hey everybody it’s lon seidman and we’ve got another laptop to review today we’re taking a look at the thinkbook 14s yoga from lenovo this is a very attractive unit here in a nice blue aluminum case and it is a two in one so you can use it as a laptop you can use it as a display only kind of device you can put it into tent mode and of course it also works as a tablet and this one is powered by an intel i5 processor and we’re going to be taking a closer look at this one and what it’s all about in just a second but i do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that this is on loan from lenovo so we’re done with this it goes back to them all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own no one is paying for this review nor is anyone reviewed or approve what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this laptop is all about now the price point on this is just under a thousand dollars there are of course a number of different configuration options to choose from all of the different versions of this laptop have a 14 inch display 1080p and of course it does support touch because this is a two in one the display quality isn’t great compared
to some other lenovo’s i’ve looked at it’s not that bright and i noticed the images are a bit washed out mainly due to its contrast ratio not being spectacular here the contrast ratio refers to how black black things appear on screen and here they look more gray than black and i think that affects the overall image quality so the display on this one could be better there are two color options available this is the abyss blue but there’s also a more traditional silver version the model that we have to look at today has an i5 1135 g7 processor that’s an 11th generation intel tiger lake chip this has eight gigabytes of ram and 512 gigabytes of storage in the loaner configuration they sent over now you can upgrade the ram they have eight gigabytes soldered onto the motherboard and then there’s a slot that you can put in additional memory my advice would be to put in another eight gigabytes if you’re going to upgrade this yourself but better to just buy it with the 16 gigs out of the gate and the reason is is that these intel chips like their memory in dual channel mode and with only one ram module installed on this one which is soldered to the board we’re not getting all that we can out of this processor and you’ll see that as we work our way through the review and compared to some other lenovo laptops powered with the very same chip so my advice would be again to get the 16 gig version for the best performance now you can upgrade the storage on this one it has an m.2 slot that’s currently occupied by the nvme ssd that came with it but you can very easily swap that out and put in a larger one if you want now it weighs about 3.3 pounds or 1.5 kilograms but it feels nice and solid again all metal no flex a really really nice build quality here the
keyboard and track pad are also very nice you’ve got your backlit lenovo keyboard here a nice travel to the keys very comfortable to type on we’ve seen that on many different lenovo machines including all of the think books that we’ve looked at this year equally nice track pad here it tracks well very accurate it’s got a nice firm feel to it all in very very good you also get a lot of ports to choose from here too so on the left hand side we have a usb type-c port this is full service so this will work as a power plug but also works with data devices and video output again though this is usb type-c next to it is another usb type-c port but this is a thunderbolt 4 port so you can use faster thunderbolt devices here versus here so this will run at a max of 10 gigabits per second this port with a compatible thunderbolt device will run at 40 gigabits per second you could also connect external gpus to this port too so a lot of flexibility out of these thunderbolt ports and because this is thunderbolt this is also full service so both of these will do power video and data devices you have an hdmi output here if you want to just plug that into an external monitor a usb 3.0 port here you got a headphone microphone jack right there and then on the other side you’ve got even more ports you’ve got your micro sd card slot here another usb 3 port a kensington lock slot now you’ll notice a sticker here for the fingerprint reader on the keyboard deck but it’s actually pointing you at the side because the power switch here doubles as the fingerprint reader so you can turn on the laptop and just rest your finger there to unlock everything another cool feature of this one is that there is a pen built right into it it garages itself here on the side and it also charges while it’s in here so you don’t have to replace batteries on it we’ll take a closer look at the
pen here as we work our way further through the review now battery life on this one is about eight to nine hours and that estimate assumes you’re doing the basics like watching some movies or doing some word processing email or web browsing when you start getting into more strenuous activities like photo and video editing or game playing that of course will eat into your battery life a bit more now the webcam here is located at the top of the display like other lenovo laptops they have a shutter mechanism a physical one that will cover the lens up when you don’t want to use the webcam and you’ll see a little red dot in there when that lens is covered it is a 720p webcam so the quality isn’t great but it’s good enough for getting your zoom calls done and that sort of thing and the computer of course is more than capable of handling zoom google meet microsoft teams and the other conferencing software solutions that are out there let’s take a look now and see how it performs so let’s begin with some web browsing we’re just going to load up the nasa.gov homepage and see how fast everything renders in this does have wi-fi six on board so you will get a pretty quick wi-fi performance and as you can see everything is rendering in very quickly as expected and there’s really nothing that i’m seeing here that concerns me we just played a youtube video there and a little bit earlier we ran my 1080p 60 youtube video that we like to test with and although we did get a couple of drop frames when
it first started playing back it was able to sustain 1080p 60 on the display here without any issues so i think if you’re doing netflix and prime video and disney plus all of that video playback should work just fine on this display at 1080p and on the browserbench.org speedometer benchmark test we got a score of 150 that puts this one right in line with another thinkbook we’ll be looking at very shortly the 13sg2 that one came in a little bit higher at 160 but pretty much within the margin of error uh so altogether this one is performing the way its peers are performing and that is typically what we’ll see with single channel memory for web browsing gaming is another story let’s have a look at that so let’s start off with gta5 and here we were running between 20 and 25 frames per second at 720p at the absolute lowest settings we were nearly doubling this on a thinkbook 13 that had 16 gigs of ram with the same processor which of course was running in dual channel configuration so you can see how much better you’ll do with that second stick of ram occupied here is fortnite this is 720p lowest settings we were all over the place on frame rates here anywhere from 20 to 45 frames per second as you can see again i think the memory is a big issue here in getting the best performance out of it we also loaded up the witcher 3.
This one is demanding even though it’s an older game and at the lowest setting 720p we were barely making 30 frames per second and again we had much better performance on a machine that was running in dual channel mode with the same chip and on the 3d mark times by benchmark test we got a score of 702 that puts this one well below two other machines we’ve looked at recently with that i5 1135 g7 processor namely the hp pavilion 14t and the lenovo thinkbook 13s that we’ll be reviewing very shortly and those two machines have their memory configured in dual channel mode and if you do that with this one you’ll see dramatically better graphical performance not only for games but also for video and photo editing so if you’re doing anything beyond the basics like web browsing and word processing configuring this with 16 gigs of ram is going to be a significant performance boost and i would highly recommend you do that now the good news is is that it’s very efficient at keeping itself cool on the 3d mark stress test we got a passing grade of 98.3 percent so that’s a good thing you shouldn’t see too much throttling when you place the computer under load i was also very pleased with the fan noise on this it’s not all that loud it will of course kick on when it needs to but it’s really pretty quiet
comparatively with other laptops you also have some ability to control how often the fan comes on with the lenovo vantage software here but if you do try to put it into a quieter fan mode that will of course impact performance you do want to keep the bottom of the laptop clear because it draws air in through the bottom here and ejects it out this spot here while we’re looking at the bottom there are two speakers here on the bottom nothing spectacular audio wise there’s not a great range of sound not that much bass but they’re very loud you get good stereo separation but they are downward firing so if you have them on a desk like i do the sound might differ on different surfaces so just keep that in mind and of course it might sound a little bit different when you put it in display mode because those downward firing speakers go to upward firing so it will vary a bit depending on how you’re using it and what you’re placing it on so let’s take a look at the pen again this garages and charges itself inside of the computer and when you’re ready to start writing you just pull it out and go to town on it this will of course detect the pen’s presence when it gets close to the screen and it looks like it’s picking it up about a half inch away from the display and that’s important because when you rest your wrist down you don’t want it picking up your wrist here as you’re writing it has 4096 pressure sensitivity levels so as you push down harder here you’ll get a darker line depending on the app and it feels pretty good i’m not seeing a lot of jitter to this the latency is pretty good it’s on par with other lenovo pens that i’ve looked at so very nice to have inside of here and of course you got a big 14 inch display to work with as well all right one last thing to take a look at and that is linux compatibility we’ve got ubuntu 21.0 loaded
up here everything seems to be detected properly including wi-fi video audio bluetooth so everything seems to be working just fine and it’s pretty snappy here just like it is on the windows side for the most part i also found that the pen is working too so if i get the pen close to the screen here it basically turns into a mouse input and once it gets within range of the screen it starts picking things up although it’s not able to repeat the same functions with my fingers here so i can’t scroll the screen for example but i can use the pen as a mouse so we may have to tweak the touch display here a little bit but overall it seems to be working just fine with linux so all together not a bad laptop here i think it’ll perform better again if you configure it with 16 gigs of ram and if you plan to do anything beyond the basics with it i would again suggest doing that because you’ll get much better performance out of it but if you’re just doing the basic stuff it’s a very attractive machine it performs well for the basics even with that single channel of memory although i do wish the display was a little bit nicer on it but other than that a very nicely well-built machine from lenovo and another thinkbook that i like quite a bit that’s going to do it for now until next time this is lon simon thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the lawn dot tv supporters including gold level supporters chris allegretta tom albrecht jim kalliger hot sauce and video games and brian parker if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to lawn dot tv support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
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