This Lightweight AMD Laptop Is Great for Creatives

One of the major highlights of this machine is its screen. This 14.5-inch display crams in 2,560 x 1,600 pixels, making it 2.5K resolution. It’s touch capable, though I still haven’t found much use for touch on a laptop. More interesting is the 90-Hz refresh rate, which isn’t quite enough to make hardcore gamers happy (if that’s you, the Slim Pro 7 X is the machine you want, with its 144-Hz refresh rate), but it makes everything else quite smooth. The screen has a 16:10 ratio, giving you a little more height than the more common 16:9. It doesn’t sound like much, but I find it helpful when browsing the web. It also makes the preview panel in video editors a bit larger.

Speaking of editing video, I did, and the Slim Pro 7 handled it quite well. I used both Blender on Windows and Kdenlive on Linux. I had to enable GPU support in Kdenlive before I saw much performance boost, but in the end I was able to render out 5 minutes of 5.2K footage in just over 12 minutes. For reference, my Lenovo X14 with an 6000 series AMD Ryzen 7 takes over 30 minutes to render the same footage. The main difference? The dedicated graphics card.

You don’t need to edit video to appreciate the performance here, but if you aren’t editing video or doing other GPU-intensive tasks this might be a bit of overkill for your needs. At the same time, the slower screen refresh rate means this isn’t the best option for mobile gaming, though it would no doubt serve the casual gamer playing Stardew Valley.

Good Ports, Bad Camera

Good video performance like this often means poor battery life, but that’s not the case here. Lenovo has packed in a 73-watt-hour battery that manages to get about seven hours of battery life in real-world use. That number will come down the more time you spend editing video, but it’s still very impressive for a laptop with these specs. Suffice it to say that for casual use you can just about eke out a day’s work, but if you’re headed to the coffee shop to edit video, bring the charger. I should also note that the charger, while rather large for a laptop charger these days, does indeed juice up the battery very quickly. Lenovo says you can get three hours of battery life off a 15-minute charge, a claim that held up in my testing.