Laptop suggestion for CS student and light game development with egpu setup

Laptops Suggest a Laptop
1

I am looking for a laptop that is light weight (~1.5kg), have good battery life (lasting for 1 day on campus), good enough performance for light gaming (civ 6, city skylines) and light game development (intensive use will be used with my 6750xt).

My budget is around 1000$ - 1400$. I’m considering 4 options right now:

  1. Yoga Slim 7i aura edition with Ultra 7 258V. In other regions outside US they have the 2.8k 120hz screen option that goes for 1300$. (https://psref.lenovo.com/Product/Yoga/Yoga_Slim_7_14ILL10?tab=spec). This one is fine in every aspect, it’s just that the cpu is quite weak for this price, might be a bottleneck for my gpu

  2. Yoga Pro 7i aura edition with Core Ultra 9 285H. https://psref.lenovo.com/Product/Yoga/Yoga_Pro_7_14IAH10?tab=spec. Way better cpu, 3k touchscreen, 1 more usb-a port. Battery might be somewhat worse though? 1400$, quite pricey.

  3. Asus Vivobook S 14 M5406WA with Ryzen™ AI 9 HX 370. This one is pretty weird, it seems like the perfect laptop with a good price: oled 3k 120hz touchscreen display 32gb ram 1tb storage, light weight (1.3kg), decent(?) 75whrs battery, great ports options. Only nitpick is wifi 6e I guess. All of that for 1150$ seems like a great deal.

I can’t seems to find much reviews of the AMD vivobook though, so things like linux support is still a mystery. I have seen many posts about vivobooks breaking down and having numerous problems though, seems like that’s a ASUS laptops thing.

  1. Zenbook 14 ultra 9 285h. Also seems perfect, except for the aforementioned ASUS problems like overheating, screen problems, etc…

This is a quite long post so thank you for reading and replying!

2

All of them are great, from all the reviews if you do not mind heat, i think vivobook is great value, for wifi i think you can upgrade the card to 7.

3

I would go for the Lenovo yoga pro 7i. If not that then I would look at the vivobook S14. I can blindly trust Lenovo for reliability and customer service, but I cannot saythe same for ASUS. In my country,ASUS has a terrible customer support. If your country does have good customer support from Asus then you can go for the Asus vivobook S14.

4

Yea it seems like the wifi the upgradable, but 6e is fine to me. Only problem for me is durability, I have an dell inspiron that is still going strong after 8 years, so having something that breakdown in 3-4 years would be a let down. May be I should consider a thinkpad lol.

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I would also trust Lenovo for being more reliable. There’s not much I can find about ASUS customer support in my country though, so maybe not that many people are experiencing problems. If I can I would go for the yoga pro too, may be wait for a sale or something.

Also I finally found a review of this particular model. Everything looks fine. Main downside: weird keyboard latency??? Might get fixed later on but right now that’s a huge deal breaker.

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I also find it weird for a laptop to have a keyboard latency. I was wondering how much is the yoga pro 7 i with the core ultra 7? And how much more expensive is the coreultra 9 model?

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I couldn’t the find the core ultra 7 model here sadly. But compared to the slim 7i model it got a much more powerful chip, better screen and ports options for just 100$ more.

1 Like
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I see. But I don’t think that it would be 1400$. Are you checking the official Lenovo website? Do you have a best buy in your location? Or Amazon? Maybe you can get a discount over there.

My friend currently bought the same Lenovo yoga pro 7i. It had the core ultra 7 chip and all the specs were same. Same SSD, same 32GB Ram, same 3K display it costed him around 1150$.

9

Dang that’s a good price. Sadly I don’t have amazon or best buy around here. Lenovo doesn’t sell directly from their website so we have to buy from retailers, may be that’s why they’re generally more expensive.

10

Lenovo is the king of durability, probs a little more expensive but it is great. But i think zenbook is for “buissnes users“ so it should have good durability too? If lenovo yoga pro 7i is on a discount take it both are great laptops i think, similar display/spec.

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Tbh I don’t know a lot about the zenbooks, at least there’s not many in my country complaining about them so they might be great.
1400$ is the absolute best price I can find, some places sell them for 1500$. Waiting for a sale gonna be tough. One thing though, people are complaining about its bad battery life (4-5 hours on chrome, 90% screen, 120hz, balance mode, might get more with lower brightness and 60hz) so I might opt for the slim 7i for superior battery life. I wonder if it’s because of the ultra 9 cpu, only if they sell the ultra 7 model here.

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Hi. A bit late comment from me, but since you’re mentioning the ASUS Vivobook S 14 M5406WA with the same specs, as you found that I have in my hands, I’ll give a mini-review, after almost 1.5 years of throughout use.
The screen quality is very good, albeit it’s a glossy panel, meaning, that it might not be a good fit, when working in some environments. I’m happy using it at 50-60% of it’s peak brightness on a normal day.
Most things I do on a laptop, is heavy multi-core processing, like encoding videos to an AV1 codec and converting pictures to a more efficient JPEG XL picture codec. In my custom settings in GHelper (settings you see are on this picture), it performs surprisingly good, even though, I prefer extremely slow encoding preset of SVT-AV1 encoder as -1 for the best efficiency at the expense of really long encoding times. It gets at up to around 80 °C, when doing such load in HandBrake I explained earlier with these fan curves.

GHelper_nKeionOyFM
GHelper_nKeionOyFM1093×558 43.9 KB

The keyboard and touchpad are passable for me. Nothing too unusual, but not so much bad things I can tell about it, except for a touchpad, where it has tendency to misclick, if I put my laptop to a certain position of my body, that somehow click itself.

Unfortunately, speakers of that laptop didn’t impress me at all. Maybe fine for watching casual YouTube videos and online conversations, but not much more than that in my opinion.
Wi-Fi and Bluetooth performance is okay, although, I can’t tell much about Wi-Fi performance, since I only really have Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) routers to begin with. Facial unlock with Windows Hello is a bit finicky too, works half the times for me, sometimes it won’t unlock the laptop with my face.
I don’t really use this laptop for gaming on integrated graphics as much, as you’re probably interested. But I did ran Test Drive Unlimited 2 on it at maximum possible settings, when playing at a native resolution of the panel (2880x1800). It ran okay with few usual microstutters, given the nature of a game’s age (more than 15 years old).
Overall, I think the ASUS Vivobook S14 M5406WA from mid-2024 with Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 is a good machine, at least for my use cases I wanted to do. Granted, it’ll perform even better in gaming, when docked to USB4 eGPU, but I think you should be more happy with it, if you can find it for around 1100-1200 USD, like I did back in December 2024, when I bought it on a Russian marketplace brand new in box.