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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eastcoast_pete - Saturday, March 2, 2019 - link
Thanks Brett! How loud and clear is the audio from the Soundboard? I am curious how well this works in a 2 way live call, especially with the built-in microphone? If that works well, a setup like this could be really interesting for allowing a small group to participate in video conferences, or an on-site presentation to customers.Brett Howse - Saturday, March 2, 2019 - link
It's one of the loudest laptops I've tested.marcplante - Friday, March 1, 2019 - link
Wife had one of these briefly. Screen is too dim and keyboard was an issue as well. Great sound, but that doesn't carry a notebook.Prestissimo - Friday, March 1, 2019 - link
Poor keyboard, poor display, poor I/O, soldered memory, overpriced.EliteBook x360 are the best convertible ultrabooks IMO.
asfletch - Friday, March 8, 2019 - link
I have an Elitebook 13 x360 & I tend to agree - it's one of the first notebooks I've really been happy with. However, I'd recommend opting for 4k screen as the 1080 (I have the 120Hz one with SureView) is not great compared with Surface Book et al.Prestissimo - Friday, March 8, 2019 - link
I have the same screen - 14" 700-nit FHD 120Hz SV3 - on my x360 1040, and can't imagine a better screen on a laptop today. Never used a Surface Book but I believe in general EliteBooks and ZBooks displays show better specs, at least according to NotebookCheck.keg504 - Saturday, March 2, 2019 - link
Are the RAM and storage user-upgradeable?Prestissimo - Sunday, March 3, 2019 - link
M.2 storage is but memory is soldered so not upgradable.wr3zzz - Tuesday, March 5, 2019 - link
Wouldn't it be easier to place the speakers as part of the display panel if audio is the selling point?Brett Howse - Tuesday, March 5, 2019 - link
There's not as much room in the display.