Lenovo Slim Pro 7 14 (2023) Laptop Review

The Lenovo Slim Pro 7 14 AMD has a simple, sleek design that fits well in most professional environments. It has a full aluminum chassis with rounded edges, thin, under-glass bezels, and a large glass touchpad. Instead of an inward notch like recent Apple MacBooks, there's a small lip at the top of the display to house the camera and provide a place to hold onto when opening the laptop. There are four speakers: two on each side of the keyboard and two more on the bottom near the front. The air vents are on the bottom and the back of the laptop. You can only get this laptop in the Storm Gray color.

The Lenovo Slim Pro 7's build quality is excellent. Its all-aluminum chassis feels sturdy, exhibiting little to no flex on the keyboard deck, lid, and display. The finish feels premium and doesn't easily scratch or pick up fingerprints. The weight doesn't feel as evenly balanced as on a MacBook, like the Apple MacBook Air 15 (2023), but it's still excellent. The feet are solid and adhere firmly to the bottom of the laptop.

The hinge is okay. It feels smooth when opening and closing the lid, and it has a wide range, which can be handy when you need to share something with someone sitting opposite you. It's very stable, so there's very little wobble, even when typing aggressively. It's possible to open the laptop with one hand, but only to 90 degrees—you need two hands to go past that because the resistance increases significantly.

The Lenovo Slim Pro 7 and its power adapter are compact and lightweight.

The Lenovo Slim Pro 7 14's serviceability is mediocre. Accessing the internals is easy; you only need to remove six screws and undo the clips holding the bottom panel with a prying tool. The clips require some effort to undo, and make sure you keep the screws organized, as they're of two different sizes. The RAM isn't user-replaceable, but the SSD is. The SSD slot supports M.2 2242 and 2280 SSDs.

You can see the maintenance manual here.

• Lenovo Slim Pro 7 laptop
• 140W USB-C power adapter and cord
• Documentation

The Lenovo Slim Pro 7 14 is available with the following displays:

• 14.5" IPS 2560 x 1600 90Hz
• 14.5" IPS 3072 x 1920 120Hz

Both displays look very sharp. The 3k (3072 x 1920) display is technically sharper since it has a higher pixel density of 250 PPI; however, the difference isn't immediately noticeable on a 14.5-inch display at typical viewing distances. Also, the 3k 120Hz display will drain the battery faster. Both displays have a 16:10 aspect ratio, which is slightly taller than a standard 16:9 screen. The increased vertical space is great for productivity, as it lets you see more information at once when reading a document or website, so you don't have to scroll as much.

While a 90Hz refresh rate isn't essential for a productivity laptop, it's still a nice addition, as it makes the system feel more responsive than on a standard 60Hz display, especially when scrolling through documents or moving the cursor. However, the display's response time is slow, resulting in visible ghosting behind fast-moving objects. The 3k display has a faster 120Hz refresh rate that further improves responsiveness, though it likely has a slow response time as well.

The QHD+ display's contrast ratio is decent for an IPS panel but still relatively low compared to other display technologies like VA and OLED. This level of contrast makes blacks look gray in dim settings. The 3k display has the same advertised 1500:1 contrast ratio.

The QHD+ display gets bright enough for use in most indoor environments but not in direct sunlight or outdoors in broad daylight. Lowering the brightness to the minimum setting makes the screen very dim, which is great for dark room viewing, as it causes less eye strain. The 3k display has a higher advertised brightness of 400 cd/m²

The display's reflection handling is okay. Its glossy finish struggles with direct, mirror-like reflections. It's best to avoid having bright light sources directly behind you, as the reflections are visible even with the screen at maximum brightness.

The QHD+ display's black uniformity is passable. Blooming around the test cross is visible, which is typical for a backlit LCD, and there's some backlight bleed at the top left corner and bottom edge of the screen.

The QHD+ display's horizontal viewing angle is passable. The image dims and washes out relatively quickly as you move to the side, so you need to be more or less directly in front of the screen to get the best accuracy. The 3k display likely has the same viewing angle.

The QHD+ display's vertical viewing angle is passable. Like the horizontal viewing angle, the image dims and washes when viewing from above and below, so you need to look at the screen more or less straight on to see an accurate image.

The QHD+ display's out-of-the-box accuracy is sub-par. The color inaccuracies are fairly minor and hard to notice; however, the white balance is visibly off, especially at higher brightness levels. The color temperature is only a tad warmer than the standard 6500K target, not enough to make much difference visually. The gamma doesn't follow the curve at all; most scenes appear over-darkened.

The QHD+ display has an excellent color gamut. It's an sRGB panel, meaning it only covers the commonly used sRGB color space. It doesn't have enough coverage of the wider Adobe RGB and DCI P3 color spaces for print graphics, photography, or HDR video production. For the latter, the 3k 120Hz display is a better option because it has full DCI P3 coverage.

The display's backlight is flicker-free, which helps reduce eye strain. Like the Lenovo Yoga 7i 16 (2023), the measurement at 50% brightness appears very low on the graph because the display is very dim at that brightness setting.

The Lenovo Slim Pro 7 has a great keyboard. The layout feels spacious and is relatively standard, so it's easy to get used to. Key stability is decent; there's some wiggle, but it's not too bad. The keys have a good amount of travel, don't require much force to actuate, and provide satisfying tactile feedback. It feels comfortable to type on for extended periods. It isn't the quietest keyboard, though it isn't loud enough to be bothersome in noise-sensitive settings. You can set the backlight brightness to Low, High, Auto (based on ambient lighting), or Off.

The touchpad is great. It's large and smooth, and it tracks all movements and gestures well. There are no issues with palm detection or accidental triggers. Dragging and dropping over a long distance doesn't always work, as the item sometimes gets dropped unless you keep a very firm press on the button. The buttons feel satisfyingly clicky, but they only work in the bottom half of the touchpad.

The Lenovo Slim Pro 7's speakers get very loud with minimal compression artifacts at max volume. They sound clear and natural, with good instrument separation, but like most laptop speakers, they have very little bass.

The webcam's video quality is good. The image looks detailed with only a small amount of noise; however, the exposure is a little too low, and some colors look unnaturally oversaturated. As for the microphone, voices sound clear but slightly sibilant.

Instead of a physical privacy cover, you can turn off the camera at the software level with a physical switch on the right side of the laptop. You can disable the microphone separately using the F4 hotkey.

The Lenovo Slim Pro 7 has a great port selection. The USB-A port supports USB 3.2 Gen 1 data transfer speed and is always on, meaning you can use it to charge a mobile device even when the laptop is in sleep mode. The USB-C closest to the HDMI port supports USB4 (up to 40Gbps data transfer speed), while the other USB-C supports USB 3.2 Gen 2 data transfer speed (up to 10Gbps). Both USB-Cs support DisplayPort 1.4a and Power Delivery 3.0. The latter allows for fast charging of the laptop and other PD-compatible devices connected to the port. Lenovo's specifications say that the HDMI port can only do 4k @ 60Hz, but we can confirm that it supports up to 4k @ 120Hz.

The Lenovo Slim Pro 7's wireless adapter is a MediaTek RZ616. Wi-Fi 6E has faster speeds, lower latency, and less signal interference than previous Wi-Fi standards. However, you need a router that supports Wi-Fi 6E to benefit from these features.

The Lenovo Slim Pro 7 is available with the following CPUs:

• AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS (8 cores/16 threads, up to 4.75GHz, 4MB L2/16MB L3 cache)
• AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS (8 cores/16 threads, up to 5.1GHz, 8MB L2/16MB L3 cache)

Both are high-performance CPUs. The 7735HS is a processor based on AMD's Zen 3+ architecture, while the 7840HS has a newer Zen 4 architecture. They're usually in thinner mobile workstations and gaming laptops, as their lower TDP of 35W—compared to the usual 45W on the H-series CPUs—doesn't require as much cooling. These CPUs can handle demanding tasks like video editing, coding, and gaming. The Ryzen 7 7840HS is up to 20% faster than the 7735HS, depending on the workload.

The Lenovo Slim Pro 7 is only available with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU running at a TGP (Total Graphics Power) of 73W. The RTX 3050 is an entry-level discrete gaming GPU often found in thin and light creator laptops. It won't give you the best render times, but it's fast enough to provide a relatively smooth experience and much better than integrated graphics. For gaming, it can handle AAA titles, albeit at 1080p, with medium to low settings. The CPUs have an integrated GPU, which the system engages to prolong battery life when performing light tasks; the Ryzen 7 7735HS has the AMD Radeon 680M, while the Ryzen 7 7840HS has the AMD Radeon 780M. The Radeon 780M is faster, though the difference is minimal. If you want a similar laptop with newer NVIDIA 40-series GPU options, check out the Dell XPS 15 (2023).

You can only get this laptop with 16GB of RAM. Models with an AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS CPU use LP-DDR5 memory, while models with an AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS use LP-DDR5x. The RAM isn't user-replaceable.

You can configure this laptop with 512GB or 1TB of storage. Depending on the model, the 512GB SSD can be an M.2 2242 or 2280 PCIe Gen 4 x4 SSD. The SSD is user-replaceable; the slot supports the shorter 2242 and the full-size 2280 M.2 SSDs.

The Lenovo Slim Pro 7 has an outstanding overall score in the Gekkbench 5 benchmarks. The AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS has excellent single- and multi-thread performance, making it suitable for nearly every type of workload, including demanding tasks like compiling code and physics simulations. That said, there are faster CPUs on the market, like the Intel Core i7-13700H in the Acer Swift 14 (2023) and Apple's M2 Pro/Max chips in the Apple MacBook Pro 14 (M2, 2023).

For GPU computing tasks, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU performs well, but again, there are much faster GPUs, as the RTX 3050 is only an entry-level model. It can get the job done; just don't expect the fastest completion or render times. The Lenovo Vantage software has a GPU overclocking feature that boosts the GPU clock speed by 200MHz and the GPU memory by 400Hz. Setting this feature to max increases the GPU compute score to 64,677, which is roughly a 10% increase.

The Lenovo Slim Pro 7 performs exceptionally well in the Cinebench R23 benchmarks, making it suitable for 3D graphics rendering and other related workloads.

The Lenovo Slim Pro 7 performs well in Blender. Although the CPU can complete renders in a reasonable amount of time, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 discrete GPU is significantly faster, especially when using Optix API hardware acceleration. Overclocking the GPU improves the render time slightly to 0.78 minutes and 0.43 minutes with Optix.

The Lenovo Slim Pro 7 with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU scores well in the Basemark GPU benchmark. Overclocking the GPU brings the score to 56,647. This means the RTX 3050 can handle most games at 1080p, though you'll have to play with medium to low settings to get over 60 fps in the most demanding titles.

The 512GB SSD's performance is outstanding. The sequential read speed is very fast, allowing the system to quickly boot up, launch apps, and retrieve large data sets. The sequential write speed is on the slower side for a PCIe Gen 4 x4 SSD, so writing large files to the drive will take a while. The 1TB SSD is likely faster, as larger-capacity drives usually perform better.

The Lenovo Slim Pro 7 has great battery life. It lasts easily through a typical day of light productivity on a full charge. If you do more intensive tasks like video editing, you can expect it to be much shorter and closer to the gaming battery life. Models with a 3k 120Hz display will have shorter battery life. The 1.4-hour charging time is with Rapid Charge enabled (on by default) in the Lenovo Vantage application. Turning it off increases the charging time to almost two hours. There's another feature called Overnight Battery Charging, which helps improve battery longevity by limiting the charge to 80% when idle and resuming charging (to 100%) when you start using the laptop.

Performance in Borderlands 3 is middling. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 can push 60 fps at 1080p with high settings, but only with the GPU overclock feature set to maximum, and even then, you'll likely experience stutters due to frame drops. The gameplay is much smoother with low settings, with an average frame rate of 129 fps (with GPU overclock).

Civilization VI runs well. The RTX 3050 has no problem pushing high frame rates in this game. The frame rate drops below 60 fps sometimes, but it happens rarely. You can expect the same performance in other similar strategy games. With the GPU overclock set to maximum, the average frame rate increases to 97 fps (with high settings), and the turn time decreases to 6.99 seconds.

CS:GO runs well on the Lenovo Slim Pro 7. The gameplay is very smooth, with almost no noticeable stutter. Overclocking the GPU boosts the average frame rate to 228 fps with high settings and 318 fps with low settings.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider runs well at 1080p with high settings. Except for a few occasional stutters, the gameplay is very smooth, with an average frame rate well above 60 fps. Overclocking the GPU pushes the average frame rate to 90 fps with high settings. The large frametime spikes are scene changes and aren't representative of the laptop's performance.

The keyboard is mildly warm when idle. It gets hot under load but isn't uncomfortable by any means. Likewise, although the fans are audibly at full speed, they aren't distracting or annoying. Setting the GPU overclock to maximum will result in slightly higher temperature and fan noise.

The Lenovo Slim Pro 7's performance over time is outstanding. Neither the CPU nor the GPU gets particularly hot under load. Although the CPU throttles very quickly when starting a demanding task, it regains its performance once the temperature stabilizes. Overclocking the GPU seems to affect the CPU's performance, resulting in a higher temperature of 89°C with no performance loss.

The Lenovo Slim Pro 7 has many pre-installed applications, including:

• AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition: Lets you tweak the performance settings, check for updates, change the display's color profile, monitor system status, and view system information.
• Lenovo Hotkeys: Lets you create keyboard macros.
• Lenovo Now: Ads for Lenovo Support Services, like Accidental Damage Protection and Smart Lock (remote lock and data wipe). Also contains ads for Amazon Music, Dropbox, Adobe Acrobat, and Lenovo accessories.
• Lenovo Vantage: Lets you check for drivers/BIOS updates, view system status, change power and audio settings, and view warranty information.
• Lenovo Voice: Speech-to-text application.
• McAfee: Antivirus software. Requires subscription.

The Lenovo Slim Pro 7 has a Windows Hello facial recognition IR camera. You can use it to log in quickly, authorize purchases in the Windows Store, and auto-fill saved passwords on supported websites.