Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 1 Gen 7

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 1 Gen 7 is powered by Ryzen 7000 series processor (Image credit: Vivek Umashankar / Indian Express)

AMD recently announced its 7000 series of Zen4-based processors for laptops at CES 2023. These processors are not just more powerful than their predecessors but they are also slightly more power efficient. Lenovo has now announced the first set of laptops with the Ryzen 7000 series of CPUs under the IdeaPad lineup, and the IdeaPad Slim 1 Gen 7 is one of those notebooks. I have been testing the base variant of the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 1 Gen 7 laptop for the last two weeks, and here is my take on Lenovo’s latest budget Windows laptop with up-to-date hardware.

Design

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 1 Gen 7 looks a lot like its predecessors and it is not a bad thing. It looks like a typical mid-range 15-inch notebook and has everything that one can expect from a laptop in this class. The laptop weighs just 1.5 kg, which makes it a lightweight machine, especially considering other budget 15-inch notebooks. The laptop also has an extensive range of I/O, including an SD card slot, a couple of USB-A ports, a USB Type-C port, an HDMI port, and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

While I liked how the laptop looks, the build quality wasn’t that impressive. The laptop felt a fit flimsy and there is also a bit of display flex. Again, there is only so much a brand can offer at this price range, and Lenovo seems to have balanced between the overall value and the build quality of the machine.

Display

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 1 Gen 7 has a 15.6-inch FHD (1920x1080p) resolution screen with a peak brightness of 220nits. While the display gets adequately bright in indoor situations, it becomes completely unusable outdoors. The display has a good amount of bezels, and the 720p web camera has a PrivacyShutter, which is a nice touch in my opinion. Although the display has lower brightness, the colours looked good, even when compared to my gaming laptop, which costs a lot more than the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 1 Gen 7. Overall, this laptop has a decent screen that will fulfil the requirement of most users who are looking for a budget notebook.

Performance

This laptop is powered by the brand new AMD Ryzen 3 7320U CPU with an integrated Radeon 610M GPU. The main advantage of the CPU is the fact that it has four CPU cores and eight threads with a peak clock speed of up to 4.1GHz, hence, it can deliver performance when required. The laptop ships with Windows 11 Home OS and can cold boot in less than 15 seconds.

The higher core count (when compared to other mid-tier laptops) makes this a good machine for multitasking. Opening a couple of tabs on Chrome, streaming a video, playing music, and downloading content all worked without any issues. With the combination of a 512GB PCIe Gen 4-based SSD and 8GB LPDDR5 RAM (5500MTs), the rest of the specifications of this laptop are on par with other modern machines.

While you can play games on the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 1 Gen 7 with the integrated Radeon graphics, you have to tone down the resolution to 720p resolution and graphics quality to low. Overall, the laptop has adequate power to handle normal day-to-day tasks that one might do on an entry-level laptop.

Battery life

The laptop has a 3-cell, 42Wh battery and according to Lenovo, the machine can offer 9 hours of battery life. In my testing, the laptop usually delivered around 5 to 6 hours of battery life. In my testing, I mostly used this laptop to browse the internet, do content production, and watch videos. The laptop also supports fast charging. Unfortunately, it uses an old-school barrel-style charger instead of a USB Type-C port.

Verdict: Good entry-level laptop

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 1 Gen 7 gets a few things right, which include a lightweight design, battery life, and up-to-date hardware. On top of that, the laptop also offers modern wireless connectivity features like Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1. However, it does miss out on features like a fingerprint sensor for added security and the keyboard also does not have any sort of backlighting. If you can overlook those features, the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 1 Gen 7 is a good entry-level notebook for those who want a laptop for web browsing and content consumption.