Lenovo Yoga C940 Review

The Lenovo Yoga C940 is the company’s flagship convertible for 2020. The device offers a flexible productivity solution in a premium aluminium body.

The design of the Yoga C940 is eye-catching but it might not be enough to measure up to competing ultrabooks in the looks department. However, a questionable design choice may have been influenced by one of the laptop’s best features – battery life.

A long-lasting battery and the latest Intel 10th Gen processors make this Lenovo flagship a worthy alternative to the likes of the Dell XPS 13 and Surface Laptop 3.

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Lenovo Yoga C940 design – Classy but chunky

It feels strange to be referring to a device that’s around 15mm thick as chunky – however, it’s true.

The Lenovo Yoga C940 seems big because we are spoilt for choice in the design stakes by the latest flagships. Even Lenovo’s own non-convertible flagship – the Lenovo Yoga S940 – is dwarfed by this laptop.

While there’s room to criticise the large surface area of the Lenovo Yoga C940, the rest of the design is up to par. The Yoga C940 uses subtle curves all the way around the device and even leaves one side completely absent of ports for a cleaner look. The ports on the other side include one USB-A, two Thunderbolt USB-Cs and a headphone jack.

Your eyes will likely be drawn to the hinge of the device that runs along much of the join between the laptop’s screen and keyboard. This design is fine – the hinge has the look of a speaker grille and houses two tweeters to support the rest of the sound system on the underside of the laptop. And the long join does make this 2-in-1 extremely sturdy.

The speakers themselves are decent enough. The Yoga S940 touts a Dolby Atmos speaker system, although that moniker may lead you to expect more. These speakers perform admirably, but aren’t good or bad enough in comparison to competitors to warrant swaying your purchase.

For artists and other creators, the design allows for a handy built-in stylus compartment. This will be super-useful for those prone to losing this fiddly item – however, trying to remove the stylus itself is a bit tricky.

Along with a fingerprint reader and Windows Hello support for logging in, the Lenovo Yoga C940 also offers a manual webcam cover at the top of the display – always nice to have for the privacy conscious.

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Lenovo Yoga C940 keyboard and trackpad – Nothing to type home about

Other than some aspects of the design, the keyboard of the Yoga C940 may be its weakest point. The keyboard is by no means terrible but it is comfortably beaten by those found on the Surface Laptop 3 13 and HP Spectre x360 13. 

You’ll get used to typing on this machine but it just isn’t that clicky and feels a tad spongy. On the plus side, it is reasonably quiet.

The trackpad is pretty standard – it works as you’d expect and is just about the right size. Lenovo has chosen to stick to a fairly familiar size rather than opt for a huge trackpad, as some manufacturers have begun to do.

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Lenovo Yoga C940 display – A glaring problem

The Lenovo Yoga C940 comes with two display options: Full HD and UHD (4K). Our 14in review model came with the Full HD display and isn’t half bad.

The laptop performed decently in our display benchmarks. The brightness topped out at 337 nits, which is an okay score. This isn’t quite bright enough to counteract the glare issue. The super-reflective screen could be a massive annoyance if you live or work in environments with lots of overhead lighting.

A low black level of 0.2 nits at least ensures a superb 1689:1 contrast ratio, ensuring bright colours stand out from the gloom for a dazzling picture.

As for colour accuracy, it scored 90.8% for sRGB, 63.5% for Adobe RGB and 66.2% for DCI-P3. These results are standard for a modern day ultrabook, although not quite accurate enough for professional artists looking to take full advantage of the stylus functionality.

A fantastic 6382K  white visual colour temperature also ensures there’s minimal distortion to the colours, with white lights appearing natural.

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Lenovo Yoga C940 performance – Ice Lake luxury

Our review model came equipped with the top specs you can get on the Yoga C940 – a 10th Gen Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD.

Given the specs, it’s no shock the the Lenovo Yoga C940 is a top performer. Intel’s Ice Lake processors (especially at i7 level) have shown themselves beyond capable of dealing with the most arduous level of productivity tasking.

Faced with everything from plenty of open browser tabs to running Word or watching videos, this Lenovo Yoga C940 had an easy time. Here’s how our £1364.99 model stacks up against the competition:

Lenovo Yoga C940	HP Spectre x360 13	Dell XPS 13 2-in-1	Surface Laptop 3 13
PCMark 10	4194	4277	4082	3919
Geekbench 5 single-core	1320	1311	1177	1151
Geekbench 5 multi-core	4379	3447	2365	4406

In most areas, the Yoga C940 either matches up to or surpasses the competition. What makes this even more impressive is that its competitors are priced at £200-£500 more for similar specs (depending on whether you opt for 4K/UHD).

For graphics, Intel’s Ice Lake is more capable than any preceding generation of processor. While you won’t be playing the latest AAA games on this laptop, it is still impressive that you can easily run a basic title like Rocket League on this machine without a dedicated GPU.

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Lenovo Yoga C940 battery – Go all day and then some

By far the biggest selling point of the Lenovo Yoga C940 is its gargantuan battery life. I can’t speak for the UHD model – which I expect would see the battery reduced significantly – but the Full HD version is seriously impressive.

Despite its beefy internals, our benchmarks showed the battery life to exceed 12 hours. These results also played out in our day-to-day testing.

This is the key factor for those who might be considering purchasing this laptop. The Lenovo Yoga C940 may not be in the top echelons of laptop design but the extra size enables the inclusion of a high-performing battery that could last you up to two working days.

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Should you buy the Lenovo Yoga C940?

The Lenovo Yoga C940 isn’t the perfect ultrabook, with compromises to the design and portability to fit that larger battery. But when you factor in battery life, performance and the low price, you realise this laptop offers supreme value. The Yoga C940 costs hundreds of pounds less than many of its competitors, while offering significantly longer stamina.

The design-conscious may recoil at the Lenovo Yoga C940 – it isn’t at the cutting edge of modern laptop aesthetics. If you are in this camp, then consider the HP Spectre x360 13 or Dell XPS 13 2-in-1. That said, the Yoga C940 is far from ugly. If you’re happy to sacrifice a couple of inches for an improved performance and battery life, than you will be richly rewarded by the Yoga C940.

Verdict

The Lenovo Yoga C940 offers a slightly larger option in the premium 2-in-1 market and represents cracking value. If you have been looking for a device that offers longer battery life with top-of-the-line specs then you may have been struggling, as laptops continue to evolve into ultra-portable iterations. Thankfully, the Yoga C940 has answered your call.

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