Is the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x the best Copilot+ PC for most people? After test-driving it for the past couple of weeks, I can safely say it's a top contender for the title.

From its thin, stylish design to its strong battery life and crisp OLED display, there's a lot to love about the Yoga Slim 7x. It's one of the first in a new collection of Copilot+ PCs, paving the way for AI-powered laptops that look to change how we interact with our devices. The initial batch of Copilot+ PCs features Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus chips, which include a neural processing unit (NPU) that allows for on-device AI. In this case, that AI is Microsoft Copilot.

Since Microsoft announced Copilot+ PCs at Microsoft Build 2024, many have wondered how Qualcomm's Snapdragon X chipsets will hold up in real-world use. I found out first-hand while testing the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x.

Here's a look at where this Snapdragon-powered laptop shines, where it falls short, and why it might be the best Copilot+ PC for most of us.

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x has two configurations. The base model costs $1,199 and includes the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 CPU, Integrated Qualcomm Adreno graphics, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage.

The premium model, priced at $1,289, includes the same CPU, graphics, and RAM, but increases storage to 1TB. Our review unit is the base configuration.

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x has a sleek, thin design with a unique cosmic blue casing. It's reminiscent of a MacBook Air, from the keycap font to the new location of the Lenovo logo in the center of the lid. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though. This new design is pretty stylish, and the metallic blue finish helps it stand out.

The aluminum chassis doesn't just look good -- it's also durable. The Yoga Slim 7x passed the MIL-STD 810H military-grade durability certification, meaning it can withstand the rigors of life in your laptop bag.

The keyboard deck includes a full row of function keys with pre-assigned media functions for brightness, volume, setting, screen capture, and more. There's also a dedicated Copilot key in the lower right corner of the keyboard, which launches the Copilot app. This is handy for quickly pulling up Microsoft's AI assistant, but it does mean there is only one control key on the Yoga Slim 7x, which may be a drawback for some people.

The top-firing speakers line the left and right edges of the keyboard deck, providing a pleasing audio experience. The right edge of the keyboard deck has a switch to activate the webcam shutter for added privacy.

At 12.8 x 8.8 x 0.51 inches and 2.8 pounds, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x is thinner and lighter than its Copilot+ PC competitor the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7th Edition (11.85 x 8.67 x 0.72 inches, 3.67 pounds). However, the MacBook Air 13 M3 (11.97 x 8.46 x 0.44 inches, 2.7 pounds) sneaks in under it, but it's worth noting that Apple's laptop features a 13.6-inch display compared to the 14.5-inch panel on the Slim 7x.

The Yoga Slim 7x's port selection is limited. It only has USB4 Type-C ports -- two on the left and one on the right side above the power button and webcam shutter switch. One of the ports on the left-hand side is for charging, so you effectively have two USB Type-C ports for everything else. There are no USB Type-A ports.

This might be fine for some users but could become an issue if you use tools and accessories like an external hard drive, a USB thumb drive, or an external mouse. Most of these accessories are still designed for USB Type-A ports, so you may need a USB Type-A to USB Type-C adapter to use them with the Yoga Slim 7x. Alternatively, add one of the best USB Type-C hubs or a laptop docking station to your setup for a more comprehensive selection of ports.

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x features a 14.5-inch 3K 2994 x 1840 OLED touch display. It's crisp and colorful and fared well overall on our display tests. It covered 155% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, far above the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 and the MacBook Air M3.

The Yoga Slim 7x didn't do as well as its competitors on average SDR screen brightness, scoring 464 nits. That's slightly lower than the MacBook Air M3 (476 nits) and about 100 points below the Surface Laptop 7 (567 nits); however, it's still a solid result that beats the premium laptop average of 457 nits. The Yoga Slim 7x also boasts the highest max brightness of this group, hitting 785 nits at 100% in HDR.

The OLED display looked great during my everyday use. The colorful sci-fi sets and costumes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds looked fantastic, as did most of the games I tried. The 90Hz refresh rate ensures everything is smooth and responsive, too.

The only real drawback I noticed is reflections. Even if you crank up the brightness on the Yoga Slim 7x's display, you can usually still clearly see your reflection unless you're looking at a bright white window. This was noticeable during low-light scenes in shows and movies. I wish there was an anti-reflective layer over the display; otherwise, it looks sharp and colorful.

The keyboard is one of my favorite features of the Yoga Slim 7x. It offers a fantastic typing experience, from the soft texture of the keycaps to the satisfying 1.5mm of key travel and tactile feedback. In fact, the typing experience on the Yoga Slim 7x is so good that I broke my typing speed record on it.

On the Monkeytype typing test, I scored a whopping 105 wpm with 100% accuracy, the highest I've scored on any keyboard I've ever tested, laptop and standalone keyboards included.

Lenovo's laptop keyboards are usually among my favorites (the Lenovo Slim 7i formerly held the record for my top typing score). So, I wasn't surprised the Yoga Slim 7x featured such a stellar typing experience. The keyboard layout perfectly balances keycap size and spacing, which helps increase typing speed.

The touchpad on the Yoga Slim 7x is equally impressive. It's roomy without being so big that it encroaches on typing space. It has a soft matte texture and never got overly warm during my tests. Mouse movement with the touchpad is smooth and responsive.

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x has four 2-watt speakers with Dolby Atmos support. They sounded good playing games, watching movies, and listening to music. I never needed to crank up the volume past 60% to hear videos and games clearly.

The speakers delivered the smooth, bassy tones of the Lofi Girl stream on YouTube with good balance and detail. Post Malone's Into the Spider-Verse hit "Sunflower" sounded punchy and smooth, especially at the higher end. Highs and mids sounded fuller than lower notes on the Yoga Slim 7x, but the speakers still sounded good.

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x isn't a gaming PC, but it can easily manage some casual gaming. It scored 5800 on the 3DMark FireStrike graphics test and averaged 20.8 frames per second in Sid Meier's Civilization VI: Gathering Storm in 1080p. That's slightly higher than the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 (5792, 20.6 fps) but significantly lower than the MacBook Air M3, which averaged 41 fps in Civilization VI.

The Yoga Slim 7x performed surprisingly well in my hands-on gaming tests. I downloaded a handful of games from my Steam library, including Death's Door, Risk of Rain 2, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and Elder Scrolls Online. I was skeptical about how well the Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 chip would hold up with gaming, so I started with a fairly low-spec game and worked my way up to more graphics-intensive and multiplayer titles.

Death's Door and Risk of Rain 2 are both lightweight games. Both ran well overall, although Risk of Rain 2 had a bit of lag when loading in new planets. Death's Door was smooth and responsive, around 60 fps on 1920 x 1280p.

Horizon: Zero Dawn was where I expected the Yoga Slim 7x to begin to stumble. It isn't a particularly demanding title for a desktop gaming PC, but it can be a horrible experience on laptops with integrated graphics.

I was pleasantly surprised, though. It launched and ran smoothly, albeit on low graphics settings. Combat was quick and responsive, and I didn't notice any dropped frames. Of course, the Yoga Slim 7x struggled when I tried to turn it up to medium and high graphics settings, but the fact that it ran the game so well at all is impressive.

Lastly, I tried multiplayer gaming on the Yoga Slim 7x with Elder Scrolls Online. This is where things got interesting. ESO ran noticeably worse than the other titles I tried. Load times were slow, and the Yoga Slim 7x struggled to render graphics correctly, especially details like grass and leaves. It was effectively unplayable, even on low graphics settings. So, the Yoga Slim 7x can manage some casual gaming, but it has limits.

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x performed well overall in our performance benchmarks. It scored 2,448 on the Geekbench 6 single-core benchmark and an impressive 13,750 on the Geekbench 6 multi-core benchmark. That far exceeds our premium laptop Geekbench 6 multi-core average of 9,595 and even bests the MacBook Air M3's score of 12,087. However, the Yoga Slim 7x fell behind the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 in both single-core and multi-core performance, with the Surface Laptop 7 scoring 2,809 and 14,426, respectively.

The Yoga Slim 7x completed the HandBrake video transcoding benchmark in a speedy 5 minutes and 16 seconds. That time matches the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7's and beats the MacBook Air M3 by over a minute.

It's worth noting that the Yoga Slim 7x outpaced the MacBook Air M3 on the Geekbench 6 multi-core benchmark but fell over 600 points behind on the single-core benchmark. This indicates that the individual cores in the Yoga Slim 7x's Qualcomm CPU are slower than the individual cores in Apple's M3 chip. However, when all of Qualcomm's CPU cores work together, they are faster overall.

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x is a Copilot+ PC, meaning it includes a Neural Processing Unit and runs Microsoft's Copilot AI platform locally. Laptop Mag has developed a thorough testing process for AI PCs like the Yoga Slim 7x to compare AI performance across devices. Our process tests how NPUs handle tasks like image generation and machine learning to give an overview of the real-world AI performance you can expect from an AI PC.

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x is one of the highest-performing laptops in the first batch of Copilot+ PCs, especially in the more budget-friendly range. It scored 2,903 on the CPU component of the Geekbench ML benchmark and 2,303 on the GPU component. Both scores are higher than those of the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 and even the Microsoft Surface Pro 11 (which has the more powerful Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100 CPU).

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x also performed well on the UL Procyon AI Computer Vision benchmark, scoring 1,710. The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 lagged by about 20 points, but the Surface Pro 11 was only 7 points behind the Yoga Slim 7x.

All that AI performance allows you to tap into various Copilot AI features, including live captions, Studio Effects, Cocreator, and everyday generative AI and chat tasks with Copilot. Live captions was one of my favorite AI features on the Yoga Slim 7x. It can generate subtitles for any audio playing on your device and even translate for you. The captions aren't always perfect, but Copilot is pretty good with clean audio.

Cocreator is a local image generation tool you can access through the Paint app. You can start with a doodle or sketch of your own and have Cocreator finish it for you. If you want to generate images using just text, Copilot can do that locally, too. Just hit the Copilot key on the keyboard deck and type in whatever you want Copilot to generate.

The general Copilot window the Copilot key opens is also where you can type in questions or ask for generated text. I really appreciated that Copilot displays links to its sources alongside its chat responses, allowing you to double-check any info easily.

Studio Effects is handy for anyone who frequently attends video calls or Zoom meetings. It uses AI to locally create different video effects such as automatic framing, eye contact adjustment, background blur, and a few creative effects.

The Yoga Slim 7x has strong battery life, but can't quite beat some of its rivals. It lasted an impressive 14 hours and 14 minutes on our battery life test, which is more than enough to get through a full day and far longer than our premium laptop average of 10 hours and 8 minutes.

However, the MacBook Air M3 outlasted the Yoga Slim 7x at 15 hours and 13 minutes. The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 scored better than both competitors at 15 hours and 44 minutes. All three are great times, but if laptops with the best battery life are your top priority, the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 might be a better Copilot+ PC for you than the Yoga Slim 7x.

The Yoga Slim 7x includes a Full HD IR camera with Windows Hello Face ID sign-in support. It has a built-in privacy shutter, which you can switch on or off from the right edge of the keyboard deck.

The Yoga Slim 7x's webcam quality is fairly good. My test video looked soft, but not blurry. The "Portrait Lighting" feature in Windows Studio Effects helped improve image quality overall. The mic quality is decent and good enough for everyday video calls.

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x managed heat reasonably well in our tests and my everyday use. The highest temperature we recorded in our thermal tests was 86 degrees near the middle of the back edge of the underside of the keyboard deck. The warmest the touchpad got was 80.5 degrees. Both temperatures are well below our 95-degree comfort threshold.

I only noticed the Yoga Slim 7x getting warm during my gaming tests. It quickly went from being nice and cool to uncomfortably hot in some parts of the keyboard deck. Unfortunately, one of the warmest areas was the upper left side of the keyboard deck, right under the WASD keys. So, if you want to game on the Yoga Slim 7x, I'd recommend using a Bluetooth controller instead of the keyboard.

Out of the box, the Yoga Slim 7x comes ready to go with Windows 11 Home (or Pro for an upgrade fee). You have the standard Windows and Microsoft apps, including the Copilot app, Microsoft Edge, the Xbox app, trial versions of the Microsoft Office apps, and Lenovo Vantage, which is a hub for device info, settings, and warranty details.

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x includes a 1-year limited warranty for parts and labor. You can upgrade or extend your warranty coverage through Lenovo's Premium Care packages if you want more peace of mind and access to 24/7 customer service. For more information on Lenovo's customer service, see how it performed in our annual Tech Support Showdown report.

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x delivers smooth performance, strong battery life, and a host of AI features in a lightweight, stylish chassis at a fair mid-range price. It's a fantastic all-around Windows 11 laptop for students and professionals. While it can't compete with purpose-built gaming laptops, it can handle some casual gaming.

Even if you aren't explicitly looking for an AI PC, the Yoga Slim 7x is worth considering. The Snapdragon X Elite CPU delivers solid, stable performance in everyday tasks like web browsing or media consumption, on top of the on-device AI features from Microsoft Copilot. Plus, it has a typing experience that's tough to beat and a crisp OLED display.

If you're looking for a Windows alternative to the MacBook Air, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x should be on your shortlist. It rivals the MacBook Air M3's performance across the board, with only a few exceptions (like graphics processing). Overall, for $1,200, it's tough to go wrong with the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, and it makes a great introduction to the intriguing new world of AI PCs.