FEBRUARY 2021 PCWorld 71GENERAL PERFORMANCE
With its quad-core, Core i5 Ice Lake CPU and
discrete graphics, we were expecting plenty
of productivity power from the Lenovo
IdeaPad Slim 7, and that’s just what we got.
The Slim 7 handles Office and daily PC duties
with ease, it excels at shouldering multi-core
CPU loads over lengthy periods, and it packs
enough graphical punch to please content
creators. That said, the IdeaPad Slim 7 falls
more in the middle of the pack when it comes
to delivering quick bursts of power, and we’ve
seen better battery life.
PCMARK 8 WORK
CONVENTIONAL
Our first benchmark measures how well a
given laptop performs during such
everyday computing chores as web surfing,
composing Word documents, tinkering
with spreadsheets, and video chat. Because
most of the tasks simulated by PCMark 8
require only a single computing core,
laptops with fewer CPU cores remain on an
even playing field with those that have more.
A PCMark 8 score of 2,000 or higher
generally means you’ll see smooth
Office performance.
So don’t fret when you see the Lenovo
IdeaPad Slim 7 sitting in the bottom half of our
performance chart. Every laptop in the
comparison pool of similar models breezed
through the PCMark 8 benchmark with a
score north of 3,000—easy peasy.
The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 may have landed
in the bottom half of our PCMark 8 chart, but
in general, all the laptops in our roundup aced
the benchmark.PCMark 8 Work 2.0
Conventional
Native Resolution
Lenovo Yoga C940-14Core i7-1065G7
Dell Latitude 7310 2-in-1Core i7-10610U
LG Gram 14T90N-R.AAS8U1Core i7-10510U
Lenovo C740-14IMLCore i5-10210U
Dynabook Portégé X30-LCore i5-10210U
Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 14IIL05Core i5-1035G1
Acer Swift 3 SF314-57-57BNCore i5-1035G1
Lenovo Yoga C640-13IMLCore i3-10110U
HP Envy 13 Wood SeriesCore i7-1065G7LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE3,8063,6063,7133,7833,5993,6353,313
3,2123,377HANDBRAKE
Our next benchmark involves using the free
HandBrake utility to encode a 30GB .MOV
video file into a format suitable for Android
tablets. This lengthy, multi-core task is
guaranteed to spin up cooling fans as CPU
temperatures begin to soar. Given that it takes
about an hour or so to complete the test, our
HandBrake benchmark does a good job of
showing us how a laptop handles heat
buildup over time. In this case, laptops with
the most cores generally get the best scores.
This time, the IdeaPad Slim 7 snags a solid
third place (shorter bars are better for