The Lenovo Yoga C930 Review: Atmos Acoustics

Battery Life

Lenovo has fitted a 60 Wh battery into the thin and light Yoga C930, which is a good-sized battery for a notebook such as this. Our review unit is also fitted with the 1920x1080 display, which is rated for much higher battery life thanks to the less-intense backlighting needs.

To test battery life, we run several tests. The 2013 Light test opens just four web pages per minute, which isn’t much work for a modern notebook. Our 2016 Web test is much more demanding and usually sees a significant reduction in battery life as a result. Finally, we test movie playback time from a local video. All of our battery life testing is at 200 nits brightness.

2013 Light

At over 10.5 hours of battery life, the Yoga C930 did very well on this test. It’s not class-leading, but it still holds its own.

2016 Web

Here the Yoga improves against the competition, closing the gap to the Huawei significantly, and providing almost 9.5 hours of runtime on this much more demanding test.

Movie Playback

Likely thanks to a low-powered display, the Lenovo Yoga C930 sets a new record on movie playback, providing over 15.5 hours of movie playback. This test is where the Intel CPU really shines, since all of the media decode is offloaded to fixed function hardware that allows the rest of the CPU to sleep, and the runtimes prove how effective this is.

Our Tesseract score divides the movie playback by the length of a long movie, to give you an idea how many movies you could watch before needing to charge. I hope you brought the popcorn.

Normalized Results

By removing the battery capacity from the results, we can look at how efficient each device is. The Yoga C930 is helped out with the larger battery, supressing some slightly higher power draw than something like a Surface Pro 6.

Battery Summary

With a good-sized battery at 60 Wh, and good efficiency, the Lenovo Yoga C930 offers excellent battery life. In most cases, it’s not class-leading, but the usable battery time is still quite strong. The 1920x1080 display helps here though, and the optional 3840x2160 version would definitely cut into these efficiency results.

Charge Time

One area where Lenovo tends to do much better than the competition is in battery charge time. The Yoga C930 ships with a 65-Watt AC Adapter, with a USB-C connector making it pretty universal these days, and the proper way to charge an Ultrabook in 2019.

As usually, Lenovo offers a bit more of the power to flow to the battery than most, which shortens the charge time nicely.