Lenovo Yoga C940 review

Last updated: Mar 22, 2021

Quick verdict: Lenovo's updated Yoga C940 takes the company's familiar 2-in-1 design and adds some serious speed, making for an excellent productivity laptop.

Good audio thanks to revolving speaker
Good processor performance
Solid battery life

Mediocre GPU performance
Screen aspect ratio is odd in tablet mode
Stylus can be hard to remove from tablet body

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Lenovo has been pumping out Yoga 2-in-1 laptops for some years now across a range of price points and use cases. The Yoga C940 very much sits in the premium space both in terms of its pricing and performance. In most respects, the 2020 model is essentially a slight refresh of the design paired with an upgrade to the best of the current generation of Intel processors. The end result is a very slick, professional-looking productivity machine.

Design

14-inch FHD or UHD display
Touchscreen
Rotating hinge for screen and speaker
Integrated stylus hard to remove

One of the defining features of the Yoga range has been how it calls to its namesake by featuring a display that can fully flip over to turn the display into an effective tablet. The Yoga C940's 14-inch display come with either a Full HD or UHD display, with the review sample supplied being the lower-cost Full HD variant. The one caveat here if you crave a little tablet action is that the 16:9 ratio does make for a very tall and wide tablet. It really does feel rather like you're holding a super-large phone when you're using it this way.
The display on the Yoga C940 is touch-enabled, but Lenovo also supplies an integrated stylus. It's tucked away to the side of the rear hinge, which is some very neat and compact engineering, although you may struggle at first to pop it out of its secure enclave.
There's a very deliberate slight "lip" on the Yoga C940 that proclaims its branding but also makes it very easy to open and close compared to many other ultraportables. It helps here that the Yoga C940 adheres to Intel's "Project Athena" guidelines so it's exceptionally fast to wake when you open it. You'd basically need Superman-level reflexes to actually try to interact with the screen before it springs to life when you open it up.
Lenovo's Yoga design incorporates rounded keys on the keyboard. I can't say I love them aesthetically – maybe I'm just a keyboard purist at heart – but they're certainly functional with a decent level of key travel for a laptop. There's also a small biometric fingerprint sensor just below the arrow keys. The front facing 720p camera can be used for videoconferencing use but isn't compatible with Windows Hello for login purposes.
The right hand side of the Yoga C940 houses just the power button, leaving all the port action on the left. That includes a single USB-A type port and two USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports, either of which can be used for charging. It would be a nice flexibility move for Lenovo to flip one of those ports over to the right to allow charging and data use from either side, but that's not what you get here.
One important differentiator for the Lenovo Yoga C940 is the way its speaker works. It's mounted into the hinge such that when you flip the C940 open, it's facing you for maximum effectiveness, but it also rotates with the screen when you flip it into tablet mode. That means if you're using it for a little sneaky Netflix bingeing before bedtime, you're not firing the sound into your lap, but directly towards your ears. It's a neat design twist – quite literally – that works well.

Performance

Good general performance
Intel GPU isn't a powerhouse

The Lenovo C940 ships with a tenth generation "Ice Lake" Intel Core i7-1065G7 processor as the default across both the standard Full HD and pricier UHD models, paired with a 512GB M.2 SSD in either unit. One important difference here is memory; the standard Full HD model comes with 8GB of RAM while the UHD model starts at 16GB of RAM. The RAM is soldered on, so if you do want or need more RAM on that entry level model, you'll need to specify that as an upgrade when ordering because there's no way to upgrade it once you've purchased it.
My review model had the upgrade to 16GB, so if you're considering the cheaper model, be aware that its performance is likely to be a step behind what I was able to achieve.
Here's how the Lenovo C940 fared across a range of popular synthetic and real-world benchmarks:
The Core i7-10065G7 provides plenty of oomph for productivity tasks, although it's not quite the top of the Core i7 Ice Lake family tree. Where it doesn't fare quite as well is in its integrated graphics. As with other Ice Lake devices, you're using Intel's newer Iris Plus graphics built into the chip. Simply put, Intel's onboard GPUs are no equivalent for a dedicated GPU as you'd find in any number of gaming laptops.
As such, if you are pushing pixels heavily – and this doesn't just cover gaming but also some 3D modelling and other productivity purposes – the Yoga C940 might only give you moderate performance. Testing with more modern titles, it could handle lower frame rates and resolutions but attempts to push it hard saw some serious performance degradation. That's entirely to be expected though, and this isn't sold as any kind of gaming laptop in any case.

Battery life

Solid overall battery life
Easy USB-C charging

Like most ultraportables and 2-in-1s, there's a trade off in the Lenovo Yoga C940 between carrying weight and battery capacity. The Yoga C940 ships with a 60Wh battery that recharges through either left side USB-C port, with a supplied charger of moderate size.
Battery usage can vary widely depending on how heavily you push any given laptop. To give that some context, I first ran the Lenovo Yoga C940 through our standard video test, streaming a 1080p video at moderate volume to the point of battery exhaustion in best performance mode. Video processing isn't the most strenuous task you can throw at a laptop, but it gives you a good comparative starting point.
Then, to put the Lenovo C940 Yoga through a more intense pressure test, I ran it through PCMark's Gaming Battery benchmark. Here's how it compared against the recently reviewed Razer Blade 15 Base Model.
Here's how the Lenovo Yoga C940 fared across both tests:
The Razer Blade, it should be noted, runs rings around the Yoga in actual gaming terms. Still, there's good potential here for an all-day battery laptop at moderate use. PC Mark's gaming battery benchmark is deliberately brutal, so that's effectively a worst-case scenario kind of figure for most Yoga C940 owners.

Should you buy the Lenovo Yoga C940?

Finder score: 3.5

Lenovo does have a range of Yoga 2-in-1s starting right down in the more affordable laptop space, but that's not the core market for the C940. It's well worth your while if you want a well-designed all-round laptop solution with a strong focus on standard productivity.

Pricing and availability

Price

RRP from $2,999 for Full HD display | RRP from $3,699 for UHD display

Where to buy

Amazon

Specifications

Finder score: 3.5

How we score our reviews

Where to buy

General

Processor Family

Intel Core i7

Processor Model

i7-1065G7

Processor Cores

10th Gen Intel® Core™ i7

RAM options

Up to 16GB

Display

Screen Size

14 inches

Resolution

1920 x 1080px or 3840 x 2160px

Graphics Processor

Intel Iris® Plus

Features

Operating System

Windows 10 Home 64 or Windows 10 Pro 64

USB-C Ports

USB 3.0 Ports

Bluetooth

v5.0

Webcam

Yes

Touchscreen

Yes

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Alex Kidman

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A multi-award winning journalist, Alex has written about consumer technology for over 20 years. He has written and edited for virtually every Australian tech publication including Gizmodo, CNET, PC Magazine, Kotaku and more. He has also been the Editor of Gizmodo Australia, PC Mag Australia, CNET.com.au and the Tech and Telco section at Finder. Alex has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of New England and a serious passion for retro gaming.

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Lenovo Yoga C940 review