PC World - USA (2020-10)

56 PCWorld OCTOBER 2020

REVIEWS LENOVO IDEAPAD SLIM^7

7 4800U gave us a score of 13,083; the Ryzen

5 4500U in the HP Envy x360 13 got 9,547;

and the Acer Swift 3 and its Ryzen 7 4700U

finished with 10,888.

AND NO: THERE IS NO

THUNDERBOLT 3

Despite some early reports that the IdeaPad

Slim 7 has the Holy Grail of features in an AMD

laptop—Thunderbolt 3—it doesn’t. After

reading those reports, we got giddy with our

Thunderbolt 3 accessories, only to end up with

the same Charlie Brown football we’ve seen on

Ryzen 4000 laptops for the last five months.

WHAT THIS MEANS

So what does this all matter? Well, the main

take away is that the Ryzen 7 4800U has finally

arrived just in time for the main fight.

When Intel unwraps its 11th-gen “Tiger Lake”

CPUs, we’ll witness an epic battle for the soul of

thin and light laptops unlike any we have ever

seen before. Our earlier prediction that Tiger

Lake will lose against Ryzen 4000 in multi-

threaded tasks (go.pcworld.com/tgrz) stays the

same. Well, kind of. After seeing the Ryzen 7

4800U’s results, we actually think it’ll be a total

blowout in multi-threaded performance now.

Graphics, however, might just be closer than we

expected. And one area Tiger Lake is likely to

win big is single-threaded performance, which

is actually probably more important for most of

what it is done in a small laptop.

Stay tuned for our full review of the Lenovo

IdeaPad Slim 7, and for more information about

Intel’s imminent Tiger Lake counterpunch.

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

Dell XPS 15 7590Core i9-998xq0HK

Dell Inspiron 15 7000Core i7-8665U

MSI Prestige 14 PerformanceCore i7-10710U

Dell XPS 13 9300 DefaultCore i7-1065G7

HP Spectre x360 13 5th GenCore i7-8565U

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7Ryzen 7 4800U

Acer Swift 3Ryzen 7 4700U

Dell XPS 13 9300 PerformanceCore i7-1065G7

Dell XPS 13 2-in-2 7390 Perf ModeCore i7-1065G7

HP Envy x360 13 PerformanceRyzen 5 4500U

HP Envy x360 13Ryzen 5 4500U

MSI Prestige 14 DefaultCore i7-10710U

Cinebench R15.038

Single-core performance

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

203

184

190

183

200

184

189

183

183

179

17 7

17 7

17 7

Tiger Lake is likely to clean Ryzen 4000’s clock in

single-threaded performance and that might just

matter more.

The notification in the bottom-right corner of this

screenshot appears when you plug a Thunderbolt

device into the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7.