Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i Gen 11 Aura Edition Review: A Slick Creator’s Laptop at a Steep Price

First, we measure workstation performance with SPECviewperf 2020 (version 3.1), which renders, rotates, and zooms in and out of solid and wireframe models at 1080p resolution. The three subtests represent PTC’s Creo CAD platform, Autodesk’s Maya modeling and simulation software for film, TV, and games, and Dassault Systemes’ SolidWorks 3D rendering package.

Next up is Blender, an open-source 3D content creation suite for modeling, animation, simulation, and compositing. We record the time it takes for Blender 4.2 to render three distinct scenes to measure CPU and GPU rendering performance.

Then, we run an automated extension, PugetBench for Creators from workstation maker Puget Systems, in Adobe Premiere Pro. The extension executes and times real-world video editing tasks, such as file export, high-resolution encoding with various codecs, processing and decoding different types of source media, and applying GPU-accelerated special effects. (The Yoga didn’t complete the Adobe Premiere test due to an issue with the benchmark itself, so we excluded that chart below.)

Finally, we also use PugetBench for Creators to test DaVinci Resolve Studio 18 video editor performance on systems suitable for that challenging app. As with Adobe Premiere, these automated tasks and features push the CPU and GPU, letting us gauge real-world media creation speeds.

Gauging the Yoga’s workstation performance is somewhat difficult, since we weren’t able to test every competitor on every benchmark. Of the systems we tested, the ProArt P16 ran most of the same tests as the Lenovo, so we can compare them directly.

Compared with the productivity and graphics benchmarks, the Yoga Pro 9i was much more consistent in its workstation performance. In our Blender tests, the Lenovo lost out to the Asus every time, with the Asus sometimes doubling its GPU score. That makes sense, as the ProArt has an RTX 5090 to the Yoga’s 5060.

In our SPECviewperf tests, though, the Lenovo beat the P16 across the board, decisively in the Maya and SolidWorks tests. Since the two benchmarks evaluate similar functions, it’s hard to say whether the Lenovo laptop is better at content creation than its competitors. It will likely come down to the individual application.