Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition Review

Introduction

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition adds a distinctly Intel flavour to one of the beefiest Windows ultrabooks money can buy in 2025.

This top model retails for £1500/$1380 and packs one of Team Blue’s capable Lunar Lake chips, the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V. It also has 32GB of DDR5 RAM and a 1TB SSD, a high-res 15.3-inch IPS display, solid port selection, and fantastic battery life.

It’s got quite the competition at the higher end of the market, against the likes of the Asus Zenbook S 16 (2024), the Lunar Lake-powered Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 and Arm-based Microsoft Surface Laptop 7.

I’ve been testing the Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition for the last few weeks to see if it really is one of the best ultrabooks we’ve tested. Let’s take a closer look.

Design and Keyboard

• Sleek aluminium chassis
• Decent port selection
• Fantastic keyboard, although meagre trackpad

I could start this review off by making some silly Gen Z or Gen Alpha joke about how the Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition has lots of aura. Very original, I know. Nonetheless, this is a gorgeous laptop in terms of look and feel with a premium aluminium chassis that’s without flex or creaking. It’s a solid chassis, undoubtedly.

The 1.53kg weight makes this a modestly hefty laptop for a 15-inch model, although it is pretty slender at just 13.9mm. That makes the Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition quite the portable laptop. It’s easily stored in a bag or sleeve, and its reasonable weight means it shouldn’t be too difficult to carry around.

Given this laptop’s slim stature, it may come as a surprise to learn that the Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition’s port selection is quite decent. The left side houses a full-size HDMI port, a Thunderbolt 4 USB-C port with support for power delivery and charging the laptop, and a 3.5mm jack. The right side features another Thunderbolt 4 USB-C port, a USB-A port, a power button, and an integrated webcam privacy shutter, which is neat.

The Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition opts for a more compact keyboard layout, with a sensible 65 percent option, complete with function row and arrow keys in the bottom corner. As is typical with these Lenovo laptop keyboards, it’s crisp and tactile under finger, making it marvellous to type on for extended periods. 

As for the trackpad, it isn’t as large as I’ve seen on other laptops of its size and cost. Being slightly smaller, it can feel a tad cramped at times, but is generally fine. It is at least reasonably responsive with tactile buttons and smooth tracking for basic tasks.

Display and Sound

• Smooth, detailed, and larger screen
• Punchy brightness with decent contrast and colours
• Marvellous speakers

The Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition features a larger 15.3-inch display with a 2.8K, or 2880×1800 resolution alongside a 120Hz refresh rate for detailed and smooth output. Intriguingly, Lenovo hasn’t bundled in an OLED screen here, as the Arm-based Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 model does, instead opting for an IPS screen.

As much as an OLED screen is preferable due to its deeper blacks and higher levels of contrast and dynamic range, an IPS panel is still perfectly fine. On a laptop this expensive, though, it had better be a good one. 

With this in mind, the Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition’s screen offers punchy brightness, with a peak of 489.9 nits as measured by my colourimeter. Its 0.11 black level at half brightness means it’s quite deep for an IPS screen. Its 1180:1 contrast ratio is perfectly fine, although unremarkable, while a 6500K white point is perfect.

In addition, the panel here is wonderfully colour accurate, with 100% sRGB coverage signalling perfect representation of mainstream colours, while its 96% DCI-P3 and 86% Adobe RGB demonstrate the Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition’s viability for more colour-sensitive workloads.

The speakers here are placed on opposing sides of the keyboard, firing sound out and upwards. This is a change from the slew of downward-firing speakers found on other laptops, allowing for clear and solid audio whether the laptop is on a desk or a softer surface such as a bed. The speakers here are some of the best I’ve tested on a laptop, with lots of volume, decent detail, and surprisingly robust bass.

Performance

• Brand new Intel Lunar Lake chip inside
• Beefy performance for productivity and light gaming
• Speedy SSD and solid RAM headroom

Inside, the Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition isn’t lacking in oomph for a modern ultrabook, with one of Intel’s new Core Ultra 200V Lunar Lake CPUs. This sample specifically utilises the Core Ultra 7 258V, an octa-core (split between eight P cores and eight low-power E cores) processor that also comes with eight threads and a base clock of 2.2GHz, boosting all the way up to 4.8GHz.

With this chip inside, it’s perhaps little surprise that this Lenovo laptop is quite the beast in both single- and multi-core workloads. Its scores in the Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 benchmarks are some of the best I’ve seen on an ultrabook, comparing well against the Asus Zenbook S 16 (2024) with its Ryzen 9 AI HX 370 APU and beating the Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 which has an Intel Core Ultra 7 256V inside.

In addition, the beefed-up iGPU with the Arc 140V 16GB allows the Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition to deliver an especially respectable score in 3D Mark Time Spy, with its result better than doubling the Snapdragon X Elite-powered version of the same laptop model. It also helps this Lenovo model offer some surprisingly playable results at 1080p in the likes of Returnal and Rainbow Six Extraction, with results of 30fps and 45fps, respectively, at max settings.

It’s much the same in Cyberpunk 2077 with a 26.3fps result without any ray-tracing. Lowering quality presets here is likely to garner better results, of course, at the expense of visual fidelity. Results do get stronger by adding in Intel Xess 1.3 on its default ‘Quality’ preset, with a 35.78fps average at Full HD.

However, that’s as far as the Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition goes for gaming performance. Bumping the resolution up to 1440p, or even its native 2.8K, causes frames to drop by quite a bit, as demonstrated by the 22 fps result in Returnal, 26fps in Rainbow Six Extraction and the 24.77fps in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p. In addition, ray-tracing performance isn’t a strong point for the Arc 140V, as on Cyberpunk 2077’s RT: Ultra preset at Full HD, it posted a 9.74fps average.

This particular model comes with 32GB of RAM, giving you lots of headroom for more intensive workloads such as video editing and the like, while the 1TB SSD is reasonably generous in terms of capacity. It’s also one of the brisker SSDs I’ve tested in an ultrabook, with measured read and write speeds of 5278.65MB/s and 4948.76MB/s respectively.

Software

• Windows’ typical AI functions are here
• Some handy extras, including webcam effects
• No compatibility issues, as with Arm-based options

The Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition is marketed and packaged as a Copilot+ PC, meaning it comes with the AI quirks and features we’ve come to expect of a laptop of its kind. Chief of these is the inclusion of the Copilot key on the bottom row of the keyboard to provide quick and convenient access to Microsoft’s AI assistant.

Beyond this, there is generative AI in Photos and Paint to create an image in the Photos app, or to turn any of your manual creations into the likes of a pixel art and an oil painting. The most useful set of features though is the Windows Studio webcam effects which can offer features such as background blur and auto-framing, as well as a way of adding live captions to videos in Windows, which is neat.

Otherwise, the Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition comes with some of Lenovo’s own software, mpst notably Vantage. In a similar vein to other laptop manufacturers’ options, it’s a way of checking on your system’s vitals and fiddling with features such as the performance mode and change the speakers’ Dolby Atmos mode.

As an x86-based system, this laptop also doesn’t have anything in the way of compatibility issues with any games or VPN apps for instance that have befallen Snapdragon X Elite-powered alternatives with this higher price tag. That’s a small, but important, win for the Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 21 hours 59 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for two to three working days

With the combination of the efficiency of the Intel Core Ultra 258V chip inside the Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition and its large 70Whr cell, it should probably come as little surprise to hear that this Lenovo laptop is one of the best we’ve tested in terms of runtime.

Its 21 hours and 59 minutes with the customary PC Mark 10 battery test at 150 nits of brightness is incredible, and puts it up there with both the Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 and the Snapdragon X Elite-powered Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 with truly all-day battery life.

It also comes with a 65W USB-C charger that charges at a reasonable speed, taking just shy of an hour to reach 50 percent charged. Going from zero to full took 110 minutes, which means you aren’t going to be attached to the mains for too long.

Should you buy it?