Sunday, June 12, 2016

Lenovo Yoga 900 - A lean beast to reckon with



So I was sent a Yoga 900 as a Christmas gift last year and also to take some time to use and review it. Before that in spring 2015 I was given an opportunity to work with its older sibling, the Yoga3pro – part of the multimedia centric – Ultrabook laptops. I used both laptops – The Yoga3pro through spring 2016 and the Yoga 900 post-Christmas. 

I do not want to compare both of these models right now because the Yoga3pro is no longer available at the Lenovo shop. What I do want to share is how worthwhile the newer Yoga900 is .
When it comes to aesthetics, it is almost similar in size to its predecessor, save the thickness because of the CPU which is more powerful when compared to the previous core m on the Yoga3pro 



The System which I obtained had the following specs
Intel i7 6500U with 2.50 Ghz, can be clocked to 3.01 Ghz with Turbo boost
16 GB RAM
256 GB SSD
Windows 10 Home 

The best part about the Yoga 900 is the watch band based hinge, similar to the Yoga3pro. It provides a sturdy and a nice feel to the laptop when it is being swirled between the tablet and the tent mode. 

I would say it is on the unique selling points of the system. To start with there is a brand new logo on the top. As with the previous yoga models, it can be changed into various “modes” namely Stand, Tent, Tablet and Laptop. More information about this can be found in my earlier article. 


The screen has a nice 13.3 inches QHD IPS screen.  A great resource to use Netflix and YouTube in High Definition.  The color reproduction looks great most of the time and the only problem I see is that application scaling, where the menus seemed to be garbled or overlapped – this is not a problem with the laptop per se, but the software vendor who still don’t provide Hdpi support to their apps. 


I have not ran all the synthetic benchmarks like others, but what  I did was, pushing the laptop to the limits – by incrementally increasing the workload on the CPU,GPU and memory and see how the system handles it.
So to run the test I installed Intel’s  GPU Analyzer to check out average CPU, GPU load . The test run was for 2152 seconds and this is what I got in the end 


The memory benchmark also resulted in strong performance. The test was run to check the average memory throughput. The i7 combined with the generous 16 gigs of ram is obviously doing a very good job.  To give an idea about much this machine could handle, the test environment I used included 4 YouTube videos running in IE 10 in full HD, One HD video on the windows media player, transferring 72gigs of data from an external hard disk to the system and also on top of that, running an instance of SQL Server 2016 which was executing a set of lengthy stored procedures. I won’t say that this is a generic environment which will apply to everyone, but in my case this is what I do while I use the Yoga 900.
The end results
1)      GPU was busy at 59% on average
2)      Overall Usage of GPU in Average 18%
3)      Aggregated CPU load was 41.85%
4)      Average GPU Frequency was 356 Mhz


To check whether my conclusion about the CPU and GPU were correct, I wanted to take a second opinion, so ran a couple of more tests on the user benchmark tool. The results were not surprising. It compliments my own tests with positive results

Lenovo has created a formidable Multimedia Ultra book which performance very formidably! . This has been one the of the best machines from Lenovo I have used till date, and  explore ways in which I can use to the fullest of its potential