Lenovo Yoga C940 review: A mighty fine 2-in-1

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While the essential idea behind the Lenovo C940 is the same as the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1, this convertible laptop has two immediate advantages: it comes with an active stylus, which stows away neatly in a slot in the spine of the machine; and it includes a larger display. The Yoga’s measures 14in across the diagonal with an aspect ratio of 16:9, while the Dell’s is 13.4in and a squarer 16:10.

You can configure the Yoga C940 with a 1080p or 4K panel, with Lenovo sending us the former for testing. It’s a fine display but if you’re going to use it for photo editing or colour-critical design work, seek out the Intel Graphics Control Panel by searching for it in the Windows 10 Start menu. With the power-saving settings enabled, dynamic contrast kicked in, dimming the display when there was a lot of dark content on the screen.

With this battery-saving guff disabled, the display was decent without being amazing. Brightness peaks at 369cd/m2, which is a fair notch behind the Dell XPS 2-in-1’s 538cd/m2, and it also falls behind for colour accuracy: while a 91.4% figure for sRGB coverage is good, an average Delta E of 3.08 is not. Dell’s laptop scored 97.1% and 1.18 in those tests.

We would still be happy watching films on the C940, though, and that’s due to the exceptional speakers. These take the form of a Dolby Atmos-branded “soundbar” that stretches across the centre of the machine, in the crease between the screen and keyboard. These don’t pump out much bass but produce audio with a surprising amount of body and volume. We wouldn’t want to listen to music on these, but talk radio, podcasts and TV shows? No problem.

A 720p webcam sits above the screen, and unlike the Dell it includes a cover that you can slide across for privacy. Alas, you can’t use the webcam to unlock the machine with your face as it isn’t compatible with Windows Hello, but a fingerprint reader sits just below the bottom right-hand corner of the keyboard for speedy unlocking.

While we’d prefer more travel and feedback, the keyboard is pleasant to type on with a good amount of space surrounding each key. The touchpad is large and responsive too: it’s a diving-board design, which means you can’t click it along its top edge, but the clicks aren’t too heavy or rattly.

With a compact chassis – it weighs 1.35kg – physical connections are inevitably limited, but still beat the Dell thanks to an old-school USB-A port sat alongside a pair of Thunderbolt 3-enabled USB-C ports on the left edge of the machine.

It’s also good to see Wi-Fi 6, but that’s to be expected alongside Intel’s tenth-gen mobile CPUs. With a Core i7-1065G7 and 16GB of RAM in this configuration, and a 256GB Samsung SSD, the C940 performed strongly in our benchmarks. A total of 102 is three points faster than the Dell.

It was a similar story when it came to graphics performance, with the more advanced Intel Iris Plus graphics (denoted by the G7 in the processor name) delivering a noticeable performance advantage over the less beefy Core i5 in the Acer Swift 5 and a similar performance to the XPS 13 2-in-1. In the GFXBench Car Chase test both the Dell and Lenovo scored around 55fps, compared to 31fps for the Acer.

Note that Lenovo includes a speedy SSD too, with the Samsung drive returning sustained read and write speeds of 2,585MB/sec and 2,062MB/sec respectively. The latter is three times as fast as the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1.

And this laptop’s battery life was even more impressive, lasting 11hrs 13mins in our video rundown test. That’s a good two hours longer than the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 and three hours better than the similarly specified Surface Laptop 3.

Whichever way you slice it, then, the Lenovo Yoga C940 is a mighty fine 2-in-1. It’s as fast as all its rivals and outlasts them for battery life. It has broad connectivity, impressive speakers and its only weakness is the display. (But, in general, it’s still a good screen.) With a sleek chassis, solid 360˚ hinge and a bundled stylus, you have a 2-in-1 that combines good looks and great performance – and all at a keen price. If you want a 2-in-1, it has to be either this or the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1. For our money, the Lenovo Yoga C940 edges it.

Lenovo Yoga C940 specifications