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These business laptops have the reliability, performance, and battery life you need whether you're at the desk or flying across the country for a meeting. Whether you're looking for the best Windows 10 laptop, a top-rated system running macOS Big Sur or the streamlined and snappy ChromeOS, an everyday workhorse or pro-level performer, you'll find a. The best 15-inch gaming and work laptops for 2021. When 13 inches is too small and 17 is too big, a 15-inch laptop from a company such as Dell, Lenovo, Apple, Acer or someone else may be just right. Feb 18, 2020 MSI Prestige 14 review: Workhorse power in a thin-and-light shell It packs a 6-core Comet Lake U and a GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q into a 2.8-pound body. Jan 02, 2020 The Maytag MHW6630HC (available at Home Depot for $1,099.00) is a solid workhorse of a front-load washing machine. It is not going to be particularly gentle on your clothes, but it will get out stubborn stains that other washers might not. It's currently our top-rated Maytag and for good reason.

This year, Lenovo's flagship consumer convertible PC is called the Yoga 9i. This follows two years of being the Yoga C900 series, and prior to that, the Yoga 900 series. Yes, Lenovo has struggled with branding as of late, but the product is still solid, and the latest 15-inch Yoga 9i is here. And to be clear, it's the successor to the Yoga C940 15.

And when I reviewed that, I called it the rare workhorse convertible. That hasn't changed. It still has a 45W Intel Core processor and Nvidia GeForce graphics. Of course, the ninth-gen CPU has been replaced by 10th-gen, but also, the GeForce graphics have been bumped up to a GTX 1650 Ti.

While the powerful internals are what makes it stand apart from its 14-inch sibling, the Yoga 9i series is just awesome. It has the best audio quality that you'll find in a laptop with the powerful Dolby Atmos rotating soundbar, and it has a built-in pen garage. The screen supports Dolby Vision HDR, and it's just an all-around solid package.

Windows

Specs

CPUIntel Core i7-10750H
GraphicsNvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Ti 4GB GDDR6
Body13.99x9.39x0.69-0.78in (355.5x238.5x17.5-19.7mm), 4.41lbs (2kg)
Display15.6' FHD (1920x1080), IPS, 500nit, VESA HDR400, Dolby Vision
Memory16GB LPDDR4, 2933MHz
Storage1TB PCIe NVMe
Ports(1) USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A
(2) Thunderbolt 3 (Power, DP 1.4, data)
(1) 3.5mm audio
Battery69Wh, Rapid Charge Express
ConnectivityIntel Wi-Fi 6 802.11 AX201 + Bluetooth 5.0
AudioRotating Sound Bar with Dolby Atmos Speaker System certification
2W x 4 (2x woofer, 2x tweeter)
Input6-row, multimedia Fn keys, numeric keypad, LED backlight
Buttonless glass surface multi-touch touchpad
MaterialAluminum
ColorSlate Grey
OSWindows 10 Home
Price$1,799.99


This model is sold at Bestbuy.com, but not at Lenovo.com. It was provided by Lenovo.

Day one

Design

The Lenovo Yoga 9i 15 that was sent to me comes in Slate Grey, and it's made out of aluminum. Yes, it seems to look the same that it has in previous years, and frankly, it's a bit dull. I've often criticized Lenovo for the gray aluminum laptop look. Just take a look at HP's beautiful Spectre x360 15 and you'll see what I mean.

I will point out that Lenovo is doing some cool things with design on its 14-inch Yoga 9i, which is available in all-black and with a leather cover. It's pretty great. That's exclusive to the 14-inch one though, at least for now.

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On the left side of the PC, there are two Thunderbolt 3 ports, a 3.5mm audio jack, and an AC power port. Yes, you'll need to use Lenovo's 135W proprietary power adapter instead of USB Type-C, since this powerful machine requires more power than you'd get over Power Delivery. In fact, these ports don't even support Power Delivery, so if you wanted to use a USB Type-C charger for a slow charge, you can't even do that.

Those Thunderbolt 3 ports do support DisplayPort 1.4, so you should be able to connect an 8K display to one port if you wanted to (I don't have an 8K display to test). Those ports also make it possible to dock the PC and use the Yoga 9i as your desktop. It has the power to handle all tasks for most people, and the display output for your high-resolution monitors.

On the other side, there's a lone USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port. USB 3.2 Gen 1, also known as USB 3.1 Gen 1 and USB 3.0, is good for 5Gbps data transfer speeds. The combination of two USB Type-C ports and one USB Type-A port isn't uncommon for consumer laptops, but I'd still hope for a second USB Type-A port on a big device like this. That's a very minor complaint though; after all, one USB Type-A port should be fine for on-the-go, and if it's docked at home, you'll have extra ports that way.

You'll notice on that side that there's also a pen garage. This is one of my favorite things about premium Lenovo convertibles. The pen doesn't get away like it does if it's magnetically attached to the side, but you still always have it with you. It's also always charged. The only downside is that it's not a full-size pen, so if you want that, you can purchase any number of third-party products.

Finally, the Yoga 9i 15 comes with a Dolby Atmos soundbar in the hinge. Lenovo calls it a rotating soundbar, because no matter which orientation you're using the device in, you've still got audio firing right at you.

Dolby Vision display and Dolby Atmos rotating soundbar

Lenovo does have both FHD and UHD options for the screen. This time around, the firm sent me the FHD model, which should get better battery life. They both support Dolby Vision HDR, and they're super bright at 500 nits.

Honestly, there's a big trade-off to be had here. Obviously, battery life drops off dramatically when you switch to UHD, but FHD just doesn't look as good. And the bigger the screen, the more noticeable it is. For a 15.6-inch panel, I feel like a higher resolution is pretty necessary, especially on something like the Yoga 9i, which is meant to have an excellent media consumption experience. As always, I wish there was a QHD option.

The Yoga 9i 15 has narrow bezels all around, and the top bezel is a bit bigger. Lenovo also used its reverse notch, which we're seeing across the lineup, and it has a privacy guard built into it. The reverse notch provides an easy way to lift the lid, and it also gives Lenovo some extra space to pack in the webcam and other sensors. There's no IR camera for Windows Hello though.

I mentioned earlier that the Dolby Atmos rotating soundbar provides the best audio that you can get from a laptop, and I'm pretty confident in that statement. It has four 2W speakers built into it, and a comfortable volume for listening to music is around 25% for me. For most laptops, it's around 90%, because regarding the general market, quality has gotten a lot better, but volume has not. Drivers upsman battery backup. This laptop offers both quality and volume. This thing can fill the room.

The Yoga 9i is the ultimate media consumption machine. With a beautiful Dolby Vision screen and the Dolby Atmos rotating soundbar, movies and TV shows look and sound great, and music gets loud. You can also use it for some Full HD gaming if you want. And of course, it's good for work too, as those video calls while working from home will sound crystal clear.

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Keyboard and trackpad

The full-size keyboard on the Lenovo Yoga 9i 15 has a numpad to the right of it, something that I'm not personally a fan of on laptops. It's big enough for it, of course, but if you don't want to use the numpad, you have to align yourself to the left.

The backlit keys are a lot shallower than you'd find on a ThinkPad, and that always kind of fascinates me. Both ThinkPads and Lenovo's Yoga consumer laptops have fantastic keyboards that are both comfortable and accurate to type on; they're just different. It's like Lenovo decided at some point that its business customers want something different from consumers.

Workhorse

There's a fingerprint sensor to the bottom right of the keyboard, which is fine. Honestly, I expect it to be there being that there's no IR camera for Windows Hello facial recognition. At least there's one method for biometric authentication.

The Microsoft Precision trackpad is clickable, and it's both fast and responsive, as you'd expect from any Precision trackpad. I do wish it was a bit bigger, a common point that I like to make on larger laptops. The real estate on the aluminum palm rest is there; why not use it? This is something that Dell finally took advantage of this year with its XPS 15 and XPS 17.

And of course, the other method of input is the pen, as I mentioned above. It comes in a pen garage in the PC, so you can always break it out if you need it.

Performance and battery life

The Yoga 9i 15 that Lenovo sent me includes an Intel Core i7-10750H CPU and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 GPU with 4GB GDDR6 memory. The CPU is a 45W processor with six cores and 12 threads, just like the Core i7-9750H that we got in last year's model, although the turbo frequency on this one can reach 5GHz.

You might also recall that last year's Yoga C940 15 also has a GTX 1650 GPU; however, that was one that was using GDDR5 memory. This year's model uses the superior GDDR6 memory, and that's definitely something you should take note of when looking at the GTX 1650 in any device.

These are powerful internals, and frankly, I used this machine for everything. I edited video, played games, watched shows, listened to music, took handwritten notes, and I just typed articles. It's an amazing all-around PC. Speaking of performance, FHD gaming does just fine with what we have here, and so does FHD 60fps video editing.

Sadly, as usual, the powerful internals don't translate well to battery life. I only got about five hours of real-world work, and that was on a good day and not including doing more power-hungry tasks like video editing and gaming. I thought the FHD screen would help it to do better than it did, but that wasn't the case. I'm not upset about it though.

A big part of choosing the right PC for you is finding the right balance between power and battery life. There's always a trade-off to be made, and you have to see how it fits into how you want to be able to use the PC. Of course, if you want better battery life, you can take a look at the 14-inch model that has a U-series CPU and integrated graphics.

For benchmarks, I used PCMark 8, PCMark 10, 3DMark, and Geekbench.

Lenovo Yoga 9i 15
Core i7-10750H, GTX 1650 GDDR6
Lenovo Yoga C940 15
Core i7-9750H, GTX 1650 GDDR5
HP OMEN 15
Ryzen 7 4800H, GTX 1660 Ti
Dell XPS 15 9500
Core i7-10875H, GTX 1650Ti
PCMark 8: Home3,9363,9154,7563,652
PCMark 8: Creative4,6933,7886,0284,839
PCMark 8: Work3,8173,9183,9893,322
PCMark 105,1595,1445,6395,136
3DMark: Time Spy3,6433,5116,0373,743
Geekbench 51,232 / 5,6081,188 / 7,946


Comparing this year's model to last year's, it's no surprise that there are few big changes in the scores. The CPUs between the two generations are very similar.

Conclusion

It's not the prettiest laptop I've seen by a long stretch, and as always, I wish there was 4G LTE and an IR camera, but as I mentioned, I was able to use the Lenovo Yoga 9i 15 for anything I wanted to. That goes for video editing and gaming to work and consumption.

It has the powerful internals for powerful tasks like video editing and gaming. At the same time, it's also just an incredibly well-built machine with a great keyboard and trackpad, so it's excellent for general productivity as well.

But let's talk about just media consumption. The beautiful screen supports Dolby Vision HDR and the Dolby Atmos soundbar provides audio that's second to none. The built-in pen is appreciated too. I was able to use this machine for taking handwritten notes and for signing documents.

I think that with Lenovo's Yoga 9 series, the company provides one of the best all-around experiences out there. If you want to check it out, you can find it here.

Gallery: Lenovo Yoga 9i 15 review

No matter what your needs are, you can find your perfect portable right here.
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Your notebook means business in every sense of the word. The problem is, not everyone defines their work style the same way. Busy professionals crave an equally agile, lightweight laptop to fit their life in motion. Others need the brute force (and huge screens) that only a desktop replacement 'portable' can provide. Then there is everyone else--people who want to combine reasonable power with the flexibility to go anywhere.

Most of us, though, no matter which kind of machine we favor, want to find that Zen state of great mobile performance and better battery life. Wb electronics usb devices driver download for windows 10.

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That's exactly what we're aiming to do here. Pouring over reams of data on products in our three laptop categories--namely, ultraportable, all-purpose, and power--we've sifted out our choice in each category for notebooks that offer the best balance of performance and endurance. Everything else is secondary. That means that money is not an object in this search for the best workhorse computers--although the reasonableness of the prices for two of our winning models will likely catch your attention.

Desktop Replacement (Power Laptop): Micro Express IFL9025
It's hardly a surprise that one of the more recent desktop replacement laptops to enter the Test Center wins out as the best choice. The Micro Express IFL9025 is one of the first Penryn-processor-loaded notebooks to roll off a factory line and into our offices.

The IFL9025 comes fairly well stacked with the hardware to garner high scores on our WorldBench 6 tests. Intel's 45-nanometer-based processor leads the charge with a 2.5-GHz Core 2 Duo T9300. This CPU, while not the fastest member of the Penryn family, had more than enough to handle any business task we could throw at the machine, delivering a downright impressive WorldBench 6 score of 97, tying it with Eurocom's D900C Phantom-X and just edging out Toshiba's high-end multimedia Qosmio G45-AV690 (which scored a 94). (Both are comparable desktop replacement machines.)

Besides business productivity, the other big reason to consider buying a desktop replacement is for its game-playing ability. The IFL9025, however, doesn't pack the most powerful 3D punch. It relies upon an nVidia GeForce 8600M GT video card with 512MB of dedicated memory. That's more than potent enough for games such as Far Cry that have kicked around for four years (the IFL9025 cracked 120 frames per second--a good score for an aging title such as Far Cry), while also being capable of dealing with what's on the store shelves today. Just don't expect to play games such as Crysis at top resolutions with all features cranked to '11.' Gaming on most notebook computers entails a series of compromises. So tone down your expectations and keep the antialiasing features off.

All this said, we still have a stack of notebooks that haven't yet finished running the WorldBench gauntlet. One model in particular stands will likely best the IFL9025 in gaming performance: Alienware's Area-51M m15x. This notebook truly feels like a desktop replacement in that, besides having 4GB of RAM and a Penryn CPU, it uses two 8800m GTX graphics cards in Scalable Link Interface mode (SLI). That's right, a notebook that is brawnier than your average gaming desktop--no small feat.

As for battery life, one again needs to keep expectations in check with this sort of machine, as these PCs sponge power--and the longest we've seen a desktop replacement run on one charge is a little over 4 hours. Micro Express's IFL9025, however, is a close second in this respect, coming in at 3 hours, 53 minutes--about 12 minutes longer than the average for all desktop replacements.

What caught me off-guard, though, was how inexpensive (at $1199) the IFL9025 is, considering how absurdly costly desktop replacement portables can be. Price may not be a factor in this story, but it's nevertheless hard to ignore a good deal when you see one.

All-Purpose: Sony VAIO VGN-SZ791N
A not-quite-ultraportable notebook, Sony's VAIO VGN-SZ791N is really a 'tweener.' It has the size and weight of a borderline ultraportable (it weighs 4 pounds and has a 13.3-inch screen), but this laptop is a racehorse at the track, and it is built for business.

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In fact, when it comes to straight sprints in WorldBench 6, Sony's VGN-SZ791N is unstoppable. Scoring 94, it outran the nearest-performing all-purpose notebook, Fujitsu's Lifebook A6120, by a full 10 percent--and kept pace as well with beefier desktop replacement models. This is thanks in no small part to the combo of an Intel 2.5-GHz Core 2 Duo T9300 CPU and an nVidia 8400GS GPU revving under the hood. If you're paying close attention, you may have noticed that Sony takes the same Penryn-based CPU of our top desktop replacement pick and fine-tunes it for this more mobile unit.

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As for battery life, the SZ791N doesn't quite achieve a runaway success, but it does last 3 hours, 50 minutes on a single charge. That's slightly better than the average all-purpose notebook. A power management toggle on the keyboard switches between a Speed and a Stamina mode; I assumed that this would add more borrowed time to work with, but it didn't do much. Besides throttling down the CPU, this one-step 'solution' tweaks a couple features (like lowering the resolution) and forces the computer to reboot. I couldn't help but wonder how much power was killed jumping through all those hoops in the first place.

A couple of notebooks have managed to squeeze out more juice than the SZ791N, but by far the most long-lasting laptop among all-purpose models we've tested recently is HP's Pavilion dv2660se. It's a true marathoner, cranking away for 6 hours, 19 minutes on the 12-cell extended-life battery it ships with. However, this Pavilion didn't walk away with the top spot because its CPU dragged it below the average of other all-purpose laptops' scores in our WorldBench 6 tests.

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Among the 'money is no object' set, the Sony VAIO VGN-SZ791N will make a solid choice. It may cost $2500, but this pint-sized powerhouse can run circles around the competition for nearly 4 hours.
Ultraportable: Lenovo ThinkPad X61
Ultraportables make all sorts of sacrifices-such as accepting anemic CPUs-in order to break into the welterweight computing class. Not Lenovo's ThinkPad line. Durable, svelte, and geared up for business, these PCs perform under pressure. In fact, a number of Lenovo's notebooks regularly creep into the Top 10 in the ultraportable category.

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The ThinkPad X61 isn't the fastest notebook you can find, but thanks to a Santa Rosa class Intel CPU (a 2-GHz Core 2 Duo T7300), it still managed to crack the top four in our WorldBench 6 test suite, scoring 75-not too shabby for an ultraportable machine; it comes in close behind the Lenovo 3000 N200 and Dell's more potent XPS M1330. The only ultraportable that scores better, the Micro Express JFT2500, blows away the X61 by a huge 17 percent margin.

The problem is that there's a wide gap between ultraportable performance and endurance. Every machine that clocked a high score in performance fared miserably in battery tests-and vice versa. For example, the JFT2500--the fastest ultraportable we've tested--sits nowhere near the top of the battery-life pack. That honor goes to the ASUS U2E, which ships with both a standard and a 6-cell extra-life battery that lasts an absurd 7 hours, 11 minutes in our tests. The ThinkPad X61 also comes with an extended-life power supply, but it runs about an hour less than the U2E by comparison (6 hours, 14 minutes, to be precise). Still, 6 hours is a good amount of time to survive our battery stress tests.

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However, as I said from the beginning, this month's quest is for that best middle ground, and the X61 delivers in spades as a well-rounded machine in its category. It's aging a little (it came to market last year), but you can't argue with the X61's success. And considering that this tricked-out 12.1-inch portable notebook line starts at a little over $1000, it also happens to offer a lot for your money.