Pros & Cons
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- Potent CPU performance
- Stunning OLED display
- Durable chassis
- Robust speaker system
- Crisp, satisfying keyboard
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- Pricey base configuration
Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i Gen 10 Aura Edition Specs
| Boot Drive Capacity (as Tested) | 1 |
| Boot Drive Type | SSD |
| Class | Desktop Replacement |
| Dimensions (HWD) | 0.7 by 14.3 by 10 inches |
| Graphics Memory | 8 |
| Graphics Processor | Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 Laptop GPU |
| Native Display Resolution | 2880 by 1800 |
| Operating System | Windows 11 |
| Panel Technology | OLED |
| Processor | Intel Core Ultra 9 285H |
| RAM (as Tested) | 32 |
| Screen Refresh Rate | 120 |
| Screen Size | 16 |
| Tested Battery Life (Hours:Minutes) | 15:04 |
| Touch Screen | |
| Variable Refresh Support | Yes |
| Weight | 4.25 |
| Wireless Networking | Bluetooth 5.4 |
| Wireless Networking | Wi-Fi 7 |
Lenovo's Yoga Pro 9i Gen 10 Aura Edition ($1,949.99 as tested) leads its line of high-end full-metal laptops for content creators quite well, with all the premium trappings designers and media pros should expect. Containing a top-end Intel processor and entry-grade Nvidia dedicated graphics, the Yoga Pro packs a lot of performance into its durable aluminum chassis for basic to intermediate photo- and video-editing work, as well as graphic design. Positioning it as a "prosumer" laptop, Lenovo built this Yoga Pro using premium materials and with an apparently meticulous attention to detail. But the GPU isn't nearly as strong as the processor, so hold out for a sale to snag that that lower-end graphics power at a more reasonable price. Otherwise, look to the Editors' Choice-award-holding Asus ProArt P16 for an unmatched content-creation PC laptop in both power and premium flair.
Configurations: Lots of Choice, But Seek Out Sales
We reviewed Lenovo's starting Yoga Pro 9i Gen 10 configuration, a setup that features an Intel Core Ultra 9 285H processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 graphics processor, 32GB of LPDDR5 memory, a 1TB solid-state drive, a 16-inch 2,880-by-1,800-pixel 120Hz OLED touch screen, and Windows 11 Home.
For all that, you'll pay a hefty $1,949.99 retail. You can buy several beefier Yoga Pro 9i configurations, some with Windows 11 Pro, ranging from $2,199.99 to $2,809.99, including options for more memory, better graphics, and more storage. Lenovo includes a directly configurable model that starts at $2,399.99; the best-equipped Yoga Pro 9i configuration runs for $3,499.99, containing the same CPU but an RTX 5070 GPU, 64GB of RAM, and a second 1TB SSD. This version also has a sharper 3,200-by-2,000-pixel touch screen.
Perhaps the most notable Yoga Pro 9i configuration has an RTX 5060 GPU inside with the same CPU, RAM, storage, and display for $2,199.99. However, our entry-level review model is at Best Buy for just $1,549.99 on sale at publishing time, making for a much better value while you can grab one, and much closer to what an RTX 5050 laptop should typically cost.
Design: Every Bit the Premium Laptop You're Paying for
The Yoga Pro earns its “Pro” title with a sleek and durable all-aluminum chassis, slim display bezels, and a clean keyboard deck. The chassis is an inoffensive Lunar Grey color that fits both at home and in the office. (A teal shade is also available.) The laptop includes Lenovo's modern camera hub along the top of the screen lid with a mirrored finish and text indicating the built-in 5-megapixel infrared webcam and quad-microphone array.
This year's Yoga Pro 9i measures 0.7 inch thick and weighs 4.25 pounds, which is both thinner and lighter than the previous model by fair margins. The latest Apple MacBook Pro 16-Inch continues to lead in thinness at just 0.66 inch, but it's heavier than Lenovo's laptop by nearly half a pound at 4.7 pounds. The Asus ProArt P16 is lighter than either of these, at 4.08 pounds, and it's just about as thin.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Lenovo's Yoga hinge is both sturdy and easy to open with one finger. Despite its name, this Yoga Pro is a clamshell laptop, not a 2-in-1 laptop like most Yogas, but it still opens to an impressive flat angle, and is incredibly stable all the way down to its full 180 degrees.
The Yoga Pro also meets the strict MIL-STD-810H standards, so it can handle extreme temperatures, high altitudes, intense humidity, and dust or sand. You're more likely to find this durability rating on business laptops, but it makes sense for the Yoga Pro. As a content-creation laptop, the Yoga Pro is more suited to travel than your average system.
Keyboard, Touchpad, and Connections: All Aces
Lenovo produces some of the best keyboards on the laptop market, and the Yoga Pro upholds that standard. The board runs nearly edge-to-edge, with speaker grilles stretching up and down the sides of the board. An oversized, offset touchpad sits centered below the space bar.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The keys reply to presses with crisp activation and ample bounce, a genuine delight to type on. Lenovo's silky oversize touchpad provides a soft and satisfying click that only enhances the Yoga Pro's premium feel.
An input combo of that quality is impressive. But the Yoga Pro's connectivity array may have it beat. On the left side, you'll find a proprietary power connection, an HDMI 2.1 port, two 40Gbps Thunderbolt 4 USB-C connections, and an audio jack. On the opposite side, you'll notice two 5Gbps USB-A ports and a full-size SD card slot. For wireless connections, the laptop contains up-to-date Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 radios.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Display and Audio: Ready for Visual Work and Leisure
Content-creation laptops demand high-quality displays, and Lenovo didn’t miss with the Yoga Pro 9i. With an 1800p OLED touch screen by default and an optional 3.2K (3,200 by 2,000) Tandem OLED upgrade, the Yoga Pro display delivers stunning and vivid colors. (Tandem OLEDs use two light-emitting layers stacked behind the screen instead of just one.) Either display includes HDR 1000 True Black enhanced contrast and a 120Hz variable refresh rate, delivering a smoother look and feel for regular tasks, not to mention for editing motion graphics and videos.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Whether you’re color-grading video, editing your tropical travel photos, or just bingeing your favorite show, the Yoga Pro’s display is an absolute treat to look at. Combined with powerful top-firing speakers in a two-by-four configuration (dual 2-watt tweeters with quad 2W woofers) and with Dolby Atmos tuning, this 16-inch laptop is a well-endowed entertainment machine.
Performance Testing: Top-Rung CPU; Ground-Level GPU
All Yoga Pro 9i Gen 10 models feature an Intel Core Ultra 9 285H CPU with 16 cores and a 5.4GHz top clock speed, one of Intel's most powerful mobile chips. That's paired with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 GPU in our configuration, containing 8GB of video memory and equipped with Nvidia Studio drivers for optimized content-creation work.
Since the Yoga Pro is a content-creation laptop, we put it through our usual gauntlet of benchmarks, as well as additional video-editing and workstation tests.
To see just how well the Yoga Pro handles those workloads, we compared it with leading creator laptops like the Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch (2024, M4 Pro), which costs $3,649 as tested. We included the $2,699.99 Asus ProArt P16 (H7606), our $2,549.99 LG Gram Pro 2-in-1 16 (2025) review configuration, and the Dell 16 Premium (DA16250) we tested, costing $3,199.99. Every system here is pricier than the Yoga Pro, which is an important distinction, but the benchmark charts show how much of a difference a fancier GPU makes.
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Productivity and Content Creation Tests
Our primary overall benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC's storage throughput. (Macs are not compatible with this test, so they're not included in that chart below.)
Three more tests are CPU-centric or processor-intensive: Maxon's Cinebench 2024 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Creators rates a PC's image editing prowess with a variety of automated operations in Adobe Photoshop 25. (The LG Gram laptop could not complete this test, so it's not included in the chart below.)
This Yoga Pro wasn't the most powerful laptop here, but it kept pace with its competitors, taking second place in the PCMark productivity test, HandBrake, and Geekbench. Both the LG and Dell laptops housed an Intel Core Ultra 7 255H chip, so the Yoga's placement in that group made sense. The AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 inside the Asus ProArt held a lead over all three Intel-based laptops on the PCMark storage benchmark and multi-core Cinebench, but it fell behind in HandBrake and Geekbench.
In the Photoshop test, which should be bread and butter for the Yoga, the laptop placed third—though it posted a perfectly usable result. Yes, it was outstripped by the more powerful GPUs in the Apple and Asus laptops, but it's also far lower in price as configured.
Would the Yoga Pro fare that much better with an RTX 5070 inside? While we can't say with certainty, we know that such a model costs $3,219.99 at a minimum from Lenovo. That's not far off from the MacBook Pro here, which outstripped every laptop in the comparison set whenever it had the chance (though notably not so in graphics).
Graphics Tests
We challenge each reviewed system’s graphics with a quintet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. The first two, Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K), use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. The next two, Steel Nomad's regular (4K) and Light (1440p) subtests, focus on APIs more commonly used for game development to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. A fifth test, Solar Bay, measures ray-tracing performance.
The Yoga Pro 9i had an entry-level discrete Nvidia GPU with Nvidia Studio drivers installed, so its gaming-graphics performance was far from the top. Asus' and Dell's laptops had xx70-class RTX GPUs, and they showed their superiority throughout these tests.
Meanwhile, the LG laptop with Intel's Arc integrated graphics fell well behind, demonstrating how the RTX 5050 stacks up against one of Intel's top-tier Arrow Lake IGPs. Meanwhile, Apple's IGP performed well enough in the tests we could measure it on, but it couldn't compete with xx70-class discrete graphics power.
You can draw playable 1080p gaming performance out of any of these laptops with discrete GPUs. However, none of them have cooling systems designed for gaming, and some have specialized media-creator graphics drivers (Nvidia Studio) installed. Laptops like the Yoga Pro are designed for photo- and video-editing work, not gaming, and its 3DMark performance attests to that.
Workstation Tests
First, we measure workstation performance with SPECviewperf 2020 (version 3.1), which renders, rotates, and zooms in and out of solid and wire-frame models at 1080p resolution. The three subtests represent PTC's Creo CAD platform, Autodesk's Maya modeling and simulation software for film, TV, and games, and Dassault Systèmes's SolidWorks 3D-rendering package.
Next up is Blender, an open-source 3D content-creation suite for modeling, animation, simulation, and compositing. We record the time it takes for Blender 4.2 to render three distinct scenes to measure CPU and GPU rendering performance. (The Yoga Pro could not complete this test, so this test is excluded from the charts below.) Then, we run an automated PugetBench extension in Adobe Premiere Pro that tests real-world video-editing tasks, including live playback, file export, high-res encoding with different codecs, processing and decoding different types of source media, and applying GPU-accelerated special effects.
Finally, we also use PugetBench for Creators to test DaVinci Resolve Studio 18 video editor performance on systems suitable for that challenging app. As with Adobe Premiere, these automated tasks and features push the CPU and GPU, letting us gauge real-world media-creation speeds.
As the Yoga Pro 9i is an entry-level content-creation laptop, it struggled much more with the workstation benchmarks than its counterparts. These scores prove the Yoga Pro certainly can handle photo and video editing at a respectable level, but not necessarily advanced workloads, which makes sense for its class. Spending more to spring for the Apple, Asus, or Dell laptops might save you valuable time (and therefore money) in the long run.
Battery Life and Display Tests
We test each laptop and tablet's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
To gauge display performance, we use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor-calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter). (We do not have display test results for the MacBook Pro, so it is not included in those charts below.)
The Yoga Pro's battery lasted respectably long, second only to the LG Gram among these PC laptops, and well beyond a workday. (The MacBook Pro is another battery beast entirely.) As for the Yoga Pro’s display, this OLED touch screen proved to be suitably bright and vivid for a content-creation laptop. Lenovo claims the Yoga's screen can reach 500 nits of brightness, with a DCI-P3 color coverage rating of 100%. In our testing, the Yoga Pro generally affirmed these claims within the margin of error. This display is deeply colorful and can cut through any indoor glare.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i Gen 10 Aura Edition
The Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i Gen 10 Aura Edition is a slick premium laptop for content creators, with a stunning OLED display and a mighty processor. Just hold out for a sale to snag that entry-level graphics chip at a more sensible price.