Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition Review

With Asus, MSI and HP knocking it out of the park recently, Lenovo has been somewhat conspicuous by its absence. Not anymore. The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition represents its re-entry into the modern, powerful, portable category and it hasn’t come to mess around. Should this be your next laptop?

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition Specs

Features, Ergonomics and Design

Lenovo’s Yoga laptops have impressed greatly over the years. Not only are they thin, portable, powerful and well-built, when on sale – which is much of the time – they’ve offered outstanding value too. The Aura Edition designation refers to a special project with Intel that developed special, ‘Smart Care, Smart Share and Smart Modes’ that automatically activate to enhance your laptoping experience. Rivals offer similar tools and features and they can be either gimmicky or innovative, so I was keen to find out where these sat.

The ‘Lunar’ grey, aluminium chassis might not be the flashiest, but it instantly feels solid, high-quality and luxurious.

Opening it up reveals what we initially thought was an 15.3-inch OLED screen but, the ‘PureSight Pro’ display actually uses IPS technology. It gets very bright indeed (500-nits), displays vibrant colours and the 2,880 x 1,800 resolution keeps text sharp. It’s compatible with Windows HDR and so is capable of displaying details in bright and dark areas plus, super-smooth colourful and monochrome gradients. It can actually do this without HDR turned on which will suit some content as highlights can blow-out, occasionally.

Designers will like that it supports 100 per cent of the difficult DCI-P3 colour gamut. My only gripe is that glossy screen can be reflective when viewing dark content (or you’re outdoors). Also, despite having a quick(ish) 120Hz refresh rate, a relatively slow pixel response time means that fast-moving objects can blur a little. Only competitive FPS players might mind, though.

It’s very responsive to touch but it’s not quite a tablet as the screen ‘only’ folds down flat. Lenovo doesn’t include a stylus.

Below the screen is a high-quality, low-travel keyboard which is comfortable for long periods of usage. The large track pad is smooth and high quality and the buttons are well-weighted.

Above the screen is a very good, Full HD camera that can fend-off low-light graininess very well. It’s partnered by a quad-mic array that’s also very good at capturing clear audio in noisy environments. The webcam also supports Windows Hello facial recognition log-in.

The Aura Edition squeezes four two-Watt speakers inside – two tweeters and two woofers and it sounds amazing. The speakers get improbably loud and bassy while retaining full fidelity. They’re excellent.

The Slim 7i has enough, Lunar-Lake-powered oomph to power Microsoft’s impressive CoPilot+ Ai features which you can read about, here. It also has impressive green credentials which you can read about, here.

Are Lenovo’s Aura Edition Special Features Any Good?

The Aura Edition Smart features come courtesy of Lenovo’s special collaboration with Intel. To be honest they’re a bit of a mixed bag.

The Smart Performance and Smart Care offerings make too many exaggerated claims regarding the need to pay extra for unneeded premium features. These range from a few dollars to almost seven hundred dollars for three-year, all-encompassing security.

Many of the issues it flags aren’t problematic at all and some of the cited functions come built-into Windows already – or are readily available courtesy of free apps like ccleaner. That all said, if you’re wanting a laptop for someone who’s hopeless with computers, they might hold some value. Much will depend on how you perceive the features explained in this video – for me, the casual suggestion that you should pay to optimise a brand new laptop, doesn’t sit well.

Some buyers would likely happily pay for the Apple-beating Accidental Damage Protection that Lenovo offers as part of its Premium Care Onsite Support, but it’s hard to discover that that’s included with so many warranty options.

Meanwhile, Smart Connect is essentially the Intel Unison phone-syncing app with an added tap function – where you tap your phone on the laptop to share content.

Some would consider Lenovo Smart Lock to be straight-up bloatware.

At least these options are discreetly displayed in the Lenovo Vantage app and not constantly rammed in down your throat. Hopefully, it stays that way.

Lenovo’s Scenario Modes offer some one-click optimisations that help what you’re doing. They’re easily activated via an on-screen widget or set automatically. Included are settings labelled, Common, Media, Meeting, Gaming, Creative and Learning. They let you choose whether Microphone and Speaker noise cancelling should be on or off during each task (along with Wi-Fi auto-recovery) in addition to setting the mic and speakers to suit the audio modes like Movie, Music, Game, Voice etc. It’s not too dissimilar to what’s available in other vendor’s apps.

If none of the above has drawn your attention, hopefully at least some of the Smart Modes will redeem the situation:

Shield Mode uses the camera to check whether people are spying on your screen and blurs it accordingly. It’s genuinely useful and something I usually see on business laptops. You can also auto-prompt joining a VPN when joining a new Wi-Fi network.

Attention Mode can set a timer to block notifications and distractions for a set amount of time. It also lets you tailor which social media sites you want to include or exclude.

Collaborate Mode can automatically activate or deactivate the camera (and low-light mode) when collaborating. Wellness Mode offers to remind you to, “Every twenty minutes of screen time, look at something twenty feet away for twenty seconds” and also to sit-up straight. Power Mode apes Windows Power Settings for Battery, Balanced and Performance modes. However, confusingly, you can set them to conflict with each other.

Connectivity

Inside there’s Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. That’s a good, complement although I’d always like another USB-A port. Note, too, that one Thunderbolt 4 port is used for charging.

Ultimately, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition is great to interact with, but the claims surrounding some of the Smart features make me wince a little. At the end of the day, though, I’ve dwelt more on the Aura Edition features than I usually would, because they’re new. Other vendors often offer similar things and, what’s most important, is that you can ignore them if you don’t want them.

Features, Ergonomics and Design Score: 4.5 / 5

Performance

Inside Lenovo’s Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition is one of Intel’s latest Lunar Lake processors, the Core Ultra 7 258V. This has four Performance cores and eight Low Power Efficient cores that operate between 2.2 and 4.8GHz with no HyperThreading. There’s also, 32GB of LPDDR5X-8533 RAM, a 1TB hard drive, a Neural Processing Unit and an integrated, octa-core, 1.95GHz Intel Arc graphics processor.

In the PCMark 10 benchmark, which uses every component of the computer, the Slim 7i Aura scored 6,942 which is well-above average and very good for an ultraportable. (Score: 3.2 / 5)

The lack of HyperThreading hurts rendering tasks, so I wasn’t surprised to see relatively low Cinebench scores of 1,642 and 10,496 in the fast R15 and longer R23 respectively. (Score: 1.8 / 5)

In the difficult 3DMark ray-tracing-based gaming tests, the Yoga Slim 7i Aura scored a devilish 666 (average 6.7fps) in Speed Way and 2,031 (average 9.4fps) in Port Royal. So, don’t expect to play the latest-and-greatest games on it. I’m still impressed it actually ran the tests, though.

In the more-middling game tests, Time Spy and Fire Strike Extreme, the 7i Aura (amazingly) scored 3,781 in both of them. That’s an average of 21.4fps and 17.9fps, respectively. These scores show that you’ll need to significantly drop resolution and settings to have a chance of playing many mainstream games.

In the much-easier 3DMark Night Raid test, which mimics casual and low-end, competitive games, the Yoga Slim 7i scored 34,097 which is a very playable average of 208fps.

I also ran the latest Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 benchmark. At default settings (native resolution and automatically selected quality settings), the Aura averaged 50fps with the lowest, one per cent per cent of frames (1% Low score) running at 38fps. That’s just about playable but stuttering can occur.

Making the settings more competitive by dropping the resolution to Full HD and setting the settings to Minimum, it averaged a nice 69fps with a 1% Low of 54fps. So, you can play CoD on it.

The following benchmarks will be used in 2025. Here are the scores for reference:

UL Procyon Microsoft Office: 7,006
UL Procyon Microsoft Office Multi-Platform: 248,000
UL Procyon Adobe Photoshop Editing: 6,232
UL Procyon Adobe Premiere Video Editing: 11,362
UL Procyon Ai Vision (CPU): 70
UL Procyon Ai Vision (GPU): 252
3DMark Solar Bay: 15,022
3DMark Steel Nomad: 875
3DMark Steel Nomad Light: 3,251

3D Performance Score: 1.8 / 5

Cooling

I was very impressed with the cooling prowess of the Aura. It never got noisy (just a low, constant whoosh when under sustained load) and didn’t get beyond tepid in temperature, either. Still, when I ran the 30-minute version of Cinebench R23, the score did drop by just over four per cent, so there is a little thermal throttling at play, but not much.

Portability and Battery Life

The 15.3-inch Aura weighs 1.53KG (well, 1.537KG, but there’s something mildly interesting happening with numbers in this review). That’s not the lightest (or the heaviest) ultraportable that I’ve reviewed lately, but most of its rivals are 14-inchers and this has a larger screen. It’s still only 14mm thick, so it feels thin and light irrespective of the tale of the tape. The power supply only adds an extra 295g too.

The aluminium lid is very solid and survives flexing when a robust twisting force is applied. The aluminium chassis is also very solid and the whole laptop is MIL-STD-810H certified, so it won’t have too much trouble surviving a life of being lugged around.

Meanwhile, the 70Wh battery managed to run our PCMark 10 Modern Office test for – get this – a physics-defying 26 hours and 28 minutes! That’s obscene… and the longest duration I’ve ever seen from a fixed, single-battery laptop. The battery is fast-chargeable, too: hitting three hours of usage in just 15-minutes. A battery lifespan-prolonging mode keeps it charged to 80 for a longer lifespan. It’s well worth activating with figures like this.

Update: It just finished running the UL Procyon Microsoft Office benchmark. 29 hours 44 minutes. That is all.

Portability and Battery Life Score: 4.4 / 5

Price, Value and Availability

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition is available right now with a sticker price of $2,799. Which is good value and places it into our Top 5 Best Laptops. If you’re super quick, though, you can get it in Lenovo’s extended sales for $700 less, making it very good value indeed and pushing the score up to 4.4 / 5. That’s enough to make it our joint, Number 1 Best Laptop. Congratulations Lenovo!

Value Score: 4.2 / 5

Alternatives to the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition

We’ve seen some amazing ultraportables lately and most of them have been Number 1 ranked for something. With prices fluctuating enormously, it’s worth checking any of the following out to find your ideal laptop:

MSI Prestige 14 AI Evo C1MG – MSI’s, matte-screened 14-inch, business-oriented rival is larger, but more powerful. It’s also crazy cheap in the current sales, if you’re on a budget.

Asus Zenbook S 14 – It’s smaller, lighter and more portable, but just as powerful and a bit pricier. A stunning laptop.

Asus ExpertBook P5 – Asus’ business-class 14-inch, Lunar Lake ultraportable laptop has a matte screen, has been torture-tested and has some great business features, especially related to web-conferencing.

HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 – HP’s Lunar-Lake ultraportable is a bona fide convertible tablet with amazing ergonomics.

HP Omen Transcend 14 – Want some gaming chops? HP’s 14-inch Omen has powerful, discreet graphics and yet remains portable.

Asus Zenbook S 16 – This AMD-powered, 16-inch ultraportable is solid, powerful and good value.

Overall

Our Best Laptop lead has changed a few times recently, but at the current price, and with the current build quality, battery life and unique feature set, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition is another worthy Number 1.

Note, the gap between the Top 5 is incredibly small and any potential laptop buyer should check out the features that best suit their needs, in addition to the price tags, which will fluctuate substantially throughout the holidays and sale periods. Nonetheless, if you’re looking for a high-quality portable general-purpose laptop that can be used for work, this does everything most people will want – and more. It’s outstanding.

Overall: 4.9 / 5

Last Updated on 26 April 2025 by Nick Ross