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

The Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8 comes equipped with a 75Wh battery, which is rather stout for an ultralight 3lb machine, and could mean good things for battery life overall. That said, the Yogi 9i Gen 8 we tested also came equipped with a 4K UHD display, which will pull some additional power as well, lighting up all those pixels.

Battery Life And Power Tests

Here we're running PCMark's Battery test that runs a 1080p video playback workload in a continuous loop, with the Windows 11 Movies and TV player, until the battery is exhausted. In all tests, Windows Quiet Hours / Focus Assist has been enabled and the displays are calibrated with lux meters on pure white screens to as close to 115 lux as possible. Wi-Fi is left enabled, which we feel is a common use case. However, enabling airplane mode in a travel use case, for example, would provide additional battery life over the results we'll show you here. 


Generally, this Yogi 9i configuration was middle-of-the-road in terms of battery life. Anecdotally speaking, it was able to provide enough juice for 8 hours of light, non-stop content creation and web surfing. That said, in local video playback with this test, the machine proved to deliver nearly 11 hours of uptime, which is more than adequate. However, heavier tasks will deplete the battery quicker than they would with other machines with lower resolution displays. If you're looking for a battery powerhouse, we'd suggest going with the 2880x1800 display option of the Yogi 9i Gen 8, perhaps.

Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8 Thermal And Acoustic Performance

Our thermal and acoustic tests involved running 3DMark's built-in stress test on the Lenovo Yogi 9i Gen 8 until its fans fully spun up and its thermal solution was saturated. We also set the machine to both its Optimized and Ultra Performance modes, the latter of which is essentially a worst-case scenario in terms of the system's peak noise output.


For the most part, the laptop remained relatively quiet, even during stress-testing. We found that it was relatively easy to get the fans to spin up, even during what would be considered relatively simple tasks. However, even with the fans spun-up, the laptop was far from what we would consider loud, clocking in at just 42.6dB from around 18 inches away. It's not silent, and you can hear it in a quiet room, but we didn't find this machine to be offensive at all.


Those fans did do a pretty good job of keeping the system cool though. At its hottest spot, the keyboard deck measured in at around 101°F, with the keyboard itself being kept to around 97°F or under. The bottom of the laptop was definitely warmer, and might be uncomfortable on bare legs in warmer climates. It measured in at up to around 109°F, which is still very acceptable for a laptop like this. And, it's impressive for a thing and light laptop with a 28W TDP processor under its hood, which presents a bigger thermal challenge than a lower-power U-Series processor. 

Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8: Our Review Verdict

We had a hunch that the Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8 would be a great-performing laptop after perusing its specs, but we were still pleasantly surprised oveall. As you can see from our testing, it beat out most of the competition in its class in most of benchmarks we ran it through. In day to day use, it was easily able to handle mainstream computing tasks and image editing workloads with aplomb, while offering good battery life. Intel's Core i7-1360P processor really shines here, ensuring the Yoga 9i excelled at every task we threw at it, save for perhaps heavier gaming workloads.

Add in its premium presentation and a stunning 4K OLED touch display, and you have a winner. This laptop isn't perfect and its battery life with that high-end display option, while good, wasn't among the best out there, but in most other metrics, the new Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8 offers a very compelling 14-inch premium laptop experience.

Of course, there is some serious competition here too. The Dell XPS 13 Plus immediately jumps to mind. Despite its non-convertible design, there's a lot to like about the XPS 13 Plus, especially if you like Dell's recent design language, with its invisible trackpad. 

Regardless, if you're in the market for a thin-and-light laptop, the Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8 is among a new breed of PC laptop PC offerings that's hard to beat. It's not cheap at $1,530 as tested, but with its included pen stylus support, a gorgeous 4K display, 360-degree hinge and a 100 Watt fast charger, there's a fair amount of features and functionality on offer here, and it does drop in just below Samsung's new Galaxy Book3 Pro 360 as well. With its combination of features, capability and build quality, the new Lenovo Yogi 9i Gen 8 is easy to recommend.