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Review: Lenovo Yoga 720



I recently picked up a new Lenovo Yoga 720 15" laptop. When it comes to laptops, everything is a trade-off. You can have small and lightweight with a less powerful processor or get something beefier and sacrifice those things along with battery power. However, this laptop strikes an excellent balance. As far as know, it's the only 2 in 1 on the market with a quad core i7 and a GTX 1050 graphics card.
I didn't know how much I would make use of tablet mode, but it is quite handy for watching Netflix in bed or browsing the web sitting on the couch. While it is huge for a tablet, it actually works fine in that role if sitting down with it. My complaints about tablet mode are on the Windows side, MS still has yet to build in critical functionality needed to support 2 in 1s well.
I have only done limited gaming on it, but it's great so far. I've played Bioshock Infinite at max 1080p settings and it plays almost flawlessly. It's impressive to see this kind of game performance in a more professional, thin profile laptop. It would have been unheard of only a couple of years ago. Thunderbolt 3 is two lanes only, but that's enough to support eGPUs in the future if connecting to an external display. The cases are ridiculously overpriced now, but consider that in < 2 yrs you will likely be able to get an eGPU case with a GTX 1060 or 1070 for < $200. However, if you're a casual gamer and care more about being able to play fun games than having the max possible graphics, the 1050 is already a solid performer.
The SSD performance has been blazing fast and CPU is great. Note that you should install throttlestop. Turbo boost is turned off by default, but you can manually turn it on and undervolt the cpu when not gaming for more performance. See youtube for more info. Lenovo turns off turbo boost because performance drops way off with the heat produced by that in combo with the graphics card on. It's a thermal trade off that you can manually control.
As far as I can tell closest competitors to this system are the hp Spectre x360 15" and the Dell XPS 15". The spectre is a fantastic form factor, but is only a dual core CPU with a much weaker graphics card. The XPS 15 is a great machine, but there are wide reports of QC issues and a similarly equipped model is $1800 right now. It's also not a 2 in 1 and doesn't support a digital pen and importantly, has an inferior keyboard. I got the Yoga for $1250 and it's very close in build quality to the XPS 15, making it an easy decision.
You can't go wrong with this laptop at this price point for both work and leisure.

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