Lenovo IdeaPad S940 Laptop Review: Slimmer, Lighter, Sleeker

[Redaktion]

The quest for the sleekest and most portable laptop continues unabated with Lenovo's IdeaPad S940, easily one of the most attractive machines we've seen to date. With a dazzling 4K HDR display, Dolby Atmos audio, a Core i7 CPU, and a tiny footprint, is this $2,000 work of art the one to beat?

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-IdeaPad-S940-Laptop-Review-Slimmer-Lighter-Sleeker.424849.0.html

[Bill]

Can you test how much undervolting will affect this laptop performance?

[not_anton]

Finally someone except Apple understands what a laptop supposed to be! Quiet and portable over all, with a passable performance.

Please stop this "oh no a laptop throttles in Furmark+Cinebench" nonsense! Many business applications like Google Hangouts will eat all the performance they can get without real benefits from it. Spinning fans to 40+dB on a business meeting or in a shared workspace is absolutely awful! And did you ever worked next to someone who's laptop blows it's fans all the time just from running Chrome+Slack? (speaking of MS Surface) Better drop a few frames or have an extra 0.1 second delay but stay whisper quiet.

If somehow you get meaningful time savings by running a mobile 4-core CPU at full turbo - you should really buy a desktop. Or use a cloud, Google's 96-core instance is about $7/hour as I recall.

Enough pushing towards "hairdryer"-loud laptops!

[william blake]

i7 my a**. never ending story.

[william blake]

Finally someone except Apple understands what a laptop supposed to be! Quiet and portable over all, with a passable performance.

Please stop this "oh no a laptop throttles in Furmark+Cinebench" nonsense! Many business applications like Google Hangouts will eat all the performance they can get without real benefits from it. Spinning fans to 40+dB on a business meeting or in a shared workspace is absolutely awful! And did you ever worked next to someone who's laptop blows it's fans all the time just from running Chrome+Slack? (speaking of MS Surface) Better drop a few frames or have an extra 0.1 second delay but stay whisper quiet.

If somehow you get meaningful time savings by running a mobile 4-core CPU at full turbo - you should really buy a desktop. Or use a cloud, Google's 96-core instance is about $7/hour as I recall.

Enough pushing towards "hairdryer"-loud laptops!

one thing youve missed. they want money for non-existent performance. it happens all the time. pretty solid money, 200usd or something. its not a joke. at least for me.

[Redtailboas]

Agreed. What's the point of all that power if just going to automatically throttle it. Should give it full reigns, with some sort of easy "office mode" button for dummies.

A shame the reviewer didn't take some closer/better shots of the curved display glass he was gushing about.

[Jesse]

Did Lenovo pick the competition in this review?  Where is the XPS 14, the Zenbook 14, which are the main competitors?

4k in a 14" laptop.  Pfft.   Make it a 15.6" laptop and I might notice the difference vs 1080P.

[Jesse]

I forgot to add   glossy?  NO.   Stop it with this crap.  All laptops should have matte finishes.

[JJSEA]

The manual says there's a Fn + Q shortcut that switches between performance mode of auto/quiet/high performance. I wonder whether selecting high performance mode would reduce the throttling you pointed out.

[Steve Schardein]

Hey everyone,

Thanks for all the replies -- I really appreciate you reading my stuff!

In short, yes, the general message is that, while performance is indeed sufficient, it's also a bit disappointingly below what we'd expect to see from this CPU. Considering the cost of the upgrade, it probably makes a lot more sense to spring for the i5 instead, which very well may resolve many of the issues we experienced with regard to performance and thermals.

FWIW, JJSEA, Fn + Q does not do anything on our review unit. There is no obvious way to switch performance modes. Importing a premade power plan also appears to make no difference. I believe that any attempts to rebalance cooling strategies on the machine would require a special Lenovo power package software update or possibly a firmware update.

So @not_anton, basically what I'm trying to convey is that, if quiet + lightweight + beautiful is the primary goal, it'd be nice to either have options to adjust/subvert that power/thermal strategy or simply omit the i7 as a configurable option altogether (assuming the i5 is comparable in terms of performance under the circumstances).

Happy 4th everyone! Thanks again for taking the time to read and reply. It means a lot.

-Steve

[Joe Yang]

I am about to buy a new laptop for my work and I am seriously considering about this laptop. Most disappointing part of this laptop is the battery and the cpu performance. It is way to far from its competitor considering the laptop battery size isnt too different. I hope we can have a review of the FHD version of S940. I want to know if the FHD screen is as good as the 4K one.

[clausmuus]

Have anybody already test this Notebook with Linux? Witch components are supportet and witch are not supportet jet?

[Michael Ravier]

Hello just ordered the unit, looks pretty nice and I do aim for quiet use (I used to have a swift 7 first gen and it was one of my best laptops despite slow cpu).

One low point to me for the yoga is poor color accuracy (very important to me).

Question : if I download and install notebookcheck'icc profile, will it improve the delta e ?

Or is this file merely a measurement of the screen ?

Thanks

[cdanc]

I think that you have the touchpad size wrong in the article. It does not look to be ~2:1 in pictures.

[cdanc]

I bought the laptop on sale (999$) although the review was unconvincing.

I also have the s730 with the same i7/16/512 configuration. It is hard to decide which one to keep as the s730 is more lite, has a better (deeper) keyboard, charges even from a tiny Anker Atom 30W, has a fingerprint reader, tall touch pad, better battery run time, and a good screen.

S940 has an unusual aspect ratio: it is very wide. They compromised on touch pad vertical size because of that. Best would be to have a 16:10 screen and then enough space for a taller touch pad. Keyboard is shallower, with some function keys being hard to press. I have 2 USB-C PD 30W chargers and they both work on s730 but on s940 they only work at 4-5W, not enough to keep the laptop charging when on. Probably some bug in the firmware. I also have a 65W USB-C PD charger and it works normally on both laptops. The Windows hello with face recognition is creepy and I do not use it. I always tape my webcams. There is no fingerprint reader. The screen is phenomenal but it consumes a lot of power.

Your cinebench 15 scores are very different than mine. After I activate lenovo's performance mode (Fn-Q) and set the windows power mode to "best performance" I get 622 with the laptop already wormed up. If I undervolt the cores and caches with 100mV, I get 699 or more.