I am finally beginning to get caught up on my backlog of laptop reviews! My latest one is of another Lenovo Thinkbook – the 14s Yoga Gen 2. You can watch it here.
This one is a middle of the road 2-in-1 with an i7-1255U processor, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. This is the kind of laptop that goes on sale frequently on Lenovo’s website so definitely keep an eye on their product page (affiliate link) if you’re looking for a deal. It’s currently starts at $840 and the one we’re looking at is around $1000.
Performance and battery life are pretty good on this one. It scored well on benchmark tests and in line with other laptops running with this generation of Intel processors. Cooling is efficient and quiet with very little throttling happening under sustained processor loads.
Like other Yoga’s we’ve looked at they have a small pen that “garages” itself on the side of the case. I noticed the pen feels a little more natural than prior iterations, with the screen introducing a little more resistance to make writing feel less slippery.
For upgradeability the Yoga 14s Gen 2 has a second NVME SSD slot that allows for the installation of a second drive. This might be a fun way to dual boot a linux operating system. There is a single RAM slot on the motherboard for memory upgrades, however half the RAM (8GB) is soldered on the main board. So the best you’ll do with this one is 16GB max by adding an 8GB module.
I recommend either purchasing a 16GB configuration or upgrading to 16GB yourself to ensure the system runs in dual channel memory mode – without that RAM slot occupied you won’t get the max performance out of this machine.
My only complaint on this machine is its display. It’s dim at 300 nits, only 1080p, and runs with a narrow 16:9 aspect ratio (most laptops these days have a taller 16:10 ratio).