Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X review: A sleek laptop for content creators with some drawbacks

The Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X is a laptop designed for content creators, offering solid performance and a very sharp and color-accurate display with Delta E < 1. All the while, it still manages to deliver solid battery life, and it comes wrapped in a sturdy and sleek chassis that looks really good. It offers a really good experience across the board, but it’s not a perfect machine.

Notably, the webcam isn’t the greatest, and the display isn’t the best if you’re heavily invested in professional creative work. Still, this is a very competent machine, with a good amount of power for basic creative work and even some gaming.

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Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X: Pricing and availability

• The Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X launched in June 2022, and it officially starts at $1,499
• It’s available from Lenovo directly, but you should also find it at other retailers

Lenovo announced the Slim 7 Pro X, alongside other laptops in the Slim lineup, in May, and it officially launched in June. The official starting price for this model is $1,499, though there’s also an Intel version that costs a bit more.

The configuration used in this review is more high-end, and it costs $1,765, based on Lenovo’s custom build configurator. Prices may vary if more pre-built configurations become available.

Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X: Specs

 Design: All-aluminum build with a dual-tone look

• The Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X has an aluminum chassis that feels sturdy and premium
• An HDMI port would have made sense for a powerful laptop like this

In terms of build quality, the Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X is about as premium as it gets. The laptop is entirely made from aluminum, and it feels solid in the hand. At 3.2lbs, it’s a bit heavier than a typical ultrabook, but that’s also because it has powerful specs, and 15.9mm of thickness is pretty good for a machine like this.

I think it looks great, too. Lenovo went for a subtle dual-tone look here, where the lid comes in a darker shade of grey that’s nearly black, with the bottom half of the laptop being a slightly lighter shade of grey. I always appreciate dual-tone designs, as it can often feel like laptops are bit stale in how they look, and this brings a breath of fresh air to the market. This is still a very subdued laptop, though, so it won’t get any weird looks in public. I think it would have been nice if the color difference was a little more striking, but this is still a nice look.

One thing I wish was a little more refined is the hinge. It’s very tight and stiff, which is generally a good thing, but it’s a little too much here. It’s hard to open the laptop with one hand without lifting the whole chassis, even when it’s as heavy as it is. I’d like it to be more flexible, but it’s better to have a stiff hinge than one that’s overly loose.

Something else that I think could have been improved is the port selection here. On the left side of the laptop, there are two USB Type-C ports, none of which support USB4. With this being something of a premium laptop, I think USB4 support would have been appropriate, but I’d say it’s not a glaring omission considering the laptop is very adequately priced for the specs. You still get display outputs and charging through these ports.

Aside from that, you get two USB Type-A ports and a headphone jack, which makes for a decent setup. I do find it odd that a laptop focused on content creation doesn’t have an HDMI port, though. Creative professionals would probably appreciate the ability to use a larger screen, but as it stands, you need an adapter to do that. To me, it would have made more sense to replace one of the USB Type-A ports with HDMI. The left side of the laptop also has an electronic shutter that turns off the webcam if you’re worried about privacy.

Display and sound: It looks fantastic, but you won’t

• A 14.5-inch display with 3K resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate looks absolutely fantastic
• The webcam is 1080p, but it’s actually not that great

With this being a laptop focused on content creation, the display is a big focus, and Lenovo did a great job here. This is a 14.5-inch IPS panel, and it comes in a very sharp 3K resolution, 0r 3072 x 1920. Not only that, it comes with a 120Hz refresh rate, which starts to add up to a really good experience in day-to-day use. The screen also reaches up to 400 nits of brightness, so outdoor visibility is pretty good, though the reflective glass cover can affect that somewhat. The laptop also includes an ambient light sensor, so it adjusts the display brightness based on the lighting around you, which is always nice to have.

But for content creators, it’s all about colors, and Lenovo touts 100% coverage of sRGB, and perhaps more importantly, hardware calibration certifying color accuracy rated at Delta E < 1. Lenovo doesn’t mention the coverage of more popular color gamuts like DCI-P3 or Adobe RGB, and looking at the results from our own tests, it’s apparent why. For content creators, good coverage of DCI-P3 or Adobe RGB would have been ideal, but this is still a solid panel, and it does look great in person.

However, that’s only true at higher brightness levels. Lenovo’s brightness adjustment isn’t balanced at all, and the 50% setting in Windows actually gives you close to 12% of the peak brightness. That means contrast values also go down, making it harder to see certain elements on screen if you lower the brightness anywhere below 50%. To Lenovo’s credit, the display does reach and slightly surpass the advertised 400 nits of brightness.

Above that display, there’s the webcam, as you’d expect. Like most of Lenovo’s premium laptops this year, it uses a 1080p sensor, but I was frankly a bit disappointed with the image quality of this webcam. This is a hybrid sensor with IR, which enables Windows Hello facial recognition. But having a hybrid sensor can greatly impact image quality, and that seems to be the case here, as this 1080p camera doesn’t look nearly as nice as I’d expect it to. it’s serviceable, but not great.

As for sound, the Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X gets by with a pair of 2W speakers, which are placed on either side of the keyboard. Top-firing speakers are always welcome, and these can get quite loud without significant distortion, so I find them pretty good for media consumption and calls. I reviewed this laptop alongside the Dynabook Portégé X40L-K, and that one has a quad-speaker system that definitely gets a little louder, but this is still pretty good.

Keyboard and touchpad: Lenovo is really good at this

• Lenovo makes some of the best laptop keyboards around, and this one feels great
• The touchpad is very large and comfortable to use

If you read a lot of Lenovo laptops reviews, this won’t come as much of a surprise, but the company makes some of the best keyboards you’ll find on a laptop. And the Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X is no exception. The signature curved keycaps and top-left aligned labels are still here, but what really matters is the typing comfort, and Lenovo nails it. These keys have just the right amount of travel and actuation, and they don’t bottom out harshly, so typing just feels great all around.

I did review the Dynabook Portégé X40L-K alongside this laptop, and I feel like the keyboard is a little better on that laptop, especially in terms of the layout. But at this stage, you’re looking at two phenomenal laptop keyboards, and there’s no such thing as a bad choice. Lenovo’s keyboards require a little bit less force to press, which you may prefer.

It’s not just the keyboard, though – Lenovo also nails the touchpad. When it comes to touchpads, you generally want them to be as large as possible, and this is about as big as you can get out of this chassis. But the smoothness of the surface is just as important, and Lenovo got it right, too. Gliding my fingers across this touchpad is effortless, and it’s just so easy to use. There’s really not much I would want to change here.

As a side note, there’s no fingerprint reader on this laptop, which is totally fine by me. I find facial recognition much more reliable and faster anyway.

Performance: Solid, but it could be better

• An AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 graphics make for solid performance, but it’s oddly limited
• The Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X still manages solid battery life despite its powerful specs

No matter what configuration you choose for the Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X, you’re getting a pretty high-end machine in terms of performance. It starts with an AMD Ryzen 7 6800HS and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 graphics are included by default. My review unit has a more powerful AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS, and it also comes with 32GB of RAM, so performance in day-to-day tasks is about as good as you’d expect. Everything is fast and smooth, and you really won’t have a reason to complain about day-to-day performance.

Looking at benchmarks, though, things are a little strange. In many of the tests, general performance falls short of what I’d expect from a 35W CPU, and it actually lags behind some of Intel’s P-series processors, which have a 28W TDP. These scores were very consistent, too, so it wasn’t a one-off. Of course, in tests that rely more heavily on the GPU, like 3DMark, the laptop has much better scores than laptops that only have integrated graphics.

Seeing it lose to laptops like the Dell XPS 15 makes sense – after all, that comes with a 45W processor, and it also has slightly more powerful graphics. But in many instances, the Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X is competing with the Intel Core i7-1260P, which isn’t even Intel’s best 28W P-series processors. And in many cases, like Geekbench 5 and CrossMark, it’s losing, and sometimes significantly. You wouldn’t notice this while browsing the web or writing documents, but if you’re going through heavy workloads like video editing, those differences become more apparent.

It’s also worth mentioning that the Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X has a MUX switch, which can be useful for gaming. A brief explanation is that usually, laptops with one integrated GPU and one discrete GPU will always rely on the integrated GPU to power the display. The discrete GPU can handle rendering in programs, but the display information still has to be fed through the iGPU to get to the screen, which can bottleneck the performance and add some latency. With a MUX switch, the laptop physically changes the connection so that the discrete GPU directly powers the display, getting you more performance at the expense of battery life. This didn’t have an effect on synthetic benchmark scores, but it did yield better results in the Forza Horizon 5 benchmark.

I also tested the performance of this SSD, which is very good, with read speeds exceeding 6,500MB/s in sequential reads, and write speeds near 5,000MB/s.

One are where the Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X positively surprised me was battery life. In my testing, I’ve always managed at least 5 hours of use, with the minimum being around 5 hours and 12 minutes, and the maximum nearing 6 hours and 36 minutes. This was with real work, using my browser to write in WordPress and with multiple tabs open, plus occasional image editing. Automatic brightness was on, and it usually ranged from 30% to 50%. Most of the time, I got very close to six hours, and that’s very impressive for a laptop with a 35W processor and discrete graphics. Even more so when you consider the 3K resolution and 120Hz refresh rate.

Part of that is because AMD-powered laptops do lose quite a bit of performance on battery power. Running the PCMark 10 benchmark on battery power with the Balanced power setting got me a score of 4,474, which is quite a bit lower than the 5,658 I got on AC power.

Should you buy the Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X?

At the end of the day, the Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X is a great laptop for day-to-day use and some lighter creative workloads. The AMD Ryzen processors and discrete Nvidia graphics offer quite a bit of performance, though they fall a little short of expectations. If you want the most power for creative workloads, you can probably find better options. But what the Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X does have is a fantastic display that’s very color accurate, sharp, and smooth, plus it has solid battery life considering its specs.

You should buy the Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X if you:

• Want a beautiful and color-accurate display
• Often work away from an outlet and need solid battery life
• Value a comfortable keyboard and touchpad

You shouldn’t buy the Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X if you:

• Need top-tier performance for heavy creative workloads
• Plan to use the built-in webcam often
• Need great coverage of P3 or Adobe RGB

Depending on how demanding your usual workloads are, the performance of the Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X may not be the best you can get, and something like the Dell XPS 15 may be a better fit for a similar price. It’s also disappointing that this 1080p webcam isn’t better. But you still get solid performance this way, and for photo editing, there’s plenty of performance here and a beautiful display to work on.