875H

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7Ryzen 7 4800U

Acer Swift 3Ryzen 7 4700U

MSI Prestige 14 PerformanceCore i7-10710U

HP Envy x360 13 PerformanceRyzen 5 4500U

HP Envy x360 13Ryzen 5 4500U

MSI Prestige 14 DefaultCore i7-10710U

Dell XPS 13 2-in-2 7390Core i7-1065G7

Dell XPS 13 9300 PerformanceCore i7-1065G7

Dell Inspiron 15 7000Core i7-8665U

Dell XPS 13 9300 DefaultCore i7-1065G7

HP Spectre x360 13 5th GenCore i7-8565U

HandBrake 0.99 Encode

Seconds

SHORTER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

1,585

2,240

1,737

2,855

1,634

2,542

1,876

3,192

3,237

3,312

3,654

3,654

4,399

We thought we ran the wrong test, but nope. The

Ryzen 7 4800U in the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 is

that fast.

Dell XPS 15 7590Core i9-998 xq0HK

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7Ryzen 7 4800U

Dell XPS 15 9500 “Ultra”Core i7-10875H

MSI Prestige 14 PerformanceCore i7-10710U

Acer Swift 3Ryzen 7 4700U

HP Envy x360 13 PerformanceRyzen 5 4500U

Dell XPS 13 2-in-2 7390Core i7-1065G7

HP Envy x360 13Ryzen 5 4500U

Dell XPS 13 9300 PerformanceCore i7-1065G7

Dell XPS 13 9300 DefaultCore i7-1065G7

MSI Prestige 14 DefaultCore i7-10710U

HP Spectre x360 13 5th GenCore i7-8565U

Dell Inspiron 15 7000Core i7-8665U

Cinebench R15.038

Multi-core performance

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

1,712

1,0 61

1,625

850

1,66 4

865

1,076

842

833

780

726

714

684