The Lenovo Yoga C930 Review: Atmos Acoustics
by Brett Howse on March 1, 2019 8:00 AM ESTBattery Life
Lenovo has fitted a 60 Wh battery into the thin and light Yoga C930, which is a good-sized battery for a notebook such as this. Our review unit is also fitted with the 1920x1080 display, which is rated for much higher battery life thanks to the less-intense backlighting needs.
To test battery life, we run several tests. The 2013 Light test opens just four web pages per minute, which isn’t much work for a modern notebook. Our 2016 Web test is much more demanding and usually sees a significant reduction in battery life as a result. Finally, we test movie playback time from a local video. All of our battery life testing is at 200 nits brightness.
2013 Light
At over 10.5 hours of battery life, the Yoga C930 did very well on this test. It’s not class-leading, but it still holds its own.
2016 Web
Here the Yoga improves against the competition, closing the gap to the Huawei significantly, and providing almost 9.5 hours of runtime on this much more demanding test.
Movie Playback
Likely thanks to a low-powered display, the Lenovo Yoga C930 sets a new record on movie playback, providing over 15.5 hours of movie playback. This test is where the Intel CPU really shines, since all of the media decode is offloaded to fixed function hardware that allows the rest of the CPU to sleep, and the runtimes prove how effective this is.
Our Tesseract score divides the movie playback by the length of a long movie, to give you an idea how many movies you could watch before needing to charge. I hope you brought the popcorn.
Normalized Results
By removing the battery capacity from the results, we can look at how efficient each device is. The Yoga C930 is helped out with the larger battery, supressing some slightly higher power draw than something like a Surface Pro 6.
Battery Summary
With a good-sized battery at 60 Wh, and good efficiency, the Lenovo Yoga C930 offers excellent battery life. In most cases, it’s not class-leading, but the usable battery time is still quite strong. The 1920x1080 display helps here though, and the optional 3840x2160 version would definitely cut into these efficiency results.
Charge Time
One area where Lenovo tends to do much better than the competition is in battery charge time. The Yoga C930 ships with a 65-Watt AC Adapter, with a USB-C connector making it pretty universal these days, and the proper way to charge an Ultrabook in 2019.
As usually, Lenovo offers a bit more of the power to flow to the battery than most, which shortens the charge time nicely.
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HStewart - Friday, March 1, 2019 - link
But Intel completion is upper end of laptops is really subpar in performance level. They might want to believe they compete on that level but manufactures understand this and they are not going waste there time - on a product that fans want in mobile industry but they don't buy mobile but instead purchase desktops. There are of course exceptionCHUWI - in my experience with them they are trying to implied that they have high end competitor but actually use the lower end chips. To me this is misleading the customer - to have a Surface Pro looking device with a lower end performance.
Windows for ARM tablets - this is strange part of mobile industry, I personally think a better fit would Chromebooks where native x86 performance is likely not required - but to fool a customer to think they have a full speed notebook to run existing apps is insane. I think they do have limited uses if only web browsing, and Microsoft office applications required. They do have good battery life but the latest generation of notebooks come very close and with Intel Lakefield on the horizon, I believe battery advantage will be gone. But there is not much on this but I believe a combination of 4 low power efficient cores combine with Sunny Cove performance core combine with Gen 11 graphics core - with close to discrete level performance in size of chip that can fit on tip of your finger is going to be quite awesome. This is likely going to remind of days when Intel went from Core 2 to i7 technology.
I loved the EMiB technology and with Lakefield they take it step farther with Foveres technology is going being better. Just image a notebook with more IO on one level, power mult-core logic on next level and high performance discrete GPU on next level. With this technology they could package 100 if not 1000's of cores on desktop size chip.
ChickenLegsxx - Thursday, June 20, 2019 - link
Download Popcorn Time for android from this page https://getpopcorntimeapk.comUpSpin - Friday, March 1, 2019 - link
It the Pen WACOM AES, or N-Trig or Synaptics or ....How does the pen get charged? Inductive in the storage slot? Are you sure? Maybe it's Wacom EMR, as in the Wacom Intuos series/Samsung Galaxy tablets/Samsung Note smartphones, then there's no need to charge the pen at all, because it's coupled inductively with the display.
How good is the accuracy of the pen? Can you draw straight lines or do they wobble?
How is the pressure sensitivity of the pen? How many levels, how sensitive?
Does the pen have an eraser on the back? Does the pen have some buttons? Does the peen offer some other functionality.
How does the pen feel on the display? Is the surface good to write on?
How does the pen perform on the edges of the display?
Please, it's a tablet you can write on, why don't you include this in your review. Just because the delivered pen is small doesn't mean the you can't buy a better larger one afterwards, as long as you know which one. Maybe the HP Active Styli work, or do we need N-Trig?
Brett Howse - Friday, March 1, 2019 - link
It's Wacom AES and feels good on the display and works well. It's not a top-tier stylus but for writing it's great.Thud2 - Friday, March 1, 2019 - link
Are you practicing your typing skills. 300 words to say "What about the pen?"heffeque - Saturday, March 2, 2019 - link
Laughed harder than I should have.Prestissimo - Friday, March 1, 2019 - link
Wacom AES 2.0 technology, 4096 pressure levels, official name is Lenovo Active Pen 2.For compatibility with both Wacom AES and N-Trig / MPP, get the Bamboo Ink Pen which is currently regarded as the best 2-in-1 laptop stylus you can buy.
imaheadcase - Saturday, March 2, 2019 - link
Because most our touch screen and no one uses a pen is why. loleastcoast_pete - Friday, March 1, 2019 - link
@Brett: Thanks for this review. Question: In addition to the soundbar, what kind of audio chipset does this Yoga use? Dolby Atmos usually implies 7+1 or more channels to get the Atmos surround effects. I don't expect that from the built-in speakers, of course, but can this thing provide 7+1 or 9+1 output to amplifiers to really get Atmos surround sound? To member the Atmos branding implies that. Thanks!Brett Howse - Friday, March 1, 2019 - link
Dolby Atmos on PC doesn't require or imply 7+1. Even in the HT world you can get Atmos sound bars. Will it be as immersive as a 7 channel setup with true height speakers? No of course not. But it still provides a wider sound stage from the included speakers in this sound bar.You can get more info from Dolby's website.
The laptop has an Intel audio chipset (SST) and Realtek codec. As for outputting to a receiver, there's no specific digital audio output like HDMI to carry the signal. You'd have to go over the USB/TB3 connections.