Life with the Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro
by Brett Howse on July 30, 2014 2:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Notebooks
- Lenovo
- Windows 8.1
- Yoga
Battery Life
The Yoga 2 Pro contains an integrated 55Wh battery inside, which compared to a tablet first device like the Surface Pro 3 with its 42Wh battery is a good size. However, with a high resolution 3200x1800 screen to drive, battery life is not spectacular, especially at light workloads.
First we consider the light workload test. We use the default browser (in this case IE 11) going through a standard workload of web browsing with the display set at 200 nits. The default setting is to hibernate the machine when the battery gets to 5%, and to avoid damage to the battery this was not changed, so please note these times are from 100% charge to 5% charge.
Battery life of the Yoga 2 Pro is not its strong point, with the battery life near the bottom end of our charts. A big part of this is likely the display. In order to achieve 200 nits, the display had to be set at 94%, which is fairly high. High resolution has its drawbacks and this is one of them.
Next up we compare it to other devices with a heavy workload.
Here, where the display is no longer the largest battery draw, the Yoga 2 does very well. The heavy workload shifts the results from being optimized for mostly idle with the display drawing the majority of the power to a scenario where the CPU, GPU, and Wi-Fi are all in use and the percentage of overall power draw by the display is less. Still the results here are a bit surprising. It is possible there is something drawing excessive power at idle that isn’t an issue when the device moves off idle, or it could just be the display. Either way, it’s a much better showing on the heavy battery test.
Next we'll look at the battery life normalized to compare platform power use and remove the battery size from the equation.
Here we can see the effect of what is likely the display power draw at idle. The Sony VAIO Pro has the same Core i5 inside, but Sony really did a great job on overall platform power. The Sony has an easier to drive 1080p display which also helps. Microsoft's Surface Pro 2 and 3 both have Haswell Core i5 processors as well. The Yoga 2 Pro also benefits by having a larger 55Wh battery inside to compensate for the higher idle platform power draw.
On the heavy workload, as discussed earlier, the overall percentage of power draw of the display is reduced. Here we see the Yoga 2 Pro much more in-line with the other Haswell Core i5 devices.
Charging Times
The Yoga 2 Pro ships with a 65 watt power adapter with a reversible plug. Though the adapter is 65 watts, normally the battery will charge with a 22 watt rate which decreases as the battery gets charged. Charging times are a function of charge rate versus battery size, which for the Yoga 2 Pro is 22:55.
The charge times are pretty good, with the Yoga 2 Pro being able to go from 5% to 100% in 2.5 hours. It is a bit quicker than the Surface Pro 3, even with a larger battery on the Yoga 2 Pro. But Lenovo has a trick up its sleeve here as well. The Yoga 2 Pro has an optional express charging mode, where the initial battery charge power jumps from 22 watts to 44 watts. This has a significant impact on charging times.
The Express Charge option drops the charge time to 109 minutes. The express charge requires 28% less charging time than the standard charge. The obvious question is why don’t they just leave it at 44 watts all the time? It gets into battery chemistry, but the higher charge rates can cause a quicker breakdown of the battery. Lenovo has likely chosen a conservative value for the standard charge in order to keep warranty claims low. Since this is a personal laptop, it likely won’t need the express charge treatment very often.
Temperatures
At idle, temperatures stay pretty low with the CPU sitting around 45°C, and the laptop itself never gets warm during light workloads.
Stressing the device for fifteen minutes, the temperatures rose up to around 80°C on the CPU. At this point, the laptop was certainly warm to the touch, but it wasn't hot.
While stressing the CPU, I also captured the CPU clock speed to see if it would throttle under prolonged high loads, but the Yoga 2 Pro never went under the advertised base clock speed of 1.6GHz with both cores (all 4 threads) at 100% usage, though it does drop quite a bit from the maximum 2.6GHz clock speed.
Noise
The Yoga 2 Pro has a fan, but in normal operations it stays fairly low so it isn’t very audible. With the default power profile, when the Yoga 2 Pro is plugged in, the fan is active but quiet, and when on battery power it switches to passive as the default cooling option. It's only if you stress the device that the fan spins up at all, and generally it stays quiet. It is not silent like a tablet would be, but it also has a lot more performance. If you push the device the fan will spin up though in either mode.
I don't have an accurate dB meter (yet), and attempts to capture the sound resulted in more noise from the room than the laptop. It's certainly not silent, but with no dedicated graphics to keep cool, the overall noise is very reasonable. Under intensive workloads, the fan spins up and is very audible, however the only time it has ever been at this level was during stress testing. Normal usage, even light gaming, was audible but not loud.
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Egg - Saturday, August 16, 2014 - link
It's fixed with a recent Windows update :Droom200 - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
You cannot upgrade the wireless card. Even though the card is a common Intel card, the card has to be on the "whitelist". Lenovo and HP have been doing that to ALL of their laptops. When you put in a card not sold by them, you will be met with "1802: Unauthorized network card is plugged in - Power off and remove the miniPCI network card." And you will find that the computer will not boot! Unless you buy the wireless card from them (even though it is the same as the card you can get on Amazon), they have hard-coded identification information into the bios of the card. Also, most times they don't carry an upgrade, and when they do it costs 4 to 7 times what the Ebay/Amazon/Tiger Direct card costs.Egg - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Dude do you know how to read? I own a Yoga 2 Pro. I *typed* the comment on 5 Ghz Wi-Fi.All you need is the correct card. I bought mine at mfactors; it cost me $40. I can't guarantee that ones from eBay or amazon will work, for some reason FCC stickers are a good sign that it will work.
lolTyler - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
How much better is the AC card in your opinion? I'm still running the stock card and it's incredibly flaky. I tried updating my drivers using the Intel's latest and the wireless drivers broken my trackpad. (Shit you not) - I haven't checked up on it 2 months though, may of been fixed.I was a day -4 Yoga 2 Pro owner. I got my Yoga a couple days before release when Best Buy posted it for sale early.
Here's my list of things I've found wrong the device that hasn't been stated:
- Terrible driver support. The Yoga 2 Pro is "flagship" ultrabook from Lenovo, yet it hasn't seen a major driver update since November 2013, other than a "Lenovo Motion Control" update pushed out in April '14
- Mustard Yellow: (Already stated, but I really want to nail this one home) This still isn't fixed and Lenovo won't recognize it. I've done the fix and only in Daily (or High Performance) mode with the brightness on max is the yellow issue fixed. As a programmer who needs to also do a lot of design work, the lack of rgb accuracy in certain brightness modes is a huge problem.
- Shutdown problems: Ever so often I shutdown my Yoga and it just hangs on a black screen with the keyboard lit up and won't turn off without my holding the power button. Happens every 1 out of 10 times. Might be a program I installed, but this has happened since day one for me.
- Keys stuck/still enabled when switching modes: Sometimes when I switch my Yoga from laptop to stand/tent/tablet modem, Windows detects keys as being pressed and won't stopped repeating the key press until I switch my Yoga back to laptop. ~(1 out of 30 chance) Also, on rare occasions, the keyboard and trackpad aren't disabled in tablet mode. ~(1 out of 100 chance)
- Wireless: The stock wireless card is abysmal, but this isn't just a Yoga problem. I get better reception on my phone sometimes and other times my Yoga fails to connect or drops connection. Depends on the router. The lack of 5GHz dual-band and AC is a joke.
- Rubberized material: Apparently they fixed this on the lower end Yoga 2 (non pro), but the rubberized texture on the lid is a massive blemish magnet. I just went on vacation and something in my backpack rubbed up against my Yoga which was in a black case and left a dark smear across the lid of my Yoga. I tried cleaning it with Alcohol and also baking soda; but because of the material, it won't come out. http://i.imgur.com/x8fxa7t.jpg
- Yoga is cooking itself?: I noticed this right before my vacation. The corners of my Yoga by the heat vents are slowly turning brown: http://i.imgur.com/FlrPWiB.jpg & http://i.imgur.com/OTHQ37J.jpg - Notice these are opposite sides by the yellow AC jack in the first picture. I've never owned a silver laptop before, so I don't know if this is common. But for a device that's less than a year old and "premium," this is a let down. This might just be a lack of material experience on my part. I don't do anything too intense on my Yoga, most gaming I've done is for ~18h total over the live of my Yoga.
- Windows 8.1 Hidpi: (Everyone's saying this, but again, huge deal) Not Lenovo's fault, but Hidpi mode is a mess. Sure, it's gotten better, but it still sucks. Chrome, my primary browser is also a mess.
Papa - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
There is a bios fix for the mustard yellow issue. No need to fiddle with modes anymore.I think this is it:
http://mobilesupport.lenovo.com/us/en/downloads/DS...
lolTyler - Friday, August 1, 2014 - link
Oh wow, that's a new BIOs fix, less than a month old. I'll check it out, thanks!lolTyler - Saturday, August 2, 2014 - link
Just did this "fix," and it's still a no go. Yellows are as mustardary as ever.I also tried locating the "new" Energy Manager that was released recently, which is suppose to help. I couldn't find a legit download. Only users posting random fileshare sites on Lenovo's forums with 60 minute download times and questionable package names.
I tried updating my current install of Energy Manager and I get a network error. Lenovo is really dropping the ball on their customer service.
I have a huge love/hate relationship with this laptop. My feelings for it are bio-polar, changing on a dime. When it works, it's great. When it doesn't, it fails hard.
KingGheedora - Friday, August 1, 2014 - link
The shutdown/restart problems will only get worse. BEWARE THIS LAPTOP. I have owned the Y2Pro since February, and at first the shutdown problem happened once every few weeks, but then I started getting random reboots and lockups with corrupt screen image while watching XBMC, which seemed like they were happening due to heat. Once that started happening everything went downhill. The laptop wouldn't boot up, it just kept trying to boot, the keyboard backlight would flash, and then it would try to boot up again. That just keeps happening over and over.Initially I could leave the laptop alone for a while and then it would eventually boot. But the problem got worse and worse until 3 weeks ago. I haven't been able to boot it up at all. I even opened it and disconnected the battery and then tried booting, still not working.
This is a common problem with this model. There are many users in the Lenovo support forums who have had this issue, had their laptop replaced, and had the issue again with the replacement model they got back. Some users eventually got a full refund. I just got the RMA set up and will be sending mine in for the first time this week.
lolTyler - Friday, August 1, 2014 - link
Wow, mine hasn't been that bad. I got my first lock up two weeks ago. The funniest part about it is someone was admiring my Yoga when it completely seized up. I'm sure it's a software issue, but like I said, the drivers haven't been updated in forever, so go figure.I've thought about trying to RMA or get a refund, but I'm still "partially" satisfied with my Yoga and there's nothing else on the market that intrigues me outside of a MBA.
Egg - Saturday, August 16, 2014 - link
Sorry for late reply.I haven't experienced the mustard yellow problems, shutdown problems, key sticking problems, or the wireless problems. I've used stock wireless on other Yoga 2 Pros and haven't noticed anything out of the ordinary, but not for too long.
I haven't really bothered to update the drivers, but I think you're right that there aren't many new ones. I probably don't mind any but the graphics drivers. I guess I got lucky; a friend had the boot issues out of box, sent it back, and got a perfect one.
I just switched back to Chrome after discovering Chrome 37 (on the beta channel) has HiDPI support and fixes the kerning issue :)