Living With a Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i: Solid, Performance-Oriented PC for Creatives (2024)

For the past few weeks, I've been trying out a number of systems based on Intel's Meteor Lake processor, including Lenovo's 16-inch Yoga Pro 9i, a solid high-end machine with an Intel Core Ultra 9 185 H processor and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 graphics.It's a great choice for those who want a larger machine for tasks like video and photo editing; it should also be pretty good at gaming, even though it's not marketed as a gaming laptop.

The Yoga Pro 9i (16IMH9) has a solid design with an aluminum case in what Lenovo calls "Luna Grey."The machine measures 14.28 by 9.99 by 0.70 inches; my unit weighs 4.73 pounds by itself and 5.89 pounds with the included 170-watt charger. It's big but needs to be to accommodate the 16-inch display.Note the charger is particularly heavy and uses a Lenovo proprietary connector rather than the USB-C connectors commonly used on current systems with smaller power draws.

The 16-inch IPS display looks very nice with a 3,200-by-2,000 resolution and 400 nits of brightness, capable of running at 165Hz. It's a touch screen, which I appreciate. The size of the screen allows for a larger keyboard with a number pad on the left, and a rather large (3.75 by 5.91-inch) glass multitouch touchpad underneath. The keyboard has 15mm of travel, which is very nice to type on.

(Credit: Lenovo)

One minor nit:I would like to see an indicator light showing when the machine is muted; it has one for the microphone but not the speaker (while the ThinkPad line has them for both). There's a small notch on the top of the display that houses a 5MP camera with IR, a design feature that is becoming pretty common.

On a machine of this size, you would expect many ports, and the Yoga Pro 9i certainly delivers. The left side has a power connector, HDMI, a USB-C 3.2 port, a USB-C 4/Thunderbolt one, and an audio jack. The right side has the power button, two USB-A ports, a full-size SD card reader, and a switch for turning the camera on and off. (I prefer the more visible physical switch on most of the firm's ThinkPad models, or at least some indicator that the camera is blocked.)

For conferencing, the 5MP video camera delivered a pretty sharp image with a wide angle. It's not the best I've seen, but it gets the job done. It does not have the now common Windows Studio Effects software, which I've seen on all the other Meteor Lake systems I've tested. (Windows Studio Effects is one of the few AI-based applications that supposedly uses the NPU that differentiates Meteor Lake.)

(Credit: Lenovo)

It does come with the Nvidia GeForce RTX Studio software, which includes Nvidia Broadcast for effects like background blur. One problem, though, was that once I enabled the Nvidia Broadcast option, the volume controls and mute button no longer seemed to work, even after I closed the application. (Shutting down and rebooting fixes the issue for normal audio).My guess is that most people won't use Nvidia Broadcast for typical video conferencing, and things like Zoom and Teams work fine without it.

Speaking of audio, the Yoga Pro 9i has six speakers, including two woofers on each side and two tweeters; and it supports Dolby Atmos. It sounded very good to me.

Other software includes an Nvidia control panel, which lets you choose when to use the integrated graphics or the Nvidia graphics, as well as the default of letting the system switch depending on the application, and some 3D settings I didn't change from their defaults. Lenovo is also promising its Creator Zone image generation software, which runs locally, but this isn’t available yet.

The Lenovo Vantage application has some basic information about the system and can scan for updates, but it mostly seems designed to upsell you on various services. Trial versions of McAfee and Dropbox load by default; I generally don't find such offers very appealing.

The Core Ultra 9 185H is the highest-end Meteor Lake chip I've tested so far. This is a 45-watt processor with six performance cores (each of which can do multithreading), eight efficient cores, and two low-power efficient cores, for a total of 16 cores and 22 threads. The performance cores have a base frequency of 2.3GHz, with a maximum turbo speed of 5.1GHz. It has Intel Arc Graphics with 8 Xe cores at a maximum of 2.3GHz. The processor is vPro capable. The Yoga Pro 9i has Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 graphics with 6GB of GDDR6 memory.My unit came with 32GB of memory and a 1 TB SSD.

As you would expect, it was a powerhouse on most benchmarks.It outperformed a Dell XPS 14 (9440) with an RTX 4050 by a bit on just about everything, but of course, the Dell is a much lighter and more portable system and uses considerably less power. It outperformed all of the small systems I've tested by a fair margin, although it couldn't quite match the ThinkPad P1 Gen 6with a Core i7-13800H and an RTX 4080 on the highest-end graphics benchmarks. Then again, it's not marketed as a workstation.

On my toughest tests, it transcoded a large video in Handbrake in 48 minutes, compared with 57 minutes on the P1 and an hour and 18 minutes on the XPS. That's the fastest I've seen on any machine I've tested. It ran a portfolio simulation in MATLAB in about 24 minutes, half a minute slower than the P1, but better than the 33 minutes on the XPS. It completed a large Excel data table model in 41 minutes, faster than the other Meteor Lake machines I've tested, but still slower than about 37 minutes on typical thin and light 13th generation Core (Raptor Lake) systems and notably worse than the 34 minutes on the ThinkPad P1.

On AI tests, the Yoga Pro 9i really shined. While it wasn't quite as fast as the XPS 14 or even the X1 Carbon Gen 12 (which only has discrete graphics) on Procyon's AI Inferencing test using Open Vino, it well outperformed the XPS when using Nvidia's TensorRT. Running a local version of Stable Diffusion was also much faster, producing models in about 4.5 seconds compared with six or seven seconds on the XPS 14 and multiple minutes on discrete systems.

It's a big machine with a large 84-watt-hour battery, but unsurprisingly, the big screen, powerful processor, and graphics use more power than a smaller machine. On PCMark's Modern Office battery life test, I got 8 hours at 100 nits of brightness and 8 hours and 13 minutes with 40 nits of brightness, about half an hour better than I saw with the P1, but still not great.

Still, you don't buy a system like the Yoga Pro 9i looking for the best battery life. This is a performance-oriented system; in most cases, it delivered quite well. As I write this, a similar model is available on Lenovo's website for $1,784, while a version with a slightly less powered Core Ultra 7 155H processor with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SDD is $1,482, very reasonable for this level of performance. It seems an excellent choice for creators who want a large display in a relatively portable package.