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
General Performance
With an Intel Core i5 4200U, 4GB of DDR3L-1600, and a 256GB Samsung SSD inside, we are right in the middle of the road as far as the Yoga 2 configurations available. It is standard fare for an Ultrabook, though the 4GB models are thankfully being phased out by most OEMs now. Being that this device can pull double duty as a laptop or a tablet, we will also do some comparisons on the tablet side.
Performance Graphs
We’ll start with general performance. PCMark gives us an evaluation of several scenarios, as well as storage performance. Being designed as a laptop, the Yoga 2 Pro does not suffer as harshly from throttling as something like the Surface Pro 3 does, although the SP3 does have the slightly faster i5-4300U.
Performance is right where we’d expect it to be for the 4200U. There were no signs of throttling during normal operation.
For storage, the Yoga 2 Pro comes equipped with a Samsung OEM SSD. This is likely the same drive used in other devices such as the Surface Pro 3, and the performance is similar. We'll likely need to wait for the next generation Yoga before we see M.2 PCIe SSDs improve storage performance.
Gaming Performance
While the Yoga 2 Pro is certainly not considered a gaming machine, a user may want to play the odd game on it. With Intel HD 4400 graphics though, it would be practically impossible to game at the native resolution of this panel.
With the Intel HD 4400, the Yoga 2 Pro does fine in low demand benchmarks such as Ice Storm, but it is quickly taxed to the point of being unusable on titles with more graphically intensive workloads. Tomb Raider and Bioshock, even at the value settings, are almost unplayable on the Yoga 2 Pro. You'll want to either drop to minimum detail settings or stick to older/less demanding titles (and thankfully there are plenty of those available).
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SanX - Friday, August 8, 2014 - link
What is actually very BAD and no one noticed- Crazy 97C temperature of processor cores. Intel must speed up its 14nm technology
- Because matrix is pentile its PPI=195 or may be a bit better due to RGBW. This makes this screen actually even worse then in Microsoft Surface 3 PPI=216. You can see all its gargantuan pixels on both. How tech people are sooooooo damn fooled by the fake 3200 numbers? Large tablet screens ***must be 4K***
Rdmkr - Sunday, August 10, 2014 - link
your PPI math is off; the number of subpixels matches that of a 225 PPI 13.3 inch non-pentile screen. I thought pentile was a disaster until I learned that the human eye almost completely ignores color information in registering pixel-level detail. The wikipedia page for "Chrominance" has a good picture to demonstrate this, as does the one for the "YCbCr" color space. Another piece of evidence towards this is that blue-ray content has heavily undersampled color information and hardly anyone ever notices or mentions that it is less than "true" 1080p.mitchellvii - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
Sorry dude but I've owned both the Surface Pro and the Y2P and I'm here to tell you, the Surface Pro comes nowhere close to the clarity of this screen. You honestly have no idea what you are talking about.mitchellvii - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
97C? Lol, really? My Y2P i7 rarely even gets warm. I could bake bread on my Surface Pro.Bateluer - Sunday, August 10, 2014 - link
I almost bought this same model a few weeks back, but ended up going for the older 11s model instead. The Yoga 2s were definitely nice, but that un-upgradeable RAM is a real buzz kill.medi02 - Monday, August 11, 2014 - link
I wish they'd do it with one of AMD's APUs. The one with discrete GPU is way to expensive and Intel HD is a no thanks, not to mention the higher price.petwho - Monday, August 11, 2014 - link
I bought a Lenovo laptop last year. But its performance was so slow that I decided never come back with this brand.venkman - Monday, August 18, 2014 - link
Good write up. I bought a Y2P in November 2013 and pretty much agree with everything you said here. Thankfully the yellow issue was resolved with a firmware update because I was about to take the dang thing back just for that. Other than that, the WiFi is a joke and a lot of people on the lenovo and notebookreview forums have taken to manually upgrading the wifi cards themselves. The screen resolution is nice but completely unnecessary considering the impact it has on battery life. Not many programs fully support it anyways. I feel like Lenovo got some kind of crazy deal from their supplier on these 1800p screens that actually saved them money by going this route instead of a 1080p screen. Other than that, I love my Y2P and I fly with it regularly. It is a dream in cramped economy with tablet and tent mode. Flight attendants ask my GF to put her Macbook Air (which I believe weighs less) away when the door closes but never bother me with my Y2P in tablet mode.mitchellvii - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
If you want deeper blacks, just turn down the gamma. Everyone knows that. Geesh. Blacks on my unit with gamma at .5 are as inky as on a super amoled display.mitchellvii - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
You blame the Y2P for having poor black levels when the fact is YOU are the one with NO clue how too adjust black levels on a PC. It's called "Gamma" and it's in the HD Control Panel. Honestly, if you are going to be a reviewer, please get some rudimentary computer knowledge.