Review: Lenovo Slim Pro 9i (14.5-Inch, Gen 8)

What’s the official line on what counts as “slim” in a laptop these days? Lenovo’s Slim Pro 9i may be the company’s most powerful consumer laptop, but it’s certainly not its thinnest. At 25 mm thick and weighing just shy of 4 pounds, it’s downright fat in comparison to anything I’d consider truly slim on the market today.

But let’s not judge this (note)book by its misguided branding. This machine is explicitly focused on performance and power, so I threw everything I had against it to see how it handles the strain.

Photograph: Lenovo

Let’s begin with a tour of the hardware. The gray slab is unique in two features. The most immediately evident is a wide tab, about 4 inches long, that juts out from the top of the laptop, above the screen. This tab is helpful for opening the laptop, and it also provides a spot for the 5-megapixel webcam and infrared presence sensor to reside without crowding the top of the screen. While that feature is mostly decorative, the other main design feature can be found by flipping the laptop over. Here you’ll find a huge vent that runs the entire length of the chassis, jetting hot exhaust out the back of the device when it’s under load. Given the beefy specs of the laptop, that may be often—and the fan was running quite a bit during my testing.

Core components include a 2.4-GHz Intel Core i7-13705H processor (13th generation), 32 GB of RAM, a 1-TB SSD, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 graphics card. None of those specs are earth-shattering, but all are definitively on the high end for any portable laptop, particularly one not specifically targeting gamers.

Photograph: Lenovo

The touchscreen is a slightly oddball size at 14.5 inches diagonally, offering a 16:10 aspect ratio at a resolution of 3,072 x 1,090 pixels. The display is backlit by the newish mini LED technology (same as on the 12.9-inch iPad Pro), which uses thousands of tiny LED light sources to create individually controllable dimming zones. The impact is powerful: Not only are images incredibly lifelike, with impressive contrast, the machine is so bright it’s painful to look at at full strength. I’ve been regularly cataloging laptops with “record” brightness levels all year, one after another, but the Lenovo Slim put them all to shame, beating the next-highest brightness benchmark I’ve measured by 38 percent. I’m confident that this new record is going to stand for some time.

The Slim Pro 9i puts up the performance numbers to back that up, too. With an overclockable CPU and dedicated graphics, there’s plenty of juice to drive solid benchmarks on both business and graphics tests. Unsurprisingly, the laptop didn’t fare as well as HP’s Envy 16, which has a more powerful Core i9 CPU and a higher-end graphics card, but less RAM. On average, the Slim Pro 9i was 20 to 30 percent slower than the Envy 16 across the board—but I’ll quickly note that it still offers impressive, wholly workable performance. If it has a performance flaw, it’s that storage operations—installing apps and getting them to load—are an apparent bottleneck.

The Slim Pro 9i isn’t all about what’s under the hood. The keyboard, with its 1.5-mm travel (called out specifically on a sticker on the chassis), is indeed one of the best I’ve encountered in years, and the touchpad is roomy and reasonably quiet when clicked. Four Dolby Atmos speakers provide plenty of audio power, with a thumping bass that noticeably causes the chassis to vibrate when you break out the bangers. Expansion is ample, with two USB-A ports, HDMI, an SD card reader, and two USB-C ports, one of which supports Thunderbolt 4.

Photograph: Lenovo

As for negatives, there are three big ones: First, the fan is incredibly loud even under modest loads, and if you’re running something heavy like a modern video game, it can ratchet up to the point where it becomes a real nuisance. The Slim Pro’s power also comes at the expense of battery life: I didn’t even hit five hours when running a YouTube video test, and that was using the integrated video card. Compare that to the HP Envy 16, which features better performance, nearly twice the battery life, and a price tag that’s $120 less than Lenovo’s. (The Envy 16’s overall size and 5.2-pound weight may be a dealbreaker for many.)

Finally, I would like to forget the obscene amount of shovelware that Lenovo attempts to force down the user’s throat with this laptop, but if you’re cool with paying nearly $2,000 and endlessly dismissing popup after popup trying to sell you garbage you don’t have any interest in—for days—you can simply ignore this complaint.

I think this laptop is overpriced by at least $200, but its many charms outweigh the price hike (and the fan volume hike) for users who need high-level performance—or find themselves working in broad daylight, where the Slim Pro’s screen is one of few that can keep up.