Lenovo Slim 7 Pro AMD Laptop Review

Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing

After several months, we are seeing AMD's Ryzen 7000 mobile processors make their way into many vendors' notebook and mini PC solutions. We had a peek at Ryzen 7000 mobile with the ASRock 4x4BOX earlier in the year with its 7735U CPU. Looking for more performance, we talked to Lenovo to see if they would be releasing the Ryzen HS or HX series into anything new, and luckily enough, they had one unit ready. The Slim 7 Pro is the company's latest slim for factor 14" notebook built for creativity, productivity, and perhaps some gaming.

Specifications

To get into the specifications of this machine, this is a 14" laptop chassis outfitted with a 90Hz 1600p touchscreen that has brightness up to 350nits. On the flip side, compute hardware includes the AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS CPU offering eight cores and sixteen threads, and this is paired with 16GB of DDR5 that is soldered to the motherboard. Further, we have NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050, complete with 6GB DDR6.

Further specifications offer connectivity in the form of two USB-C and one USB 3.2. Additional displays can be connected via the HDMI 2.1 jack and audio out via the 3.5mm jack. The MSRP of the Lenovo Slim 7 Pro with the above configuration comes in at $999 with a one-year warranty.

Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X Laptop: Ryzen 9 6900HS, RTX 3050, 32GB DDR5 RAM

	Today	Yesterday	7 days ago	30 days ago
	$1503.94	$1503.94	$1523.11	$1499.90	Buy
* Prices last scanned on 6/28/2023 at 10:34 pm CDT - prices may not be accurate, click links above for the latest price. We may earn an affiliate commission.

Notebook Overview

Lenovo Slim 7 Pro Overview

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The packaging for the Slim 7 Pro includes the white box above, Lenovo branded.

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Unboxing, we have the Slim 7 Pro, to this point looking and feeling like any other Lenovo system.

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The bottom offers full venting along the backside of the laptop. Two sets of rubber feet keep the unit off the desktop.

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The left side gives us the HDMI and both USB-C ports.

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The right side includes the USB-A port and 3.5mm audio jack. Further up, we find the power button.

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Opened up, we have a large trackpad offset to the left. The keyboard is centered in the chassis, with white backlighting.

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You can get a better look at the keyboard backlight by dimming our room lighting.

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Opening up Lenovo, we have the battery taking up the bottom half of the chassis. We have a dual fan cooling pipe, CPU, GPU, and memory under the black tape. We have the Wi-Fi module to the left and, to the right, the NVMe SSD.

BIOS/UEFI and Software

UEFI

The BIOS for the Slim 7 Pro offers mouse support with a friendly GUI. The main page provides insight into the hardware installed, including CPU, memory, and NVMe. The configuration menu includes support for networking, USB, display configuration, CPU power options, and Thunderbolt.

Further options include support for USB boot and keyboard mouse setup and power options such as Speedstep and c states. Security offers options for setting up fingerprints and passwords, memory protection, virtualization, and I/O ports.

Software

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The included software for the Slim Pro is called Vantage. From here, the initial screen offers warranty information on the right side with quick settings along the bottom.

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Moving into the software, we find information about the laptop, including the CPU, memory, and storage.

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Power settings will show you the status of the battery and its condition.

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Audio settings offer configuration on the integrated speakers and microphone.

System/CPU Benchmarks

Cinebench

Cinebench is a long-standing render benchmark that has been heavily relied upon by both Intel and AMD to highlight their newest platforms during unveils. The benchmark has two tests, a single-core workload that will utilize one thread or 1T. There is also a multi-threaded test that uses all threads or nT of a tested CPU.

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Getting started with R23, we picked up 1547 in single core and 12575 for multi-core.

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BAPCo CrossMark

CrossMark™ is an easy-to-run native cross-platform benchmark that measures overall system performance and responsiveness using real-world application models. CrossMark™ supports devices running Windows, iOS, and macOS platforms.

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CrossMark finished with a 1387 overall score.

AIDA64 Memory

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Memory throughput offered us 45K read, 51K write, and 51K copy. Latency was very high at 104ns.

PCMark

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PCMark Extended landed us a score of 6916 for the Slim 7 Pro, 8509 in gaming.

Geekbench 6

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Looking at Geekbench, we see 1990 single-core and 8841 multi-core

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Switching to GPU workloads, we picked up 41649 in OpenCL.

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Landed a score of 28351 for Vulkan.

3DMark and Comparisons

3DMark

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CPU Profile offered a single core score of 917 and a sixteen thread score of 5389.

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Looking at Speed Way, we picked up a score of 1001 from the RTX 3050.

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Storage landed this laptop at 351 MB/s bandwidth and a score of 2069.

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Above, we have the battery testing results. The Slim 7 Pro lasted a touch for over nine hours.

Charts

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With its 1547 single core score, the Slim 7 Pro is in the middle of the pack, just above the ASRock 4x4BOX.

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With nT, the Slim 7 Pro lands second in our charts to the Thinkpad Z16.

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CrossMark lands the Slim 7 Pro near the bottom of our charts.

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Looking at Geekbench scores, Slim has our second-best multi-core score to date.

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OpenCL and Vulkan, we get our best scores from the RTX 3050.

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CPU Profile shows the Slim towards the middle of the pack, just above last year's Yoga 9i.

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If we look at storage, this score will land the Slim Pro once again in the middle of the pack.

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Battery life lands the Slim 7 Pro as the third-best laptop we have tested.

Value and Final Thoughts

Value

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With value, the Slim 7 Pro did remarkably well, scoring 98.3%, and it represents one of the best values for money in recent memory.

Final Thoughts

The Slim 7 Pro is a relatively solid laptop and remarkably one of the cheapest solutions we have tested. Best Buy has a stranglehold on this model, as I could not find it anywhere else, including Lenovo's site.

The Slim was quite good to use. The keyboard feels cheaper than something you would find with a Thinkpad, while the trackpad is oversized and offers a tactile click. The backlighting is all standard, white being the only color available, and it's either on or off. At 14", the screen was quite good, nothing like the OLED or mini-LED we see on higher-end models, but the colors seemed sharp and on point, while the blacks were a bit washed.

Testing this device, performance was hit and miss. I expected the 7735HS to offer more power than it did in reality. In some cases, we were barely beating up on its U-series counterpart. Single-thread benchmarks like R23, Geekbench, and CPU Profile all showed subpar performance from the Ryzen CPU, though bumping over to multi-thread gave us some relatively solid numbers.

12575 in R23 was our second-best, and 8841 with Geekbench was the second-best. On the flip, running this unit through several gaming benchmarks, we did pick up a Speed Way score of 1001, which is good for 100+ FPS in Fortnite and 40+ in Battlefield V, leaving hope this could be a dual-purpose machine to some degree.

The software and BIOS are both basic solutions, with the software side offering a bit more control over the laptop and keeping track of the device's warranty status, battery life, and keeping your operating system up to date. The BIOS, on the other hand, doesn't have too many options to configure. Lenovo does offer the ability to enable or disable the onboard graphics, along with a few options for power.