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Sep 18, 2023

Lenovo Slim Pro 7 Gen 8 (2023) Review

At 3.5 pounds, the Lenovo Slim Pro 7 Gen 8 ($1,199.99) is half a pound over the line for an ultraportable, but still certainly a light and easy-to-carry laptop. With its Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 GPU,

At 3.5 pounds, the Lenovo Slim Pro 7 Gen 8 ($1,199.99) is half a pound over the line for an ultraportable, but still certainly a light and easy-to-carry laptop. With its Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 GPU, it's no match for all-out gaming rigs, but far more suited for occasional gaming than most business slimlines are, thanks in part to a video- and motion-friendly 90Hz screen refresh rate instead of the vanilla 60Hz. This 14.5-inch notebook is a first-class choice for creative apps as well as everyday productivity, but its display, while handsome, sticks with IPS technology when you can find more vivid OLED screens in the same price range.

Lenovo's website describes the Slim series as having "sophisticated design featuring premium processing, visuals, and sound to boost all your ambitions," but you can't buy a Slim Pro 7 there. Our $1,199.99 test unit is a Best Buy exclusive and apparently the only configuration (though an online spec sheet mentions a 3K alternative to our 2.5K screen), with an eight-core, 16-thread AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB PCIe solid-state drive.

The 6GB GeForce RTX 3050 graphics processor drives a 2,560-by-1,600-pixel touch screen with 16:10 aspect ratio surrounded by slim bezels (Lenovo claims a 91.4% screen-to-body ratio). A slight bump in the top bezel holds a face recognition webcam for Windows Hello logins (there's no fingerprint reader) and makes it easy to open the lid with one hand.

Clad in dark Storm Gray aluminum, the Slim Pro 7 measures 0.61 by 12.8 by 8.9 inches, a bit bulkier than the Editors' Choice award-winning HP Pavilion Plus 14 (0.72 by 12.3 by 8.8 inches) as well as a bit heavier. The HP is 3.09 pounds, the same weight as the 14-inch Acer Swift 3 OLED. Lenovo says the Slim has passed MIL-STD 810H torture tests against travel hazards like shock, vibration, and extreme temperatures; there's almost no flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck.

The laptop's left side holds an HDMI monitor port and two USB Type-C ports with DisplayPort functionality—one USB4 and one USB 3.2, either suitable for the AC adapter. There's a USB 3.2 Type-A port on the right, along with an audio jack, the power button, and a webcam security toggle switch. Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth are standard.

Like other Lenovos, the Slim Pro 7 bolsters Windows 11 Home with a variety of pre-installed apps and utilities. They include Lenovo Vantage, which combines system monitoring and updates, display color temperature and blue light settings, noise cancellation, Wi-Fi security, as well as cooling and network priority options that can tweak performance for selected apps. In-app upgrades include $29.99 Smart Performance optimization and $49.99 Smart Lock antitheft annual subscriptions. The Lenovo Voice app combines spoken commands with language translation, subtitles, and transcription.

Besides working with Windows Hello for touchless login and locking the system if you walk away, the webcam offers 1080p resolution, instead of lowball 720p resolution. It captures well-lit and colorful images with hardly any noise or static.

The keyboard lands in Lenovo's second tier instead of joining ThinkPads in the top rank, because it commits the two common sins of lacking real Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys—those functions pair the Fn and cursor arrow keys—and arranging said arrow keys in a clumsy row instead of the correct inverted T. We'll never know why laptop vendors are OK with hard-to-hit, half-size up and down arrows stacked between full-size left and right.

On the positive side, the keyboard has bright backlighting and a snappy, comfortable typing feel. A good-sized, buttonless touchpad glides and taps easily and takes just the right amount of pressure for a quiet click.

Speakers flanking the keyboard pump out fairly loud and clear sound, though with some boom or echo at high volume. Bass is minimal, as almost always is the case on laptops, but highs and mid-tones are clear and you can make out overlapping tracks. Dolby Access software provides dynamic, movie, music, game, and voice presets and an equalizer.

The 2,560-by-1,600-pixel touch screen is nicely bright (though it darkens rapidly as you tap the backlight dimmer key to save battery power), with good contrast and wide viewing angles. Colors don't exactly pop but are vivid and well saturated, and fine details look sharp with no pixelation around the edges of letters. White backgrounds are clean instead of dingy, helped by the ability to tilt the screen as far back as you like.

In addition to the above-mentioned utilities, the Slim comes with a 30-day McAfee trial, three months of Amazon Music, and six months of Dropbox. To bolster the one-year warranty, the company offers a year of accidental damage protection for $19.02 and onsite support for $72.14. Best Buy says the laptop also comes with a two-month Adobe Creative Cloud membership, though I didn't see it in the Start menu.

For our benchmark charts, we pitted the 14.5-inch Lenovo against four other 14-inch slimlines. The above-mentioned Acer Swift 3 and HP Pavilion Plus 14 offer snazzy OLED screens at prices barely above the Slim Pro 7's. The Dell Inspiron 14 2-in-1 is a convertible in the same price ballpark, while the HP Pavilion Laptop 14 is a more economical choice at about $800 (with an Intel Core i5 instead of Core i7 or AMD Ryzen 7 CPU).

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage.

Three other benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while HandBrake 1.4 is an open-source video transcoder we use to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). Primate Labs' Geekbench simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning.

Finally, we test systems' content-creation chops with workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, an automated extension to Adobe's Creative Cloud image editor that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated tasks ranging from opening, rotating, and resizing an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The Slim Pro 7 acquitted itself admirably, taking the gold medal in Photoshop and PCMark 10—though all five laptops breezed past the 4,000 points that indicate excellent productivity for everyday office tasks—and holding its own in the CPU tests.

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).

We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

These benchmarks were no contest, with the Lenovo's GeForce RTX 3050 the only discrete GPU in the group. The RTX 3050 was never near the top of Nvidia's silicon ladder, but it's still miles ahead of Intel's integrated graphics. The Slim doesn't pretend to be a gaming laptop, but it can certainly handle casual games and some esports titles with aplomb, and AAA games at 1080p if you kick down some settings.

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

The Lenovo showed great unplugged stamina, outlasting the Dell by an hour as the only two systems to break the 12-hour mark. Its IPS screen outshone those of the Inspiron and the inexpensive Pavilion, but the Swift and Pavilion Plus flaunted superior color coverage and extra brightness and contrast due to their OLED technology.

We would have given the Slim Pro 7 even higher marks, but our verdict changed halfway through our testing, because the Slim Pro 7's initial $999.99 price at Best Buy turned out to be a sale with the true tag $200 higher—i.e., a near match for the HP Pavilion Plus 14, which is lighter and has a more dazzling, higher-resolution OLED display. At the lower price, the Lenovo is a winning combination of above-average CPU and GPU performance for users of more demanding content creation apps rather than just Microsoft 365, so it's well worth hoping for another sale.

Lenovo's Slim Pro 7 is an high-performing, near-lightweight laptop with an Nvidia GPU, punchy Ryzen processing, and a relatively roomy 14.5-inch screen. It packs lots of appeal, though photo and video pros may prefer a unit with an OLED display.

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