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