The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Review: OLED and LCD Tested
by Brett Howse & Brandon Chester on September 29, 2016 11:30 AM ESTWireless Performance
There was a time when Intel wireless cards were better known for stability than speed, but now they can be known for both stability and speed. The Intel 8260 wireless adapter which has been in the latest Skylake notebooks has set some pretty lofty levels of performance. Lenovo has used the 8260 in the X1 Yoga, and to great effect. The one thing Intel has been missing is MU-MIMO, but it is arriving in the updated 8265 which we should see with Kaby Lake devices.
At about 600 Mpbs, the 8260 is one of the few wireless cards where I don’t feel the need to hook up to Ethernet for large file transfers. At the moment it’s going to be tough to compete against Intel right now with good driver support as well as top tier performance, which will be interesting with the new Dell XPS13 being announced with a Killer AC1535 WiFi solution.
Noise and Thermals
When you go thin and light, one drawback can be thermal load capability. This can be offset by good design, or loud fans. The latter is not something you really want in an Ultrabook. When performing light loads, the fan in the X1 Yoga appears to be turned off, even when the notebook is plugged in, which makes it silent at idle. When working, you can hear the fans ramp up, but they never get too loud, We measured the maximum SPL of the X1 Yoga, and it achieved 43.5 dB(A) when measured one inch over the trackpad.
To test the thermal capabilities, our Dota 2 test was run for the full duration of the match, which is about 40 minutes.
Thermals are a bit of an issue in a high demand task like gaming. The GPU frequency does fluctuate from 950 Mz to 900 MHz, but the SoC is rated up to 1.05 GHz on the GPU. The CPU also throttles quite a bit in order to keep the SoC temperature under 80°C.
Audio
The X1 Yoga features stereo speakers on the bottom of the notebook, which is not ideal for use on a desk, but once flipped around the speakers would be pointed towards the user. Maximum volume, measured one inch over the trackpad, was only around 80 dB(A). This, by comparison to other notebooks, is on the low end. There is not a lot of room in an Ultrabook for quality speakers, and even the loudest laptops struggle with any low frequencies, and the X1 Yoga is no exception. For conference calls and such, it would be fine, but for music a good set of headphones would be in order.
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Ej24 - Thursday, September 29, 2016 - link
Nope. There are at least two or three 15w "U" processors with Iris 540 and one 28w U processor with iris 550. The 580 graphics are only reserved for HQ (35-45w) and S (65w) processors. I'd love just to have iris 540. The typical 520, 4400, or 4000 Intel graphics are hardly good enough for light gaming at 720 or heavier loads during hardware decode/encode or the 50/50 software hardware hybrid pipelines Intel has been using.Ro_Ja - Thursday, September 29, 2016 - link
All of the GeForce with *40 and below are just a waste of good money now since the Iris HD 580 can stack up against even a 940M. I can hardly find a laptop in our country without any horrible AMD EXO Pros and NVIDIA's crappy entry-level cards. I just want less heat on the laptop I want to use.spikebike - Friday, September 30, 2016 - link
I have a NUC with the Iris 540. It's pretty nice, handles the occasional light gaming, WebGL games, Minecraft, http://slither.io, and related much better than the non-iris graphics.forgot2yield28 - Friday, September 30, 2016 - link
CAD. Not a huge niche, but Iris will outperform standard intel integrated GPU. Sometimes architects/engineers want to get work done on the road. The small footprint and lightweight of an ultrabook still has appeal.Byte - Thursday, September 29, 2016 - link
Would love to get this, but all the Yogas i've had had tons of hardware bugs that were near impossible to fix. Just getting the touchpad right took a few days of fiddling. If only they can get things working.Samus - Thursday, September 29, 2016 - link
Working in IT, I can back you up on one thing for sure. These machines are hell to work on. I've had to replace two fans in Thinkpad Yoga 12.5's and they are, in traditional Lenovo fashion, not detachable from the heat pipe (which is why they failed in the first place...the bearing is in direct-contact with the source) so the whole assembly needs to be needlessly replaced, instead of just popping the cover off with a latch and unscrewing two screws like you do in just about any modern HP Elitebook.The real insult to the Thinkpad Yoga line is the dreaded history of the battery "non-recall" that caused the Yoga 14 machines to hard power off if bumped in the front right corner where the battery is connected. This connection is very sensitive and the only way we found to help prevent this anomaly was to insulate the battery connection internally on every model we came across.
Routine repair by Lenovo would result in a machine returned with the same exact problems. Dealing with Lenovo support is like dealing with a car dealership. They don't listen to your problem and the mechanic runs their standard tests, says its ok, and returns it to the customer. They don't seem to have a system in place to diagnose specific issues.
Brett Howse - Thursday, September 29, 2016 - link
It already throttles GT2. Going to GT3e would help because of eDRAM but likely throttle even more.ajp_anton - Friday, September 30, 2016 - link
Sure it throttles, nobody would expect an Iris 540 to go full speed at 15W. But with double the EUs and half the frequency, you get the same performance but at lower power (lower frequency allows for lower voltage). Wider GPUs generally have higher performance per watt because of this, at the expense of higher cost.Senti - Thursday, September 29, 2016 - link
I expect USB type-C in what you call "premium notebook" today. And better than Intel HD 520 graphics...It's sad to see that OLEDs are still "not quite ready". Battery life with web browsing was the last nail in the coffin.
BrokenCrayons - Thursday, September 29, 2016 - link
It's not bad hardware, but it does seem overpriced. Given the GPU choice, the panel resolution is too high for the graphics card to effectively drive it. 1080p is a stretch for the 520 doing anything intensive. Lenovo should offer a lower resolution & cheaper option. I can't see the usefulness of the hinge design either. Desktop operating systems work a lot better with access to a keyboard and mouse (or touchpad) so owners are probably paying for a novelty feature they'll rarely put to use.