PC World - USA (2021-02)

FEBRUARY 2021 PCWorld 73

slower out of the gate than the Yoga C740,
it’s still well ahead of the Acer Swift 3 and its
identical Core i5 Ice Lake chip.
We are a tad concerned by the Slim 7’s
single-threaded Cinebench performance,
which is third-to-last in our chart, although the
laptop’s solid PCMark 8 score gives us some
comfort in terms of its single-core efficiency.

3DMARK SKY DIVER
The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 comes equipped
with a discrete Nvidia GeForce MX350
graphics card, an entry-level GPU that won’t
set your hair on fire in terms of gaming but
should grease the wheels for Adobe Premiere
and other content creation tools. We
expected the Slim 7 to top the charts for our
3DMark Sky Diver benchmark, given that all
the other laptops in our comparison only have
integrated graphics.
And there you have it. The two Core i7 Ice
Lake systems make a somewhat better
showing than the rest, due to their
turbocharged Iris Plus graphics cores, but
they still can’t hold a candle to the Slim 7’s
discrete graphics.
Just to put things in perspective, we also
ran a couple of quick gameplay benchmarks,
lest anyone were to think that the IdeaPad
Slim 7 is a full-on gaming machine. As
expected, the Slim managed only sub-30-fps
visuals for Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
and Rise of the Tomb Raider using their
maxed-out graphics presets. To wring 60 fps

or better from those two aging AAA games,

you’ll either have to dial the graphics way

back or upgrade to a gaming laptop with, say,

a GeForce GTX 1650 GPU or better.

BATTERY LIFE

We test battery life on a laptop by looping a

4K video using the stock Windows Movies

and TV app. We set screen brightness set to

approximately 250 nits and volume to 50

percent, with headphones plugged in.

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7’s result here is

decidedly meh. While the laptop’s nearly

10.5-hour performance sounds pretty good at

first blush (remember, of course, that the

With its discrete GeForce MX350 graphics card,

the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 easily beats the other

laptops in our chart with integrated graphics.

3DMark Sky

Diver 1.0 Overall

Graphics performance

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 14IIL05Core i5-1035G1

Lenovo Yoga C940-14Core i7-1065G7

HP Envy 13 Wood SeriesCore i7-1065G7

Acer Swift 3 SF314-57-57BNCore i5-1035G1

Dell Latitude 7310 2-in-1Core i7-10610U

Lenovo C740-14IMLCore i5-10210U

Dynabook Portégé X30-LCore i5-10210U

LG Gram 14T90N-R.AAS8U1Core i7-10510U

Lenovo Yoga C640-13IMLCore i3-10110U

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

12,3 0 4

4,963

7, 6 6 7

8,995

4,574

6,226

4,410

4,285

4,470