Lenovo's first Windows 11 laptops run on Ryzen

Lenovo will ring in the arrival of Windows 11 with a pair of premium AMD Ryzen-based laptops.

The IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon will feature a carbon lid and aluminum body to go with its drop-dead gorgeous 14-inch OLED screen. Besides the infinite contrast an OLED provides, Lenovo will use a fast 90Hz, 2880x1800 panel with an aspect ratio of 16:10 on the Slim 7 Carbon. That’s just over 5 megapixels with a density of 243 pixels-per-inch. This is one smoking screen.

But this beauty goes deeper than the skin. Inside the Slim 7 Carbon, you’ll find an 8-core Ryzen 7 5800U with an optional Nvidia GeForce MX450 GPU. Lenovo will offer up to 16GB of power efficient LPDDR4X RAM and up to a 1TB PCIe SSD.

Battery life should be fairly excellent with its 61 watt-hour battery rated for 14.5 hours of use. Lenovo said the Slim 7 Carbon will also feature Rapid Charge Express, which means the laptop can pack enough power into a dead battery in 15 minutes of charging to run for 3 hours form its 65 watt charger.

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Like every AMD laptop we’ve seen, there’s no support for Intel’s Thunderbolt 3 or Thunderbolt 4 technology, nor is there a rectangular USB-A port. Lenovo instead offers three USB-C ports, which lets you charge the laptop while leaving two ports open for use. 

Thanks to the light-weight carbon and aluminum shell, Lenovo said the Slim 7 Carbon will weight about 2.4 pounds when it goes on sale in October with a US$1,290 ($1,699 AUD) starting price.

IdeaPad Slim 7 Pro

If a 14-inch screen laptop with a GeForce MX450 isn’t enough for you, Lenovo also unveiled a new IdeaPad Slim 7 Pro. It's aimed at someone who needs a little more oomph.

The laptop also features a 16:10 aspect ratio screen, which we consider superior to 16:9 aspect ratio laptops for getting work done. The IPS panel shines at a very bright 500 nits, and it's rated for 100 percent of the sRGB spectrum with an option for a 120Hz refresh rate version.

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Inside the laptop you’ll find an 8-core Ryzen 7 5800H, up to 16GB of DDR4, a 1TB PCIe SSD, and up to a GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop graphics chip. Compared to the Slim 7 Carbon, you should expect the CPU to run faster thanks to the additional thermal headroom of the H-class Ryzen chip. The GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU, meanwhile, is based on Nvidia’s newest "Ampere" GPU cores instead of the older "Turing" GPU the GeForce MX450 uses in the Slim 7 Carbon.

That upgrade translates to far better gaming performance, hardware ray tracing support, and the inclusion of Nvidia hardware encoding and decoding, which can help you use Adobe Premiere on the road. Obviously, a bigger screen and more performance doesn’t come for free. The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Pro will weight about 4.6 pounds, which is considerably more than the Slim 7 Carbon.

For battery life, the Slim 7 Pro will feature a 75WHr battery that’s rated for 12.5 hours of use. For ports you get two USB-A ports, an SD Card reader, an HDMI port, USB-C, and an audio jack.

 The IdeaPad Slim 7 Pro will also go on sale next month with a price starting at US$1,450, with pricing not yet available for Australia.

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