Lenovo Slim Pro 9i (2023) review

Lenovo’s top-tier Slim Professional and Yoga laptops have come into their very own in recent times, delivering top-notch efficiency alongside wonderful design. The brand new Slim Professional 9i as soon as once more ups the ante for Lenovo’s opponents, pairing a 14-core Intel processor with Nvidia RTX graphics and a Mini-LED show. Let’s get into it.

The Lenovo Slim Professional 9i packs Intel’s Core i7-13705H, a uncommon different to the Intel Core i7-13700H. The 2 processors share the identical core rely, clock velocity, and most energy draw. The Core i7-13705H lacks vPro, nevertheless, and it’s bodily smaller. 

Lenovo additionally delivers a Mini-LED show with an uncommon 3072×1920 decision. It’s an alternative choice to the OLED shows which can be widespread amongst opponents. The Mini-LED show quotes an especially excessive most brightness of 1,200 nits in HDR, a lot larger than the 400 to 600 nits of typical LED and OLED shows.

It is available in at a hefty, however comprehensible beginning value of $1,899 and you should buy it from Lenovo in addition to BestBuy. The UK retailer says ‘Out there Quickly’ on the time of writing.

Design & Construct

Lenovo’s Slim Professional 9i retains the good-looking, refined design widespread to high-end Lenovo laptops. Its metallic-gunmetal colorway and lack of apparent aptitude makes for an earthly first impression. Look nearer, although, and the laptop computer’s benefits change into apparent. The usage of rounded edges throughout the laptop computer’s perimeter makes for a pleasant, inviting really feel. Materials high quality is great, as effectively. Each the decrease and higher half really feel sturdy in-hand.

The Slim Professional 9i is a bit thick, although, measuring as much as 8.5 inches thick and practically 13 inches broad. The Apple MacBook Professional 14, Lenovo Yoga 9i, Razer Blade 14, and Acer Swift X 14 are much less voluminous. Lenovo retains the Slim Professional 9i’s weight in verify, although, because it ideas the scales at simply 3.7 kilos. Don’t get me fallacious, although: the Lenovo isn’t large and can slot in most backpacks and messenger luggage with out concern. 

There’s a pair design quirks to notice. The Slim Professional 9i has a digicam bump-out above the show which homes the 1440p webcam and IR digicam. The laptop computer’s show lid can be a tad thicker than standard (because of the Mini-LED show). Thankfully, neither quirk turns into a problem in day-to-day use. 

Keyboard & Trackpad

IDG / Matthew Smith

A cushty keyboard greets anybody who makes use of the Lenovo Slim Professional 9i. It offers a spacious, typical format that feels instantly acquainted. A numpad isn’t included (which is typical for a 14-inch laptop computer), so the keyboard stays centered above the touchpad. 

Keys activate with prolonged journey and a agency bottoming motion that gives good tactile suggestions. It’s a quiet keyboard, too: personally, I favor a bit extra click on, however your mileage might differ. The general expertise is superior to Apple’s MacBook Professional 14 and Razer’s Blade 14. 

A girthy touchpad consumes a lot of the true property beneath the keyboard’s spacebar. It responds shortly to enter and offers ample house for home windows multi-touch gestures. The dimensions of the touchpad meant my palms usually partially rested on its floor, but I had no points with unintended mouse enter. Apple’s MacBook Professional touchpads stay the gold normal for laptops, however the Slim Professional 9i’s touchpad is pretty much as good because it will get on Home windows machines.

Show & Audio

IDG / Matthew Smith

The Lenovo Slim Professional 9i’s specs are spectacular, however its finest function is the one you’ll see most frequently: the Mini-LED touchscreen. It delivers extraordinary efficiency that leaves OLED within the mud. 

Let’s speak luminance. The Slim Professional 9i can attain a peak brightness of 548 nits in SDR mode and an outlandish 1145 nits in HDR mode. That’s a bit lower than the claimed peak of 600 nits and 1,200 nits, respectively, however I’m not going to complain. Razer’s Blade 16 and Apple’s MacBook Professional 14 and 16, which even have a Mini-LED show, are the one laptops that ship comparable efficiency.

Brightness is beneficial when utilizing the laptop computer in a vivid room or in a setting the place you may not have management over the lighting, like an airport foyer. Nonetheless, the Slim Professional 9i’s unimaginable brilliance can be helpful in HDR video games and films. I used to be amazed by the element and punch delivered in Prime Gun: Maverick. The solar shone intensely over Maverick’s shoulders and its reflections glittered via micro-scratches within the cockpit. OLED has its perks, however it might’t hope to match the Slim Professional 9i’s cinematic immersion. 

The Slim Professional 9i does effectively in distinction. It achieves an infinite distinction ratio in HDR content material, and in SDR when the show was used at a low stage of brightness. This happens as a result of the Mini-LED show can obtain an ideal minimal brightness of zero nits when displaying darkish content material. The distinction ratio isn’t infinite when SDR is considered at a extra affordable 50 to 100% brightness, however nonetheless hits a powerful distinction ratio of 5070:1. 

Shade efficiency is nice, too. The Slim Professional 9i can show 100% of sRGB, 97 % of DCI-P3, and 87 % of AdobeRGB, all with strong coloration accuracy. It does fall a tad behind OLED: the Acer Swift X 14’s show hit 100% of DCI-P3 and 94 % of AdobeRGB. Nonetheless, the Slim Professional 9i has a vivid, punchy image. 

Sharpness is great, because the laptop computer’s uncommon 3072 x 1920 decision packs nearly 250 pixels per inch (a 27-inch 4K monitor has 163 pixels per inch). Movement readability is nice, too, due to the show’s 165Hz refresh price. 

Downsides? Whereas the Mini-LED’s HDR efficiency is nice, it’s solely out there when the laptop computer is plugged in. However even this isn’t actually a criticism, as a result of the identical is true of practically all laptops that help HDR.

Lenovo helps the Slim Professional 9i’s wonderful visuals with beefy four-speaker audio. It contains important bass that properly fills within the low finish. That, in flip, offers house for the mid and higher vary, which avoids the muddy or metallic sound widespread to most laptops. Most quantity is excessive, too, so the laptop computer can properly fill an workplace with sound. I’m unsure it’s fairly pretty much as good as Lenovo’s Yoga 9i nevertheless it beats most 14-inch Home windows laptops I’ve tried not too long ago, and stands toe-to-toe with Apple’s MacBook Professional 14. 

Webcam, Microphone, & Biometrics

Lenovo goes all-in on the webcam. It has a most decision of 1440p and contains an IR sensor for compatibility with Home windows Good day facial recognition login (a fingerprint reader isn’t out there). The webcam’s excessive decision delivers an especially crisp picture, particularly in good lighting, and coloration replica seems pure in most conditions. Picture high quality stays unimpressive in dim lighting, however that’s true for all laptop computer webcams. 

Microphone high quality is great, too, due to a four-microphone array that picks up clear, crisp dialogue and removes most quiet to reasonable background noise. The microphone array was in a position to decide up my voice even after I moved my head back and forth or barely conscious from the laptop computer. 

Connectivity

IDG / Matthew Smith

As talked about earlier, the Slim Professional 9i is a bit thick for a 14-inch laptop computer. It places that thickness to good use with a mixture of future-proof and legacy connectivity.

Fashionable units can connect with the laptop computer’s Thunderbolt 4 / USB4 port or the USB-C 3.2 port, each of which dot the laptop computer’s left flank. Each ports help DisplayPort Alternate Mode and USB Energy Supply, as effectively, to allow them to be used to attach an exterior USB-C show or energy the laptop computer with the included 140-watt energy adapter. 

Older peripherals are dealt with by a pair of USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports on the precise flank. An HDMI 2.1 port, SD card reader, and three.5mm combo audio jack spherical out the choices. It’s an especially robust choice that gives a bonus over opponents that focus solely on Thunderbolt 4 and USB-C.

Wi-fi connectivity is great, too, with help for Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.1. That is typical for many laptops bought in 2023, however good to see all the identical. 

Specs & Efficiency

The Lenovo Slim Professional 7, which I reviewed earlier this yr, was already a little bit of a powerhouse for a 14-inch machine. But Lenovo ups the ante with the Slim Professional 9i, which packs an Intel Core i7-13705H processor that has a complete of 14 cores (six efficiency cores and eight environment friendly cores). It upgrades from Nvidia RTX 3050 graphics to the brand new Nvidia RTX 4050, too. 

These upgrades place the Slim Professional 9i alongside different 14-inch efficiency laptops, such because the Acer Swift X 14, however a tad behind essentially the most highly effective options, like Razer’s Blade 14. 

IDG / Matthew Smith

PCMark 10, a holistic system benchmark, places the Lenovo Slim Professional 9i off to a powerful begin. It scored 6,864 mixed, which defeats many laptops that present comparable {hardware} in a slim or small design. The Acer Swift X 14 and Lenovo Slim Professional 7 each lag behind. Samsung’s Galaxy Book3 Extremely is high canine on this check, nevertheless it’s a considerably bigger laptop computer.

IDG / Matthew Smith

Cinebench R15, a multi-core CPU check, is much less favorable to the Slim Professional 9i. It offers an affordable rating of 1,979 however lands fairly far behind the Acer Swift X 14 and Samsung Galaxy Guide 3 Extremely. 

It’s an fascinating outcome which underscores the distinction between the Intel Core i7-13705H and the Core i7-13700H. They’re extraordinarily comparable on paper, however they don’t carry out equally in the true world. The Core i7-13705H is at a drawback right here. 

IDG / Matthew Smith

Handbrake, one other CPU-heavy benchmark, confirms that outcome. The Lenovo Slim Professional 9i is the slowest of all laptops used for comparability, falling behind even the AMD Ryzen 7735HS within the older Lenovo Slim Professional 7.

The Slim Professional 9i’s CPU efficiency isn’t unhealthy, nevertheless it doesn’t impress. Actually, it struggles to face out even when in comparison with the AMD Ryzen 7735HS, a processor with fewer cores and a decrease most clock velocity. That’s not an awesome outcome for Intel, which continues to look lackluster subsequent to much less power-hungry AMD Ryzen 7000-series processors.

IDG / Matthew Smith

Thankfully, the Slim Professional 9i has a secret weapon: the Nvidia RTX 4050 GPU.

The Nvidia RTX 4050 doesn’t look intimidating on a spec sheet. It’s Nvidia’s least performant RTX 40-series GPU, in any case. Nonetheless, Lenovo offers an RTX 4050 with a most graphics energy of 80 watts. That’s an enormous enchancment over opponents just like the Acer Swift X 14, which limits the RTX 4050 to a most graphics energy of fifty watts.

It reveals in 3DMark Time Spy, the place the Slim Professional 9i delivers a formidable rating of seven,236. That’s a greater than 20 % enchancment over the Acer Swift X 14, and greater than 35 % faster than the Slim Professional 7 with Nvidia RTX 4050.

IDG / Matthew Smith

An analogous enchancment is present in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the place the Slim Professional 9i offers one other roughly 25 % enchancment over the Acer Aspire X 14. That places the Slim Professional 9i at a powerful 100 frames per second at 1080p decision and the sport’s Highest element preset. 

IDG / Matthew Smith

The Slim Professional 9i continues to do effectively in Metro Exodus, which we examined at 1080p decision and Excessive element. Its lead is decreased to only a few frames, nevertheless, offering a much more slender benefit than in Tomb Raider. Reminiscence could also be a problem: although it might eat extra energy, the Lenovo’s RTX 4050 stays restricted to 6GB of VRAM.

I wrapped up testing with Cyberpunk 2077, which affords an instance of ray-traced efficiency in motion. The sport averaged 58 frames per second at 1080p decision and Extremely element (with AMD FSR 2.0 on). Switching on the ray-traced Extremely preset decreased that to only 16 frames per second, however Nvidia DLSS 3 lifted efficiency again to a playable 50 frames per second. It’s additionally a tad higher than the Acer Swift X 14, which achieved 46 frames per second on this state of affairs.

Battery Life

The Slim Professional 9i packs a 75 watt-hour battery into its thick chassis. That’s a pretty big battery for many laptops, however the Slim Professional 9i’s CPU and GPU put it to the check—and discover it wanting.

Our normal battery life check, which loops a 4K file of the quick movie Tears of Metal, drained the battery in seven hours and 47 minutes. That’s a usable outcome, and definitely higher than the disappointing Acer Swift X 14. 

Nonetheless, this result’s unlikely to impress street warriors in search of all-day battery life. The older Slim Professional 7 was a more sensible choice for marathon periods and a few bigger laptops, just like the Samsung Galaxy Book3 Extremely and Asus Vivobook Professional 16X OLED, outlast the Slim Professional 9i.

Do you have to purchase the Lenovo Slim Professional 9i?

The Lenovo Slim Professional 9i is a powerful laptop computer with a superb Mini-LED show, a robust 100-watt model of Nvidia RTX 4050 graphics, and wonderful connectivity. Intel’s Core i7-13705H lets the laptop computer down, because it fails to ship a major enchancment over the cheaper Lenovo Slim Professional 7. That wound is worsened by the Slim Professional 9i’s MSRP, which is larger than options with superior CPU efficiency. Nonetheless, the Slim Professional 9i is a simple advice for individuals who care extra about GPU than CPU efficiency. It’s additionally a incredible selection should you regularly view HDR films and video games in your laptop computer. 

On the lookout for extra choices? Try our roundup of the perfect laptops out there at present.

This overview initially appeared on PCWorld.

Specs

• CPU: Intel Core i7-13705H
• Reminiscence: 32GB LPDDR5 6400 MHz
• Graphics/GPU: Nvidia RTX 4050
• Show: 3072×1920 165Hz Mini-LED touchscreen
• Storage: 1TB strong state drive
• Webcam: 1440p with digital privateness shutter
• Connectivity: 1x USB-C 3.2, 1x Thunderbolt 4 / USB 4, 2x USB 3.2, 1x HDMI 2.1, 1x card reader, 1x 3.5mm combo audio jack 
• Networking: Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.1
• Biometrics: Home windows Good day facial recognition
• Battery capability: 75 watt-hour
• Dimensions: 12.9 x 9.64 x 0.85 inches
• Weight: 3.7 kilos