So every brand of a certain product has its flagship series. It doesn’t matter if we are talking about laptops, computers, smartphones or hair driers. This drives us to one of the highest levels of Yoga laptops you can find on the market right now – the Yoga C940 (14).
It has an astonishing aluminum build, a pen that is stored inside of the chassis, as well as the now-signature soundbar, that we saw on the last-year model – the Yoga C930 (14). There is something new, however, that raises a lot of questions and excitement. It is the processor line-up. Similarly to the Yoga S740 that we reviewed a while back, this device ships with the Ice Lake Intel CPUs – Core i5-1035G4 and the Core i7-1065G7.
Additionally, it is embodying the same crazy fast memory as the Yoga S740 as well – 3733 MHz of LPDDR4X. On the display side, obviously, there is a touchscreen panel, which can either be a 1080p one or a 4K, both of which are IPS models.
You can check the prices and configurations in our Specs System: https://laptopmedia.com/series/lenovo-yoga-c940-14/
Contents
Specs Sheet
Lenovo Yoga C940 (14″) - Specs
All Lenovo Yoga C940 (14″) configurations
What’s in the box?
Inside the package, you are going to find a 65Wh power adapter, as well as the laptop and some mandatory manuals. As we said, this laptop comes with a built-in pen, which is “garaged” into the chassis.
Design and construction
Here, we are talking about a high-quality build. The entirety of the body is built out of aluminum. While everything looks super sleek, there is one thing that shines above all (literally) – the soundbar. Mainly on the silver model, the bar looks chromed and gives the Yoga C940 (14) a hint of extra exclusivity. As expected from a 14-inch convertible, it is extremely easy to carry it around with its 1.35 kg weight and profile of 14-15mm.
Interestingly, the lid opens easily with a single hand and then is able to go all the way around for an almost flush finish with the back of the device. You can notice that no matter in what direction you have converted the device, the soundbar is always firing towards you. Isn’t that insane?
On the base, there is the keyboard, which is hardly going to be the most popular input device on this machine. Nevertheless, it is pretty comfortable with its relatively big keycaps and clicky feedback, while the travel is shorter than what we would like. Further below, the touchpad has a glass cover and feels fast and responsive. The same can be said about the fingerprint reader.
How about the “garaged” Pen this laptop comes with. Well, it is pretty good from a non-artist perspective. Also, the display is pretty fast to respond with the input from the Pen, while the palm-rejection software does its job in a great way. However, something was not right. We found it extremely difficult to draw a straight line with this thing. There was something with the detection of the Pen input that was making the pointer to flicker, similarly to drawing on MS Paint with a mouse.
Speaker-wise, this laptop has 4 of them. Two are placed at the bottom plate and two are hidden in the “soundbar”, which greatly improves the sound quality of this machine.
Ports
In terms of I/O, there is not much to choose from. It is all situated on the left side and consists of a single USB Type-A 3.1 (Gen. 2) port, two Thunderbolt 3.0 connectors, that can be used for charging, as well as one audio combo jack. Optionally, you can receive some dongles inside the box. By the way, on the right side, you can see the power on/off switch, which is surprisingly tactile when pressed.
Disassembly, upgrade options and maintenance
Similarly to what HP has done with some of their laptops, you need a little bit more effort in order to remove the bottom plate of this notebook. First, remove the back rubber foot, as it hides three Phillips-head screws. After you unscrew them, you can undo the other four Torx-head screws and then pry the panel with a plastic tool.
Immediately, you see two fans – one big and one small, which cool down two heat pipes – one big… and one small. They are both cooling the processor, as we expect to see a more powerful GPU, despite the smaller process node.
In terms of upgradability, the Yoga C940 (14) clearly sucks. On the bright side, you can configure the laptop with up to 16GB of LPDDR4X memory (which we recommend), the speed of which is out of this world – 3733 MHz. Then, there is a single M.2 slot that supports PCIe x4 NVMe drives.
Lastly, the battery seems unchanged from the Yoga C930 (14) and is a 60Wh unit – one of the biggest on a 14-inch laptop.
Display quality
Lenovo Yoga C940 (14) has a Full HD touchscreen display, model number LG LP140WF9-SPE2. Its diagonal is 14″ (35.56 cm), and the resolution – 1920 х 1080. Additionally, the screen ratio is 16:9, the pixel density – 157 ppi, their pitch – 0.161 x 0.161 mm. The screen can be considered Retina when viewed from at least 56 cm (from this distance, the average human eye can’t see the individual pixels).
Its viewing angles are excellent. We have provided images at 45 degrees to evaluate quality.
The maximum measured brightness is 386 nits (cd/m2) in the middle of the screen and 369 nits (cd/m2) average across the surface with a maximum deviation of 10%. The Correlated Color Temperature on a white screen and at maximum brightness is 7200K (average) – colder than the 6500K optimum for sRGB. The average color temperature through the grey scale before profiling is again 7100K.
In the illustration below you can see how the display performs from a uniformity perspective.
Values of dE2000 over 4.0 should not occur, and this parameter is one of the first you should check if you intend to use the laptop for color-sensitive work (a maximum tolerance of 2.0 ). The contrast ratio is very good – 1900:1 (1600:1 after profiling).
To make sure we are on the same page, we would like to give you a little introduction to the sRGB color gamut and the Adobe RGB. To start, there’s the CIE 1976 Uniform Chromaticity Diagram that represents the visible specter of colors by the human eye, giving you a better perception of the color gamut coverage and the color accuracy.
Inside the black triangle, you will see the standard color gamut (sRGB) that is being used by millions of people in HDTV and on the web. As for the Adobe RGB, this is used in professional cameras, monitors, etc for printing. Colors inside the black triangle are used by everyone and this is an essential part of the color quality and color accuracy of a mainstream notebook.
Still, we’ve included other color spaces like the famous DCI-P3 standard used by movie studios, as well as the digital UHD Rec.2020 standard. Rec.2020, however, is still a thing of the future and it’s difficult for today’s displays to cover that well. We’ve also included the so-called Michael Pointer gamut, or Pointer’s gamut, which represents the colors that naturally occur around us every day.
The yellow dotted line shows Lenovo Yoga C940 (14)’s color gamut coverage.
Its display covers 94% of the sRGB/ITU-R BT.709 (web/HDTV standard) in CIE1976.
Our “Design and Gaming” profile delivers optimal color temperature (6500K) at 140 cd/m2 luminance and sRGB gamma mode.
We tested the accuracy of the display with 24 commonly used colors like light and dark human skin, blue sky, green grass, orange, etc. You can check out the results at factory condition and also, with the “Design and Gaming” profile.
Below you can compare the scores of Lenovo Yoga C940 (14) with the default settings (left), and with the “Gaming and Web design” profile (right).
The next figure shows how well the display can reproduce dark parts of an image, which is essential when watching movies or playing games in low ambient light.
The left side of the image represents the display with stock settings, while the right one is with the “Gaming and Web Design” profile activated. On the horizontal axis, you will find the grayscale and on the vertical axis – the luminance of the display. On the two graphs below you can easily check for yourself how your display handles the darkest nuances but keep in mind that this also depends on the settings of your current display, the calibration, the viewing angle, and the surrounding light conditions.
Response time (Gaming capabilities)
We test the reaction time of the pixels with the usual “black-to-white” and “white-to-black” method from 10% to 90% and vice versa.
We recorded Fall Time + Rise Time = 29 ms
Health impact – PWM / Blue Light
PWM (Screen flickering)
Pulse-width modulation (PWM) is an easy way to control monitor brightness. When you lower the brightness, the light intensity of the backlight is not lowered, but instead turned off and on by the electronics with a frequency indistinguishable to the human eye. In these light impulses, the light/no-light time ratio varies, while brightness remains unchanged, which is harmful to your eyes. You can read more about that in our dedicated article on PWM.
Thankfully, Lenovo Yoga C940 (14)’s display is free from flickerings. This means you will be able to work all day on your laptop, without experience any eyestrain, at least in this aspect.
Blue light emissions
Installing our Health-Guard profile not only eliminates PWM but also reduces the harmful Blue Light emissions while keeping the colors of the screen perceptually accurate. If you’re not familiar with the Blue light, the TL;DR version is – emissions that negatively affect your eyes, skin and your whole body. You can find more information about that in our dedicated article on Blue Light.
Conclusions
Lenovo Yoga C940 (14)’s display is a touchscreen, has a Full HD resolution, good contrast ratio, comfortable viewing angles, and wide color coverage. Moreover, its backlight doesn’t use PWM to adjust the screen brightness, while the color accuracy becomes incredibly high when you install our Gaming and Web design profile.
Buy our profiles
Since our profiles are tailored for each display model, this article and its respective profile package are meant for Lenovo Yoga C940 (14) configurations with 14.0″ LG LP140WF9-SPE2 (FHD, 1920 × 1080) IPS panel.
*Should you have problems with downloading the purchased file, try using a different browser to open the link you’ll receive via e-mail. If the download target is a .php file instead of an archive, change the file extension to .zip or contact us at [email protected]
Read more about the profiles HERE.
In addition to receiving efficient and health-friendly profiles, by buying LaptopMedia's products you also support the development of our labs, where we test devices in order to produce the most objective reviews possible.
Office Work
Office Work should be used mostly by users who spend most of the time looking at pieces of text, tables or just surfing. This profile aims to deliver better distinctness and clarity by keeping a flat gamma curve (2.20), native color temperature and perceptually accurate colors.
Design and Gaming
This profile is aimed at designers who work with colors professionally, and for games and movies as well. Design and Gaming takes display panels to their limits, making them as accurate as possible in the sRGB IEC61966-2-1 standard for Web and HDTV, at white point D65.
Health-Guard
THealth-Guard eliminates the harmful Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) and reduces the negative Blue Light which affects our eyes and body. Since it’s custom tailored for every panel, it manages to keep the colors perceptually accurate. Health-Guard simulates paper so the pressure on the eyes is greatly reduced.
Sound
Lenovo Yoga C940 (14) has a loud sound with very good quality. Its low tones have some deviations in clarity, while mids and highs are clear. Interestingly, while the lows are not very audible, hence there is no sophisticated punch, the entire laptop is vibrating as a result of the bass tones.
Drivers
You can download all of the drivers and utilities for the Lenovo Yoga C940 (14) on their official website: https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/us/en/products/laptops-and-netbooks/yoga-series/yoga-c940-14iil/downloads/driver-list/
Battery
Now, we conduct the battery tests with Windows Better performance setting turned on, screen brightness adjusted to 120 nits and all other programs turned off except for the one we are testing the notebook with. The 60Wh battery delivered great results!
We were able to get almost 12 hours of Web browsing and around 12 hours and a half of video playback.
In order to simulate real-life conditions, we used our own script for automatic web browsing through over 70 websites.
For every test like this, we use the same video in HD.
We use F1 2017’s built-in benchmark on loop in order to simulate real-life gaming.
CPU options
This device is equipped with one of the following: Core i5-1035G4, Core i7-1065G7.
Results are from the Cinebench 15 CPU test (the higher the score, the better)
Results are from the Fritz chess benchmark (the higher the score, the better)
Results are from our Photoshop benchmark test (the lower the score, the better)
GPU options
As Lenovo doesn’t offer a dedicated GPU, you can only take advantage of the newly improved Intel Iris Plus Graphics chips that come integrated into their processors.
Results are from the 3DMark: Fire Strike (Graphics) benchmark (higher the score, the better)
Results are from the Unigine Heaven 3.0 benchmark (higher the score, the better)
Results are from the Unigine Heaven 4.0 benchmark (higher the score, the better)
Results are from the Unigine Superposition benchmark (higher the score, the better)
Gaming tests
| CS:GO | HD 1080p, Low (Check settings) | HD 1080p, Medium (Check settings) | HD 1080p, MAX (Check settings) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Average FPS | 69 fps | 37 fps | 22 fps |
| DOTA 2 | HD 1080p, Low (Check settings) | HD 1080p, Normal (Check settings) | HD 1080p, High (Check settings) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Average FPS | 97 fps | 46 fps | 28 fps |
Temperatures and comfort
Max CPU load
In this test we use 100% on the CPU cores, monitoring their frequencies and chip temperature. The first column shows a computer’s reaction to a short load (2-10 seconds), the second column simulates a serious task (between 15 and 30 seconds), and the third column is a good indicator of how good the laptop is for long loads such as video rendering.
Average core frequency (base frequency + X); CPU temp.
| Intel Core i5-1035G4 (15W TDP) | 0:02 – 0:10 sec | 0:15 – 0:30 sec | 10:00 – 15:00 min |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lenovo Yoga C940 (14) | 2.46 GHz (B+124%) @ 94°C | 2.29 GHz (B+108%) @ 94°C | 2.15 GHz (B+95%) @ 92°C |
| Lenovo Yoga S740 (14) | 2.64 GHz (B+140%) @ 100°C | 1.89 GHz (B+72%) @ 83°C | 1.66 GHz (B+51%) @ 69°C |
So yeah, the Yoga C940 (14) is working at significantly higher temperatures than the Yoga S740 (14), after the first checkpoint. However, this results in a lot more respectable results in terms of CPU performance.
Comfort during full load
Despite the high internal temperatures, the fans were not bothering to spin up to their maximum capacity. This resulted in a very quiet overall noise, coming from this machine.
Verdict
If we have to compare this 2-in-1 device to its predecessor, there is nothing much separating them apart. Perhaps the main (if not the only) difference between these devices is the chipset. Indeed the newer Ice Lake processors give the Yoga C940 (14) the edge when it comes to graphics power. However, when we put CPU performance at stake, we can see some disappointment in people’s eyes.
Not only the Yoga C940 (14) is not worth the upgrade from the yester-year model, but the Core i5-1035G4 performed worse than the Core i5-8265U. We noticed some differences in the cooling system, which now is using two separate heat-pipes rather than one longer to cool down the processor. Nevertheless, this didn’t seem to do the job.
On the bright side, the soldered memory modules are now working at the extraordinary 3733 MHz. There is also an M.2 PCIe x4 slot. In fact, the laptop is not that bad – there are two Thunderbolt 3.0 connectors and an “ordinary” USB Type-A 3.1 (Gen. 2) port. Moreover, Lenovo offers optional dongles that you can get inside the box.
What else to you get inside the box? Well, more accurately – inside the laptop is where you can find the dedicated stylus. It all sounds great, but we had some issues with ours. Whether the problem is due to the 1080p display, or because of some issues with the detection of the Pen, we don’t really know. So, our problem appeared whenever we try to glid the pen on the surface of the display, and no – there were no dust particles on it. It would be great if you can share your experience, should you own the Lenovo Yoga C940 (14), yourself.
One of the strongest points of this laptop is its display. Its 1080p IPS panel (LG LP140WF9-SPE2) has good maximum brightness, comfortable viewing angles, great contrast ratio and doesn’t use PWM to adjust its brightness levels. In terms of color representation, it is able to recreate 94% of the colors in sRGB and with the help of our Gaming and Web design profile, the display reaches an Average dE of 0.7, which is great for color-sensitive work.
Battery-wise the notebook we were able to get around 12 hours of on-screen. There is a 30-minute difference between Web browsing and video playback in favor of the latter.
At the beginning of this review, we really wanted to give this laptop an Editors Choice award. However, this is a classic case of judging the book by its covers. Honestly, this is a great laptop, but there are just too many conditions and Ifs.
Pros
- LPDDR4X memory working at 3733 MHz
- Ice Lake CPUs
- Has two Thunderbolt 3.0 port
- Great battery life
- Covers 94% sRGB (LG LP140WF9-SPE2)
- Average dE value of 0.7 with our Gaming and Web design (LG LP140WF9-SPE2)
- Doesn’t use PWM to adjust screen brightness (LG LP140WF9-SPE2)
Cons
- No SD card reader
- Poor upgradability options
- Premium price tag
- Has some issues with the touchscreen
You can check the prices and configurations in our Specs System: https://laptopmedia.com/series/lenovo-yoga-c940-14/
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