Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 Review

Introduction

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 updates its longstanding line of excellent all-round ultrabooks with quite a boost in power.

The headline here is Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X2 Elite SoC that touts a large boost in overall power against the original model, which comes alongside 32GB of RAM and a generous 2TB SSD in my sample. That comes built around a fetching blue metal chassis with a 14-inch 3K 120Hz OLED screen and large 70Whr battery.

It all sounds very promising, although Lenovo has quite the competition to overcome with its latest model. The Asus Zenbook A14 (2026) has a similar spec sheet and has been out and about for a few weeks, while there’s also the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI and of course the Apple MacBook Air M5 to worry about. Prices start at £1050/$1199 for a Snapdragon X2 Plus-equipped base model, with my tricked out sample costing £1669.99/$1899.99, making things very interesting indeed.

I’ve been putting the Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 through its paces for the last couple of weeks to see if it’s one of the best laptops we’ve tested.

Design and Keyboard

• Gorgeous and sturdy construction
• Meagre port selection
• Responsive keyboard and trackpad

One area about the Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 I’m both relieved and surprised that hasn’t shifted too much is its overall design. I like the dark blue finish it retains, plus a metal chassis that provides a quality finish. If you’re after a Windows laptop that looks like a midnight blue MacBook Air, then this is a dead cert.

At 1.17kg, it’s quite light for a 14-inch laptop, and its compact form factor makes it especially easy to carry around. I am splitting hairs a little bit, but it isn’t quite as light as the Asus Zenbook A14 (2026) and Acer Swift Edge 14 AI, both of which push towards the sub-1kg mark, and you can feel it when you pick the laptop up.

The Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 is just 13.9mm thick, which makes it slender and svelte, but has the unintended consequence of reducing its port selection down. We’ve got three USB4-capable Type-C ports in total, with two on the left and one on the right. It’s modern and fast, but a bit too one-dimensional. 

This comes at a time when Asus’ rival is slightly thinner at 13.3mm, and manages to pack in a pair of USB-C ports, a full-size HDMI, a USB-A port and a 3.5mm headphone jack. As I said then, the Zenbook A14 (2026) is more Pro than Air, and it’s clear to see which side Lenovo has opted for.

The Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 excels with its keyboard in typical Lenovo fashion, though. It’s a quiet, tactile scissor-actuated offering with Lenovo’s typical deep-dish keycaps that feel brilliant to use for extended periods, while its bright white legends are big and easy to read. The smaller form factor is fine, too, while its white underglow backlighting provides vibrancy for after-dark working.

As for the trackpad, it’s got a glossy, smooth texture to it in a similar vein to a lot of modern ultrabooks, while it’s also quite large for a laptop of its size, providing your fingers with a lot of real estate.

Display and Sound

• A couple of different screen choices
• Excellent brightness, contrast and black level
• Surprisingly competent speakers

Lenovo is offering the Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 with a couple of different display variants, both of them OLED, and both of them 14-inches in size.

The base model comes with a 1920×1200 resolution 60Hz touch-enabled panel, while the higher-end variant I have ups the resolution to 2880×1800 (or 3K), the refresh rate to 120Hz and its rated peak brightness. Weirdly, though, it eschews touch capabilities but retains a lay-flat hinge for collaborative working.

In practice, though, it’s a capable screen with deep blacks and lovely contrast, as measured by my colorimeter. Here, I measured a 0.03 black level and 17250:1 contrast ratio. A 6700K colour temperature is also right where it should be.

We’re also seeing sharp brightness, with a measured peak SDR of 480.2 nits, making it a capable panel for indoor and outdoor work, while also helping displayed images pop, given the black level and contrast ratio results. Lenovo also touts this screen to offer up to 1000 nits of HDR brightness alongside DisplayHDR 1000 True Black certification.

The Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11’s panel also impresses with its excellent colours. I saw perfect 100% coverage of both the sRGB and DCI-P3 spaces, plus an excellent 92% coverage of the trickier Adobe RGB gamut. This makes this screen suitable for productivity and more colour-sensitive workloads alike.

Lenovo has opted for an upward-firing four-speaker array for this laptop, with two woofers and two tweeters. This helps to provide a full and quite rich sound for a set of laptop drivers with decent mids and good volume.

Performance

• Beefier Snapdragon X2 Elite processor
• Improved integrated graphics
• Capacious RAM and SSD arrangement

Lenovo’s last Yoga Slim 7x laptop I tested came with one of Qualcomm’s first-gen Snapdragon laptop SoCs, and it’s arguably inside where the biggest gains have been made with this latest model.

For 2026, the Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 I have is supplied with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X2 Elite processor, the second-in-command to the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme. There are two variants of this processor available to manufacturers, with 12-core and 18-core options – the variant I have ships with the latter. For the base model, Lenovo is also offering the Snapdragon X2 Plus, which we haven’t tested just yet.

The difference between this chip and the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme you’ll find in the likes of the Asus Zenbook A16 (2026) appears to be clock speeds, with this chip rated for a max boost clock across single or dual cores of 4.7GHz (against the Elite Extreme’s 5GHz) and a max multi-core frequency of 3.4GHz (against the Elite Extreme’s 3.6GHz).

Qualcomm is touting major gains in both single and multi-core performance with this new 18-core chip, which I’d certainly wager is true in comparing it to laptops with the Snapdragon X Elite chip.

As you’d expect, the numbers here aren’t quite as strong as with the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme SoC, but the difference is only a few percentage points in the synthetic benchmarks in real terms. It is much the same story, though, with especially high single-core scores in Geekbench 6 that push this laptop into Apple Silicon territory for comparison, plus much-improved multi-core scores, too. 

The improvements in Cinebench R23 are slightly more modest and peg this laptop back a smidgen, but there are nonetheless some substantial improvements to be proud of in synthetic terms against the original Snapdragon X Elite chip.

There is also a major improvement to the Adreno iGPU with the Snapdragon X2 Elite, which provided a doubling in the 3DMark Time Spy test and brings it more into line with more recent iGPUs fitted to x86-based laptop chips from Intel and AMD. 

My sample of the Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 came quite a generous RAM and storage configuration, with 32GB of fast DDR5 RAM provided and a hefty 2TB SSD. In testing, it also proves to be a brisk PCIe Gen 4 option, with reads and writes of 7144.32 MB/s and 6721.86 MB/s, respectively.

Software

• Clean Windows 11 install with Copilot+ PC AI smarts
• Minimal Lenovo-specific software
• Small compatibility issues, being Arm-based

For its software situation, the Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 comes with a reasonably clean Windows 11 install with minimal pre-installed apps, including McAfee antivirus. There are some Lenovo-specific system apps here, including the catch-all system app Lenovo Vantage in the taskbar, but that’s about it.

There is also enough AI horsepower from the Snapdragon X2 Elite chip inside to mark this laptop as a Copilot+ PC, providing access to Microsoft’s AI functionality for generative powers and filters in the Photos and Paint app, as well as the clever Windows Studio webcam effects for background blurring, auto framing and maintaining eye contact. With the latest version of Windows 11, there is also the controversial Microsoft Recall feature.

Being Arm-based, the Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11, also has the problem of having minor issues with some compatibility.

This is because Windows is traditionally run on x86-based systems, so to work on Arm, apps have had to be translated through Microsoft’s Prism translation software. For the most part, I had little in the way of issues with compatibility in running a range of benchmark software, as well as Photoshop and similar apps. Qualcomm has also worked with lots of brands to increase overall app compatibility with its latest Arm-based laptop chips against the original run from last year. 

As with other Arm-based Windows laptops I’ve looked at, the PCMark 10 benchmark app doesn’t run fully, but that’s an issue we’ve seen on other Arm-based Windows systems

Battery Life

• Lasted for 19 hours 42 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for two to three working days

Lenovo has put a hefty 70Whr battery inside the Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11, which, combined with the excellent efficiency that these Qualcomm chips have traditionally yielded, should result in some fantastic battery life.

In dialling the brightness down to the requisite 150 nits and running a video loop test in PCMark 10, this Lenovo laptop lasted for 19 hours and 42 minutes – that’s just about enough for three working days with some hypermiling. For reference, that’s one of the best results I’ve seen in recent times, matching the likes of the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI and the Asus Zenbook A14 (2025). The new Zenbook A14 (2026) is nearly three hours ahead, though, and uses the same SoC as this Lenovo choice.

The Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 comes with a reasonably compact 65W charger that’s also quite fast at getting charge back into the laptop. It took around 40 minutes to get it back to 50%, while a full charge took 75 minutes or so.

Should you buy it?

FAQs