Tomorrow’s Tech, Today: Innovation That Moves Us Forward
Our primary overall benchmark, UL’s PCMark 10, tests a system in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC’s storage throughput. Three more tests we use 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 measure 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. However, the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3i 15 was not able to run this benchmark.
While the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3i 15 isn’t a speed demon, it isn’t a complete laggard, either, at least in benchmarking. The laptop’s scores consistently trailed at least one competitor in each test, but it only fell far behind in Handbrake. (The $999 Dell Inspiron, as it should, outmatched the lot, though it couldn’t run the PCMark tests.) To be fair, the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3i 15 is affordable, which counts for a lot when evaluating its performance. To wit, the Lenovo Idea Slim 5i laptop that costs $200 more was only slightly faster in each test, save for HandBrake, where it almost lapped the 3i model.
The IdeaPad Slim 3i is an adequate laptop for browsing the web and editing documents in Word. However, you’ll need to adjust your expectations relative to what the laptop costs—to the point where you should consider spending more on a better-equipped machine if performance matters much. Just a couple hundred more bucks would snag a laptop that, in some benchmarks, is twice as quick, such as the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED Touch.
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