Lenovo Yoga 13 Review

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Software and Performance

The Lenovo Yoga 13 ships with Windows 8 64-bit, making it the first system we have tested to ship with Microsoft's latest OS.

I'll stop well short of doing a full-on review of Windows 8 but just note that if you are totally new to the OS, it will certainly take some time to get used to. I've had a little experience with Windows 8 beforehand but even still, it took a bit to get the hang of things initially. After a couple of weeks, however, I felt pretty well versed and even found that there were some things I preferred over the tried and true Windows 7 I've been using for years.

One of those things is how quickly the operating system loads from a cold boot. I clocked a complete boot at just 11 seconds; faster than any other system I have tested to date by a significant margin. Windows 8 and the solid state drive can share the credit for this feat.

Upon booting into Windows 8 for the first time, I navigated to the add / remove programs menu and surprisingly found only half a dozen or so programs that I would remove from the get-go. This is refreshing as the last several notebooks I have reviewed shipped with at least a dozen or more bloatware apps.

Given this new platform, we were forced to modify our benchmarking procedures slightly. PCMark Vantage refused to give an overall score now matter how hard I tried. We are also doing away with our "real-world" web-browsing battery test in favor of the much more standardized Powermark application. All of our other testing procedures have been carried over from Windows 7.

Benchmarks Results

Synthetic Tests	Yoga 13	Aspire S5	TimelineU M5	MacBook Air

3DMark 06
3DMark Score	4393 3DMarks	5263 3DMarks	11958 3DMarks	5785 3DMarks

PCMark Vantage
PCMark Suite	N/A	13643 PCMarks	6743 PCMarks	N/A

Application Tests	Yoga 13	Aspire S5	TimelineU M5	MacBook Air

iTunes Encoding Test	1 min 25 sec	1 min 15 sec	1 min 19 sec	51 sec

File Transfer Test
Small files	24 sec	10 sec	1 min 11 sec	22 sec
Large file	22 sec	10 sec	1 min 19 sec	22 sec

The iTunes encoding tests consist of converting 14 MP3s (119MB) to 128Kbps ACC files and measuring the operation's duration in seconds. For file transfers, we measure how long it takes to copy two sets of files from one location to another on the same hard drive. On the small files test we transfer 557 MP3s, totaling 2.56GB. For the large file, these same MP3s were zipped into a single file measuring 2.52GB.

Gaming Performance	Yoga 13	Aspire S5	TimelineU M5	MacBook Air

Far Cry 2
1024x768, Medium Quality	23.5 fps	35.2 fps	69.0 fps	37.3 fps
Native res, High Quality	15.3 fps	21.9 fps	55.5 fps	19.3 fps

StarCraft 2
1024x768, Medium Quality	16.9 fps	21.8 fps	39.7 fps	25.1 fps
Native res, High Quality	10.8 fps	15.2 fps	29.9 fps	16.1 fps