Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8 Review: 14-Inch 2-In-1 Laptop Excellence

ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO disk benchmark is a fairly quick and dirty test that measures sequential read/write bandwidth across a range of different data sizes. While we don't typically compare these results across multiple machines, it's useful to gauge whether a particular notebook's storage subsystem is up to snuff.


Unlike many ultra-portable laptops these days, the Yoga 9i Gen 8's SSD is not soldered to the motherboard, so you can replace and upgrade it as needed. With PCIe Gen 4, the laptop was able to deliver excellent read and write speeds, even when compared with other 13th Gen laptops like the Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro 360. Speeds were pretty uniform across block sizes too, at least for those larger than 256 KB, where write speeds were around 4.55 GB/s, and read speeds varying between 5.11 - 5.63 GB/s.

Speedometer 2.0 Browser Benchmark

We use BrowserBench.org's Speedometer test to gauge mixed internet usage experience, which takes a holistic look at web application performance. This test automatically loads and runs several sample web apps from ToDoMVC.com using the most popular web development frameworks around, including React, Angular, Ember.js, and vanilla JavaScript. This test is a better example of how systems cope with real web applications, as opposed to a pure JavaScript compute test like JetStream.


The Yoga 9i Gen 8 excelled at this test, though it did slot in just behind the aforementioned Galaxy Book3. Regardless, it beat out all of the other thin and light laptops we've tested recently, showing very good system responsiveness overall. 

Cinebench R23 Rendering Benchmark

This is the latest 3D rendering benchmark from Maxon, based on the Cinema 4D R23 rendering engine. We tested both single-threaded and multi-threaded tests on all of the notebooks represented here...


The Yoga 9i Gen 8 also excelled here. It didn't beat out all of the AMD Ryzen-powered competition in the multi-threaded test, but it was at the top of the pack in the single-threaded test, proving that it'll easily hold its own with some of the best thin-and-light machines we've tested to date.

Geekbench 5 Benchmarks

Geekbench is a cross-platform benchmark that simulates real world processing workloads in image processing and particle physics scenarios. We tested the notebooks featured here in Geekbench's single and multi-core workloads. It measures single-threaded performance allowing a single core to stretch its legs, and multi-threaded throughput to put all cores under a heavy load. 


In GeekBench 5, the Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8 outperformed all of the other thin-and-light laptops we've reviewed recently, in both single-core and multi-core performance. It's not surprising, given the fact that this laptop offers one of the latest top-tier Intel 13th Gen chips, but it's good to see it proven out in this synthetic benchmark.

However, let's look at more real-world metrics, next...

PCMark 10 Productivity And Content Creation Benchmarks

PCMark 10 uses a mix of real-world applications and simulated workloads to establish how well a given system performs productivity tasks, including image and video editing, web browsing, and OpenOffice document editing. While these scores appear to be all over the place, the systems are sorted by their overall PCMark score, which is the third (gray) bar in each cluster.


Overall, the Yoga 9i Gen 8 performed well in this test, and in the general PCMark 10 test, it was once again top of the pack. Much of that likely has to do with how well the laptop did in Digital Content Creation, however it also performed very well in other areas as well. 

3DMark Graphics And GPU Tests

3DMark has several different graphics tests which focus on different types of systems. We tested here with Night Raid, which is 3DMark's targeted benchmark for laptops with integrated graphics. This test presents a solid challenge for the system's CPU and GPU engines using DirectX 12's API.


The Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen performed about as expected here. That said, the laptop still handled things reasonably well overall, comparing favorably with other Intel Xe-equipped laptops in its weight class. It did drop in, however, well behind the AMD Ryzen 9 and 7 class machines with integrated Radeon 680M graphics.

In-Game Graphics And GPU Tests

Middle Earth: Shadow of War is a fun and beautiful title set in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings universe. To test the game's performance relative to other systems, we set the resolution to 1920x1080 and turned the visuals up to the High preset. For Gears Tactics, we used a similar resolution, but tested the game with its Low, Medium, and High presets to see how it scales. The frame rates here are the averages reported by each game's built-in benchmark utilities. 


We didn't expect the Yoga 9i Gen 8 to perform like a purpose-built gaming machine, and these benchmarks prove that out. However, they also prove that this laptop does have a little more graphics oomph than some of the other integrated graphics-equipped machines, except for the Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360. Despite the fact that the laptop doesn't match those with discrete graphics at the top of our chart here, it should still be able to handle some light-duty gaming on the go at Medium image quality settings.