Reviews

Lenovo Yoga C740 2-in-1 (15”) Convertible Laptop Review

Provided By: Lenovo

Price: $979.99

Closer Look:

The Lenovo Yoga C740 (15″) is an all-metal convertible laptop that has a pretty thin and lightweight body. The C740 provides a premium all-aluminum design that I find to be both modern and attractive. Its curved rear pieces provide a unique look that is nicely offset by the device’s strong hinges, and they make it more comfortable to carry. As a convertible PC, the C740 supports multiple versatile usage modes—like tent mode, stand mode, and tablet mode—in addition to the standard laptop style clamshell mode.

We weren’t able to open the lid of the laptop with a single hand. However, we were certainly impressed by the strength of the lid itself this thing barely moves when you try to bend it around itself. The strength of this laptop is likely boosted by the use of metal on the back and glass on the front of the display.

Keyboard, Touchpad:

Next, we have the base of the device, which is also very strong. Unlike some of its competitors, things are pretty busy around here. The keyboard itself offers above average comfort, with mostly well spaced keys and virtually no flex when you press them. That said, the travel distance of each keystroke is quite short, and the directional arrow keys are very cramped.

Then, there is matte glass on top of the touchpad, which feels agile and snappy, it’s a bit on the small side and lacking dedicated left and right click buttons. Last, you can find a fingerprint reader just beneath the “Enter” key.

Ports:

Lenovo shouldn’t be very proud of the I/O selection on this laptop. It has two USB Type-C 3.1 (Gen. 1) ports on the left (both can be used for charging and DisplayPort, as well as a headphone jack. Unfortunately, The Yoga lacks Thunderbolt 3 functionality.

The right side houses Two USB Type-A 3.1 (Gen. 1) port and the power button. The 65-watt AC adapter has a USB Type-C port a new addition compared to the preceding model, which came with a proprietary AC adapter.

Display:

img_20200505-5365722

The Yoga C740’s full-HD and touch-enabled display is one of its best features. First of all, it’s relatively bright, measuring more than 500 nits. I found the Dolby HDR panel offers reasonably crisp text, and at an impressive 500 nits of rated brightness, it’s viewable even in a room flooded with sunlight. Even better, the C740’s display supports Dolby Vision, a dynamic HDR format that allows for vivid color and deep, dark black levels when you’re watching supported content. You can also listen in Dolby Atmos over the Yoga’s integrated speakers.

Above the display, there’s a 720p fixed-focus camera. Quality is not its strong suit—the video feed appeared washed out and slightly grainy even with good light, which is common with laptop webcams at every price. The Yoga C740’s camera does have a nifty built-in privacy door that covers the lens to thwart snoopers, however, and it’s one of the best-designed privacy doors I’ve encountered. It’s virtually invisible, with a tiny lever built into the display bezel and the rest of the door hidden behind the outer display glass. It’s perhaps the best example of the exemplary attention to detail that is present throughout the Yoga C740’s design. The camera lacks IR sensors for face-recognition logins, but you can still log into Windows Hello by using the fingerprint reader.

Internals:

It’s easy to remove the back cover. After taking out all the screws, we can see its internals. The model I’m testing comes with 12GB DDR4 the RAM is soldered onto the motherboard, users can upgrade the M.2-2280 SSD and swap the non-soldered Wi-Fi module. Furthermore, the two fans can be cleaned and the battery is also user-replaceable. The WiFi is a Intel Wireless 9560 which provides Bluetooth 5 and 2×2 802.11ac WiFi including wave 2 features such as 160MHz channels.

You can also see the Dolby Atmos speaker system, I expected the speakers to be horrible but they are really not. They’re fine.

Performance:

The Core i7-10510U is a new Ultra Low Voltage (ULV) processor from Intel. In this case, ULV refers to the processor’s typical TDP of 15 watts. The four cores of this processor have clock rates ranging from 1.8 to 4.8 GHz.

The processor is able to exceed its TDP limit by a fair amount, at which point it can consume up to 43 watts, which translates into a clock speed of 4.1 GHz. Over the course of our Cinebench test, the consumption drops to 23 watts and the clock speed to 3 GHz. During the Cinebench loop, the consumption drops to about 16.5 watts and the clock rate to around 2.6 GHz after a few loops.

The results display that the i7-10510U processor’s single-core score is 386cb and its multi-core score is 1475cb.

Geekbench scores are 1155 for Single-Core and 3252 for Multi-Core Score

geekbench-8639190

Thermals are very acceptable. The laptop is never too hot to touch (unlike some of the other laptops. The fan noise is minimal even at full tilt.

SSD Speeds:

The Intel 512GB NVMe SSD included here offers okay speeds, and there’s even room to add a second SSD if this one doesn’t cut it.

Battery Life:

The Yoga C740 sports a 60Wh battery. In testing the The better performance setting with the display set to 70% brightness, backlit keyboard on, I did manage to get just under five hours of battery life on the YOGA C740. When set to better battery, I was able to get nearly eight hours and six hours respectively. Given Lenovo claims up to 11.5 hours of battery life with HDR or 15 hours on the non-HDR version, I didn’t really come close. Of course, turning your brightness down and disabling the backlit keyboard will also increase battery life. During testing on battery I was strictly web browsing, document editing, and watching Netflix.

The YOGA C740 also features Rapid Charge which allows you to charge for one hour in standby mode or while powered off and get up to 80% battery life.

The Lenovo YOGA C740 2-in-1 laptops is a great option to consider for both basic business and general personal use.

The Yoga C740 from Lenovo is an impressive 2-in-1 convertible laptop, It’s flexible and rugged enough to use in various modes, good computing performance, and thoughtful extras like the webcam privacy filter. I'd like some more ports and thunderbolt support. It's still a sleek aluminum convertible that's undeniably well built. The displays 500 nits brightness with Dolby Vision HDR is no doubt also going to be attractive for a lot of people. Additionally, there are two pretty well sounding speakers. While they produce loud and dynamic audio, there is a noticeable lack of punch, I’d be happy to recommend the C740 to anyone unless you want to do serious gaming.

8.7
DESIGN:
10
DISPLAY:
9
PERFORMANCE:
9
KEYBOARD:
7.7
TOUCHPAD:
9.5
THERMALS:
8.5
BATTERY:
8.5
AUDIO:
7
PRICE:
9.5

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