Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 Review: Oh, Snap! Elite CPU Speed at a Heavy Price

Our first group of tests represents workloads such as content creation, office productivity, and raw CPU speeds. Our go-to overall productivity and storage test, PCMark 10, is not yet Snapdragon-compatible, so we focused on core-stressing tests and media tasks.

The three primary tests presented below are CPU-centric or processor-intensive. Maxon’s Cinebench 2024 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs’ Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the transcoding freeware HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.

Additionally, we have encountered issues with Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Creators Adobe Photoshop 25 test on systems with Qualcomm Arm processors, so we’ve skipped it here until we resolve our problems with the test.

These tests are where the Slim 7x stood out, outperforming its Intel x86 rivals as well as the MacBook Air in multi-core performance, which is essential for multitasking and overall system responsiveness. The Yoga also defeated the x86 competitors in single-core speed, which is important for single-app and basic task responsiveness. 

Its Snapdragon chip only landed within 75% of the Apple M5’s single-core Cinebench 2024 result, however. Surprisingly, it put up the best HandBrake time on the list, finishing the 1080p video transcoding task nearly 90 seconds faster than the M5.

However, this performance advantage falls away if you run apps through Windows 11 Prism x86 emulation. Apps developed for x86 processors, like Intel and AMD, can’t run directly on an Arm-based processor like the Snapdragon X2 Elite, so Windows Prism converts an app’s existing x86 code into Arm-compatible code on the fly so it runs on Arm chips, though this impacts performance. 

In Cinebench, for instance, running the x86 version of the benchmark on the Zenbook results in about 44% lower multi-core performance and about 41% lower single-core performance compared with the version designed for the Arm CPU architecture. 

Most popular apps nowadays have Arm versions of their software, so this shouldn’t be too much of an issue; you just need to make sure you’re downloading the right version to get the most out of this laptop. A shrinking number of Windows apps simply will not work on an Arm system, or will run so poorly through emulation that it’s not worth the hassle.