The Lenovo Slim Professional 9i ($2,149.99 as examined) falls into one in all our favourite laptop computer classes: full-fledged desktop substitute techniques made for content material creators and scientific and engineering professionals. Pairing a beefy Intel CPU with a discrete Nvidia graphics resolution, these near-workstation notebooks are geared towards getting cool issues performed. Excessive on fashion, well-built, and outfitted with an eye-popping mini LED show, the Slim Professional 9i delivers a whole lot of energy and quite a bit to like. That stated, we nonetheless suggest the lighter Dell XPS 15 because the class chief.
Configurations: Choices Galore
Made to energy by way of demanding media workloads and complicated STEM purposes, the Slim Professional 9i is outfitted with a potent Intel Core i9-13905H processor and 32GB of RAM, together with a 6GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 cellular GPU and a 1TB solid-state drive. Our Finest Purchase configuration was priced at $2,149.99 at this writing, however pricing and availability have various within the weeks that the system has been on sale, so keep watch over product listings. It’s possible you’ll discover it cheaper.
Whereas Lenovo’s Slim Professional line is out there in each 14- and 16-inch sizes with each Intel and AMD processors, the Slim Professional 9i seen right here is bought with just one CPU possibility. Nevertheless, you may configure the laptop computer with a step-up GeForce RTX 4060 GPU, and you will find two M.2 slots for including storage after buy, although you will haven’t any possibility to take action when shopping for from Lenovo.
Design: Fundamental Seems to be, Premium Construct
The chassis of the Slim Professional 9i appears to be like fairly fundamental, with a uninteresting grey end and minor highlights like a small Lenovo emblem in a nook of the lid and a mirrored stripe behind the webcam. However one contact and you may perceive that the all-aluminum chassis is extra than simply office-friendly. The lid and deck do not flex, whether or not you are lifting the open laptop computer by a nook of the palm relaxation, opening and shutting the lid, or pounding away on the keyboard. Lenovo claims the Slim Professional 9i has handed 21 MIL-STD 810H sturdiness checks, so it ought to maintain up effectively to the bumps and bangs of on a regular basis life.
Measuring 0.71 by 14.3 by 9.6 inches and weighing almost 5 kilos, that is clearly a desktop substitute relatively than ultraportable, however actually manageable in a briefcase or backpack. It is almost a pound heavier than the Dell XPS 15 (9530) or the Asus Vivobook Professional 16, however noticeably lighter than the HP Envy 16. Lenovo’s energy brick or AC adapter is comparatively trim, as effectively, delivering 170 watts of energy with out being too heavy or cumbersome.
The near-black anodized end can also be surprisingly efficient at warding off fingerprints, as is the big touchpad. Measuring 7 inches diagonally, the latter is among the largest I’ve seen, however I used to be pleasantly shocked by how effectively it distinguished an intentional contact or swipe from a stray graze of a palm—one thing that is nearly unavoidable with a touchpad this huge. The floor feels nice with a reasonably distinct click on, due to a mechanical clickable floor as an alternative of a simulated response through haptic suggestions.
The backlit keyboard can also be predictably luminous, with Lenovo’s trademark 1.5mm key journey and barely rounded keycaps offering a comfortably spaced keyboard with numeric keypad. Now we have a number of small complaints in regards to the cramped arrow-key cluster and the not-quite-full-width number-pad keys, however these are minor quibbles with an in any other case main keyboard.
Utilizing the 16-Inch Lenovo Slim Professional 9i: Show, Ports, Audio system, and Webcam
Flanking the keyboard is a pair of audio system—two of a complete of six, with Dolby Atmos sound. The 5-megapixel webcam above the show captures wonderful element and colour, and I did not encounter any points when transferring between totally different lighting circumstances. The webcam additionally has a pointy, extensive image, capturing extra of the house round you, which is a plus in the event you do not wish to see your face filling the whole body everytime you’re on a Zoom name. The digicam additionally offers Home windows Good day face recognition for password-free logins, and has a shutter swap on the facet of the system to guard your privateness. A helpful LED indicator lets you recognize when the digicam is lively.
However the standout function of the Lenovo Slim Professional 9i is definitely the show. The 16-inch IPS panel has mini LED backlighting, giving it a brighter, bolder look than different IPS screens and a depth of distinction that rivals that of OLED panels. With 3,200-by-2,000-pixel decision, the display screen’s vivid colours look attractive from any angle, although the glass floor picks up a whole lot of reflections. It would not, nonetheless, decide up many fingerprints regardless of its contact functionality. And creators or players in quest of excessive refresh charges will discover the 165Hz display screen retains movies and animations wanting exceptionally easy.
On the Slim Professional 9i’s proper facet, you will discover a full-size SD card slot and a USB 3.2 Kind-A port. A second USB-A port, a USB-C Thunderbolt 4 port, and an HDMI output are on the left. The number of connections is welcome, particularly in contrast with laptops that count on Thunderbolt to interchange each port or require an adapter to plug in an exterior monitor.
The mixture of HDMI output and an SD card slot is a specific boon for anybody working with video, making it that a lot simpler to add video recordsdata to the system for modifying after which watch playback of edited materials on a bigger monitor or TV.
Lastly, the Slim Professional 9i has Wi-Fi 6E for fast networking and Bluetooth 5.1 for connecting audio and wi-fi equipment, although a 3.5mm audio jack is supplied for wired headphones or audio system.
Testing the 16-Inch Lenovo Slim Professional 9i: A Heavyweight Bout
With its Core i9-13905H processor and GeForce RTX 4050 GPU, the Lenovo Slim Professional 9i is a robust possibility for inventive professionals, number-crunchers, and machine-learning geeks. It matches into the prosumer or power-user class together with abovementioned rigs just like the Dell XPS 15, HP Envy 16, and Asus Vivobook Professional 16, in addition to creator-focused cellular workstations just like the HP ZBook Studio G9.
Productiveness and Content material Creation Checks
We run the identical basic productiveness benchmarks throughout each cellular and desktop techniques. Our first take a look at is UL’s PCMark 10, which simulates quite a lot of real-world productiveness and workplace workflows to measure total system efficiency and in addition features a storage subtest for the first drive.
Our different three benchmarks concentrate on the CPU, utilizing all out there cores and threads, to charge a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 makes use of that firm’s Cinema 4D engine to render a posh scene, whereas Geekbench 5.4 Professional from Primate Labs simulates well-liked apps starting from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine studying. Lastly, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to transform a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p decision (decrease instances are higher).
Lastly, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Techniques, which makes use of the Inventive Cloud model 22 of Adobe’s well-known picture editor to charge a PC’s efficiency for content material creation and multimedia purposes. It is an automatic extension that executes quite a lot of basic and GPU-accelerated Photoshop duties starting from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving a picture to making use of masks, gradient fills, and filters.
With a PCMark rating of seven,603, the Slim Professional 9i blasted previous the 4,000-point threshold of on a regular basis productiveness. The truth is, it topped the XPS 15 and the ZBook Studio G9, Editors’ Selection award winners within the desktop-replacement and workstation classes respectively. Extra vital, it delivered class-leading scores in HandBrake and Cinebench, exhibiting that it has the chops for processor-intensive jobs starting from media work to machine studying.
Graphics Checks
Our artificial graphics benchmarks embody two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark: Night time Raid (extra modest, appropriate for techniques with built-in graphics), and Time Spy (extra demanding, appropriate for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Additionally within the combine is the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which we use to gauge OpenGL efficiency. These GFXBench checks are rendered offscreen to accommodate totally different native show resolutions; extra frames per second (fps) means larger efficiency.
The Lenovo did not fly fairly as excessive in these checks, however that was anticipated given its GeForce RTX 4050 going up towards stronger RTX 4060 and 4070 rigs. Nonetheless, the Slim Professional 9i held its personal. We did not run our real-world gaming checks, since it is a skilled relatively than gaming laptop computer, nevertheless it’s actually able to some after-hours gameplay.
Workstation-Particular Checks
We run two extra packages to simulate workstation purposes. The primary, Blender, is an open-source 3D suite for modeling, animation, simulation, and compositing. We report the time it takes for its built-in Cycles path tracer to render two photo-realistic scenes of BMW vehicles, one utilizing the system’s CPU and one the GPU (decrease instances are higher). BMW artist Mike Pan has stated he considers the scenes too quick for rigorous testing, however they seem to be a well-liked benchmark.
Our most vital workstation take a look at, SPECviewperf 2020, renders, rotates, and zooms out and in of stable and wireframe fashions utilizing viewsets from well-liked unbiased software program vendor (ISV) apps. We run the 1080p decision checks based mostly on PTC’s Creo CAD platform; Autodesk’s Maya modeling and simulation software program for movie, TV, and video games; and Dassault Systemes’ SolidWorks 3D rendering bundle. The extra frames per second, the higher.
Given our earlier observations about its Nvidia RTX 4050 GPU, we did not count on the Slim Professional 9i to blow our socks off in workstation testinjg, however we have been pleasantly shocked because the Lenovo handily stored tempo with each the HP cellular workstation and the creative-focused Vivobook Professional 16. This graphics energy will even translate into higher efficiency for non-visual duties resembling machine studying and mathematical modeling.
Battery and Show Checks
We take a look at laptop computer battery life by enjoying a domestically saved 720p video file (the open-source Blender film Tears of Metal) with show brightness at 50% and audio quantity at 100%. We be certain the battery is totally charged earlier than the take a look at, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
Moreover, we use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software program to measure a laptop computer display screen’s colour saturation—what proportion of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 colour gamuts or palettes the show can present—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per sq. meter).
The Lenovo impressed us with greater than 10 hours of battery life, outlasting each the Vivobook and ZBook techniques, although the XPS 15 and Envy 16 confirmed much more stamina. If you happen to’re utilizing the system for video modifying or rendering 3D fashions, you will wish to keep near a wall outlet, however for typing assembly notes or searching the online, you must be capable to get by way of a workday with out plugging in.
Due to the Lenovo’s mixture of a high-quality IPS panel and mini LED backlighting, the Slim Professional 9i’s colour and brightness are additionally wonderful. The truth is, the one system to supply higher colour was the OLED-equipped Dell, and the Lenovo’s brightness was unequalled.
Verdict: A Highly effective Machine for Making and Extra
The 16-inch Lenovo Slim Professional 9i impressed us with its highly effective mixture of processing and graphics efficiency, matched by a premium all-metal construct and extensive function set. From its high-resolution, high-refresh-rate show to its 10-hour battery life and broad port choice, it is a formidable possibility for every thing from video modifying to coding. Whereas it has a number of limitations, notably restricted configuration choices, and a premium worth, it is a first-class desktop substitute for getting critical work performed. If you’d like the very best within the Home windows world, we might nonetheless counsel the Dell XPS 15, however if you need an equally succesful machine with its personal enchantment, the Lenovo is a brilliant alternative.
