The Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16” is the most powerful laptop in the long-running Yoga series. Packed with the impressive Intel Core Ultra 9 285H, 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5050 GPU, Lenovo’s latest Yoga is a powerful productivity machine. Throw in a beautiful 16” OLED display, and the Yoga Pro 9i is ready to take on even the toughest creative tasks.
In line with the design philosophy of the Yoga series, the Yoga Pro 9i offers a rounded, smooth profile. Considering its relatively large frame, measuring 362.72mm x 253.69mm, the Pro 9i is quite thin, at just 17.9mm. At 4.25lbs, though, it fits squarely in the midsize category of laptops.
The Luna grey finish looks sharp and, thanks to its matte finish, keeps fingerprint smudging to a minimum. The Yoga Pro 9i offers a fully lit keyboard as well, which provides excellent key illumination, even during the day. While there is no zone lighting or RGB options (this is a productivity laptop at its core after all), the backlighting provides full and consistent coverage for every key. The keyboard itself is fairly standard, though the keystrokes do provide a cushioned typing experience, making them ideal for long days of typing and data entry.
The trackpad, likewise, is quite nice to use and is positioned in line with the keyboard, something that this generation of laptops seems to be moving away from. Thankfully, Lenovo has opted to keep the trackpad in position with the board as opposed to centred to the laptop, providing a smooth typing experience without constantly bumping the trackpad, an issue I’ve run into with other recent test units.
“In line with the design philosophy of the Yoga series, the Yoga Pro 9i offers a rounded, smooth profile.”
The Pro 9i comes equipped with a solid selection of I/O to work with as well. The left side contains Lenovo’s proprietary power connector, an HDMI 2.1 port with support for up to 10K@30Hz, 2 x USB-C (Thunderbolt 4) with power delivery 3.0 and DisplayPort 2.1 and a combo headphone/mic jack. The right side houses two additional USB-A (5Gbps) ports and an SD card reader.
It’s an ideal I/O selection to manage multiple monitors, Thunderbolt Hub and other peripherals typically used in an office or studio setting. Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the Pro 9 connected to my mobile work station, which has allowed me to connect it to my 4K monitor and Razer Chroma hub. It works great in this setting for longer editing sessions and immediately recognizes the additional peripherals when connected to the hub and monitor.
When taken on the road for recording, daily work, recording and editing, the Pro 9i shines as a productivity powerhouse. For starters, the 16” 2.8K (2800×1800) OLED display is absolutely beautiful to work on. While it’s not necessary, I do love to see the brightness and clarity that OLED delivers. With full HDR support and a peak brightness of 740 nits, this display is wonderful to edit with, especially when doing colour correction on photos or with video in Davinci.
While a standard ISP display is more than functional for daily work and editing, Lenovo’s decision to include an OLED here is much appreciated and helps the Yogo Pro 9i stand out from the crowd. The fact that it is also a capacitive touch screen elevates the Pro 9i’s functionality over the competition even more.
Regarding hardware, while Lenovo offers a few variants to choose from, the one sent for review is sporting an Intel Core Ultra 9 285H processor, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5050 8GB GDDR7 GPU, 32 GB LPDDR5X 8400MT/s Dual Channel RAM and 1TB M.2 PCIe Gen 4 SSD. As far as productivity laptops go, the Yoga Pro 9i is as close to a gaming laptop as you can get. While not specifically aimed at the gaming crowd, the Pro 9i has enough horsepower to keep up with most modern gaming titles.
The Ultra 9 285H processor leverages the latest in AI processing with E-cores processing at up to 4.50 GHz and P-cores boosting up to 5.40 GHz. This provides an impressive amount of horsepower for high-end editing and rendering. When combined with the RTX 5050, the resulting power crushes productivity and content creation tasks without hesitation. Editing and rendering 4K video in Davinci is silky smooth, with real-time preview presenting without lag or slowdowns. Multi-tasking, likewise, is efficient with no notable hesitation when swapping apps or managing multiple open software applications.
“The Yoga Pro 9i is a great addition to the Yoga lineup. Its focus on content creation helps it stand out from the crowd.”
More resource-heavy tasks, such as 3D modelling, shouldn’t be a problem for the Pro 9i as the onboard Lenovo X power suite optimizes the hardware to focus processing to higher-demand applications on the fly. This is further boosted thanks to an impressive 798 TOPS focused on optimizing processing for the aforementioned higher demand applications. This translates to an impressively powerful and efficient user experience, and one I have been quite impressed with during testing over these past few weeks.
While not strictly a gaming laptop by definition, I did take it for a spin with some quick tests for science. On the Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark, the Yoga Pro 9i actually did quite well, especially considering that it’s not speced for gaming. While it couldn’t quite hold 60 FPS on Ultra settings at native resolutions (avg 43 FPS), once DLSS frame generation was turned on, the Yoga Pro 9i had no issue managing over 100FPS (avg 108 FPS). Titles like DOOM: The Dark Ages and Diablo IV ran smoothly when pulling the settings down to Ultra and high, respectively.
Another noteworthy outcome from stressing testing of the Yoga Pro 9i was its impressive cooling system. Even when games and render testing, the Pro 9i stayed quite cool to the touch and relatively quiet, despite the fans running at top speed. With airflow pulling in from the bottom rear of the unit and exiting out the back vents, the heat never goes near any area where the hand naturally rests. It’s a smart system that works quite well, even when the system is under load.
To help accommodate a wide range of scenarios and as part of the new Lenovo Aura experience, Lenovo has an interesting software suite called Smart Modes. Essentially, the Pc can automatically shift resources, power and even notifications to better suit the specific use case. It’s an interesting and quite useful feature.
For example, Collaboration mode prioritizes the impressive 5M IR camera to automatically engage autoframing, low-light enhancements and even background blur(if you like) while Attention mode allows you to choose what notifications, apps and even domains you want to see and be engaged with, allowing for a much more focused work time. While they can be manually set, I found that allowing the PC to select the best mode for my working state works quite well.
Another application baked into the Aura experience is the Smart Connect hub that seamlessly allows you to connect any Android or iPhone to the Yoga Pro 9i. Once connected, the data can be transferred effortlessly between the two. Additionally, the phone can be used as a high-quality webcam for the Yoga. While other applications can manage these various elements, Smart Connect does it all seamlessly and centralizes the experience. It was one of those surprise features that I can see there actually being some great use cases for.
“As a sub-2,000-dollar laptop, I have no problem recommending the Yoga Pro 9i 16” laptop to those looking for their next content creation laptop.”
Shifting back to hardware, the Yoga Pro 9i comes speced with an 84Wh battery. While it can get you through 6-8 hours of continuous use for regular productivity, longer if the system is in power-saving mode, these numbers degrade quickly if any resource-heavy tasks need to be performed. It’s fairly standard fare for an Intel-powered laptop and what I would expect based on specs.
Audio testing of the two 2W tweeters and four 2W woofers was a bit of a mixed bag. While the audio quality was actually pretty solid, the power and thus overall volume were a bit underwhelming. While you could clearly hear audio, it lacked any meaningful volume and was relatively quiet. This is a bit disappointing, considering that the audio profile is actually pretty great for this 16-inch laptop.
The Yoga Pro 9i is a great addition to the Yoga lineup. Its focus on content creation helps it stand out from the crowd. I appreciate that it doesn’t compromise on hardware, choosing to include a beautiful, touch-enabled OLED display when it could have probably gotten away with an IPS panel.
Likewise, I’m impressed with the efficiency and pairing of the processor, GPU and RAM, which result in the Yoga being able to handle resource-heavy tasks with ease. The fact that this content creation laptop can handle triple-A titles as well is a wonderful bonus. The only real drawbacks to the experience are battery life and audio, which both could have used more power. Regardless of these minor critiques, I am, overall, impressed with Lenovo’s latest offering.
The Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16” laptop is an impressive piece of hardware, squarely aimed at content creators. It offers plenty of power for even the most power-hungry tasks and manages the hardware with masterful efficiency, providing everything a creator needs to take on their next big project. As a sub-2,000-dollar laptop, I have no problem recommending the Yoga Pro 9i 16” laptop to those looking for their next content creation laptop.
