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The Lenovo Yoga C940 (15-inch) is one of the premium consumer 2-in-1 laptops with a discreet GPU that caught all my attention. We recently revised the 14-inch model of the Lenovo Yoga C940, which may be one for the Best laptops out the re, but the Yoga C940 (15-inch) doesn’t meet the hype. For $1,639 (beginning at $1,369), the Yoga C940 offers quite a strong performance and graphics together with strong speakers, a bright 15.6-inch display, and a bunch of security features. This is our Lenovo Yoga C940 (15-inch) Review.
However, the system is short on gates, offers poor viewing angles, and has a stylus that is difficult to remove. Besides, the battery of the Yoga C940 could have been better for a laptop with a 1080p panel. But if you’re looking for a first-class machine with powerful performance and graphics, the Lenovo Yoga C940 is a reliable general-purpose laptop.
Lenovo Yoga C940 (15-inch) Review: Design
The Lenovo Yoga C940 (15-inch) features a gray aluminum chassis and an elegant glossy yoga logo in the upper left corner. Lenovo shows off its speaker hinge at the back, and when you open it with its protruding lip, you’ll also see it at the front. It’s as simple on the inside as it is on the outside, with a grey rim-to-edge keyboard deck. And while it still exudes excellent aesthetics, it would be nice if Lenovo played with some new colors.
The edges are pleasantly narrow, thanks to the extra space provided by the protruding webcam. The webcam has a neat privacy shutter, and the deck features a fingerprint reader on the right. The Yoga C940 can rotate 360 degrees, and its speaker-hinge follows me like Sauron’s eye when I turn it. For a 15-inch laptop, the Lenovo Yoga C940 is incredibly scarce on ports. On the left, there are just two Thunderbolt 3 ports, a headphone jack, and a power jack. On the right side, the re’s room for the power button, a USB 3.1 port, and a stylus dock.
Keyboard, TouchPad, and Stylus
Typing on the keyboard of the Lenovo Yoga C940 didn’t feel as good as using a ThinkPad, but it was still clicking and comfortable. The keys are a little too stiff, and I could have typed faster if they were lighter. By default, Lenovo’s keys have white backlighting that you can set between two different brightness settings. Trying to get the stylus of the Yoga C940 out of the slot can be difficult if you don’t have big nails. It should have been a pop-up stylus like we see in the Galaxy Note phones.
Apart from that, the stylus was sensitive when I drew a sloppy-looking version of my colleague. It supports 2,048 levels of pressure sensitivity and charges itself when plugged into the chassis. It can be used actively for up to 2 hours. The pen also features two buttons that you can program yourself as per your requirements in the Lenovo Pen Settings app. The 4.1 x 2.8-inches touchpad is on the compact side, but the surface is smooth, and the buttons offer a pleasant click. Thanks to Windows 10 precision drivers, three-finger tabs and two-finger scrolling have worked well.
Lenovo Yoga C940 (15-inch) Review: Display
The Yoga C940’s 15.6-inch, 1920 x 1080 (Full-HD) display is surprisingly bright and relatively colorful. In the Mulan trailer, the greenery that surrounds the city of the titular character appeared on the Yoga C940’s display. And while the screen is bright enough to reveal the surrounding furniture in Mulan’s dimly lit house, the shiny panel of the Yoga C940 mainly revealed my reflection. I noticed that the viewing angles were not as right, because I had to look at the dead center of the display to see everything as bright and crisp as it should be.
However, the display was sharp enough to reveal bright strands of hair on Tzi Ma’s head. According to our colorimeter, the C940’s yoga panel covered 105% of the sRGB color gamut, which is not as colorful as the average premium laptop (124%), or the Prestige 15 (159%). However, the ZenBook 15 (103%) was defeated. With 432 nits, the display of the Yoga C940 crushed the category average (354 nits) and even slipped past the Prestige 15 (428 nits) and the ZenBook 15 (279 nits).
Audio
Except for the 16-inch Apple MacBook Pro, I haven’t heard good laptop speakers in a long time, but the soundbar hinge on the Yoga C940 made my ears shiver with joy. I listened to Rise Against’s “Help Is On The Way,” and the guitar nailed all the mid- and highs of the electric guitar’s power chords. The next vocals were loud and clear, well balanced with the background guitar. Even the drums sounded pleasantly heavy and thick.
The Yoga 940’s speaker-hinge was supported by the Dolby Atmos Speaker System audio app. It offers a variety of presets, including Dynamic, Movie, Music, Game, and Voice. You can customize your EQ in the Personalize tab. The music sounded best in the Music > Balanced setting.
Graphics
Gaming on the go is made easy with the Yoga C940’s Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q GPU with 4GB VRAM. At the 3DMark Fire Strike synthetic graphics benchmark, the Yoga C940 scored 7,478, surpassing the average of 5,846 premium laptops. While its competitors had the same GPU, the Yoga C940 beat both the Prestige 15 (6,816) and ZenBook 15 (6,783). In practice testing, the Yoga C940 nailed 167 frames per second to the Dirt 3 benchmark, crushing the 61-fps premium laptop average. It won from the ZenBook 15 (153 fps) but lagged behind the MSI Prestige 15 (181 fps).
On the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark test (max, 1080p), the Yoga C940 averages 29 fps, and while that’s technically below 30 fps, which marks a game as playable, you can easily lower the settings to get a smoother frame rate. It also beats the average of the Prestige 15, which was 23 fps. The Yoga C940 beat 55 fps on the Hitman benchmark (Ultra, 1080p), which slides past the 47 fps of the Prestige 15. On the Middle-earth: Shadow of War test (max, 1080p), the Lenovo Yoga C940 achieved 40 fps over the MSI Prestige 15’s 31 fps.
Lenovo Yoga C940 (15-inch) Review: Performance
Packaged in the Lenovo Yoga C940 is an Intel’s Core i7-9750H processor with 16GB RAM that tore through 35 Google Chrome tabs and five YouTube videos (1080p) without missing a beat like I was beaming Spotify in the background. In the Geekbench 4.3 overall performance test, the Yoga C940 nailed 21,825, crushing the average of 16,821 premium laptops. It also beat the Intel Core i7-10710U CPU in the MSI Prestige 15 (19,022) and the Intel Core i7-10510U CPU in the ZenBook 15 (17,866).
The Lenovo Yoga C940 took 11 minutes and 11 seconds to convert a 4K video to 1080p format in our HandBrake benchmark, which is above the 19:33 category average. It also passed the MSI Prestige 15 (14:46) and the Asus ZenBook 15 (13:17). Yoga’s 512GB SSD copied 4.97GB of data in 11 seconds, equivalent to 463 MBps, slightly less than the premium laptop average (608MBps). The 1TB SSD in the MSI Prestige 15 (661 MBps) and Asus ZenBook 15 (771 MBps) were also lost.
Lenovo Yoga C940 (15-inch) Review: Battery Life
The Lenovo Yoga C940 has quite a bit of battery life, but we’ve seen better than other laptops with 1080p displays. After the Yoga C940 surfed the web continuously over Wi-Fi with 150 nits of brightness, the battery died after 8 hours and 46 minutes, which is just above the average of an 8:41 premium laptop. Although it survived the Prestige 15 (7:55) and the ZenBook 15 (UX534F) (8:34), it didn’t even get past the Dell XPS 15 (2019), which ran a 4K display and a GTX 1650 GPU 8:48.
Heat
Everything is cool under the hood of the Lenovo Yoga C940. After streaming a 1080p video, the bottom hit 87 degrees Fahrenheit, bringing it safely below our 95-degree comfort threshold. The center of the keyboard and touchpad touched 87 degrees and 80 degrees, respectively. The hottest the machine got was 89 degrees, just above the F10 key.
Price and Configuration Options
I tested the $1,639 version of the Yoga C940, which is equipped with an Intel Core i7-9750H processor, 16GB RAM, a 512GB SSD PCIe, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q GPU with 4GB VRAM and a 1080p display. The base model drops you down to $1,369, leaving you with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD. Meanwhile, the ball-on-the-wall model will give you a Core i9-9880H CPU with vPro, a 2TB SSD, and a 4K display, all for $2,349.
If you are looking for something different, consider taking a look at our best video editing laptops and The Best Business Laptops articles.
Lenovo Yoga C940 (15-inch) Review: Conclusion
When you pick up the Lenovo Yoga C940, you’ll be honored with powerful performance and graphics, a powerful speaker-hinge, bright display, and convenient security features. However, the Yoga C940 suffers from poor viewing angles and a lack of ports. And although the battery life is slightly above average, it could have been a lot better. For $1,799, you can choose the MSI Prestige 15, which offers a more colorful 4K display with nearly equal battery life, as well as a slimmer and more visually appealing design.
But overall, if you want a great pair of speakers and reliable performance, then go with the Lenovo Yoga C940.
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