Benchmarks: Vitals and Battery Life
Though the Yoga Slim 7 and ThinkPad T14s look similar in terms of specification, they are configured somewhat differently. The T14s is the more reserved of the two, with the 15W chip quick to throttle in order to keep temperature down. 76ºC can be deemed cool for an octo-core chip, though the laptop does physically get quite warm toward its right side, where the cooling fan is located.
The advantage of reducing peak frequency is that noise levels are no burden. Lenovo's fan switches off at idle and when it does spin into action it does so smoothly and generates a subtle hum that while audible is far from off-putting.
We use a pair of PCMark 10 benchmarks to gauge battery life; Modern Office, which intermittently uses the writing, web browsing and video conferencing workloads from the main PCMark 10 benchmark; and Gaming, which repeats the common Fire Strike test to provide a worst case scenario.
In order to make the results comparable between laptops, each system is configured with a purpose-built power plan, wireless radios disabled, and screen brightness set as close to 200 nits as possible using a calibration device.
Almost 12 hours of longevity is more than enough for an average day's work, and on paper a decent-enough result for the T14s. What's curious is that the Yoga Slim 7, with a faster, higher-power CPU, is able to keep going considerably longer with only a marginally larger battery (61Wh vs. 57Wh). We're struggling to explain the gulf, but the Yoga's superlative battery performance suggests the ThinkPad could be optimised further still.