I spend the majority of my days creating content on a computer, whether that's editing 5K footage,
designing off road wheelchairs in CAD...what I do is usually pushing computational hardware to its
limits. So it's nice when a professional laptop is actually professional. This Tidal Teal laptop is
all about power while maintaining portability. It's called the Yoga Pro 9i, and here in North
America it's called the Lenovo Slim Pro 9i, and it has a few extra tricks up its sleeve to eke
out every oodle of extra oomph possible. But the only way to see those extra tricks is with a tear
down. Huge thanks to Lenovo for sponsoring this video, sending over the laptop. If it can survive
I'll make sure to put it to good use here at the shop. Fingers crossed. Let's get started.
[Intro]
Opening a top of the line laptop for the first time is always exciting. My version of opening
is a bit more extensive than most, but that's how we like it. We'll be able to actually see
the 13th Generation Intel Core i9 processor, and the 64 gigs of RAM, along with...oh hey,
this is a touch screen...along with the dedicated insanely powerful Nvidia GeForce 470 processing
unit. So much power in such a small package. Not to mention the mini LED Pure Site Pro display
which is the absolute best screen technology at the moment for video or picture editing.
With the Pro 9i turned off we can make our way around the outside. We have a USB port,
and SD card slot (they'd be crazy to make a processional laptop without one of these),
the power button, and a power cutoff switch with a 5 megapixel webcam. And on the left
side we have a proprietary plug for the 170 watt power adapter. Another USB port. HDMI port. They'd
be crazy to make a professional laptop without one of these. There's the Thunderbolt 4 USB-C
and a headphone jack, because they'd be crazy to make a professional laptop without...stop
that! But you're not here for what the laptop can put out through the outputs,
you're here to see what the Pro 9i can provide from the inside.
There are 8 T4 screws holding down the back metal panel, anodized to match the Tidal Teal coloring,
as well as some matching threadlocker. Some designer somewhere is sleeping well tonight.
This back panel actually has several secrets of its own that I didn't discover until later...which
also means you won't find out till later either because that's just sequentially how this works.
Even with the screws gone the panel is very securely clipped into place, but finally with
it removed we get our first look at the internals of the Pro 9i in all their glory. Dual blacked out
fans and blacked out heatpipes dominate the upper two-thirds. And a large 75 watt hour battery takes
up the bottom third, snuggled up between two rear firing speakers. It's held in place by
5 Phillips head M2 by L5 screws. Incredibly cool of Lenovo to label the screw locations and sizes.
Huge bonus for future repairability. Thumbs up for that. Looks like the larger track pad can
be removed which sits right below the keyboard. One thing I forgot to mention is that each key
on this bad boy has 1.5 millimeters of travel, which is quite a lot of strokes for a laptop.
And each key is slightly curved with a protective oil resistant coating. Protection is a good thing.
The internal SSD also has its own protection with some foil shielding. This is where all
the long-term storage is found, like the files, videos and programs. Looks like we have a solid
terabyte of space here, and it's nice that we can upgrade it in the future. I remember my
dad buying a computer back in the 90's with a 4 gigabyte hard drive and he said that we
would never need to upgrade ever again. Turns out though that modular upgrade ability is kind
of important. There is a sneaky little hole that blends into the back grill and I assume this is
for the reset button. Kind of interesting. The cooling conglomerate is held in place by
7 phillips head screws and an additional 6 screws in the center attached over the processor and GPU.
I'll unplug the two long display cables that are routed around the two high efficiency hurricane
fans and the whole cooling unit can come up and out in one piece. The fans are able to pull in
cool air from outside the laptop and blow it over the copper fins attached to the heatpipes,
which when combined with a very impressive array of copper plates, thermal paste,
and foam, makes for a cooling system worthy of a professional laptop.
There's a lot of computation happening under the hood – 130 watts worth of Lenovo's X power to be
precise. The two main brains of this operation are the 13th Generation Intel Core I9 H series
processor on the right, and our Nvidia RTX 470 dedicated GPU on the left. The 4 boxes
covered in pink bubble gum are the memory for the GPU. And the large silver block is
non-removable RAM for the processor. The pros of having memory so close to the processors is
the faster response time. Data doesn't have to go run a marathon every time it gets computated
making everything much more efficient. The shortest distance between two points is no
distance at all. The square boxes below the processors are the power delivery doodads.
The motherboard has 10 screws holding down the main board, and another 5 screws holding down
the two daughter boards. The daughterboards allow the extra ports, like the USB, SD,
and power switches to be on the far side of the laptop without compromising much space.
The last thing holding the motherboard down is the power input, which I'm just going to leave
inside the laptop. Underneath the motherboard we find two more front firing speakers.
All of this hardware is pretty fascinating. One Jerry Tech Tip I can offer is that if
you're using the Adobe suite to edit videos or pictures, of which you get two months free by
the way with a purchase of this laptop, I'll put a link in the description. The Jerry Tech
Tip is to make sure that the Adobe software is utilizing the dedicated GPU and not the
integrated GPU. I accidentally left Adobe utilizing the integrated GPU for about a
year once before realizing that I have no business being anywhere near technology.
Speaking of which, I'm just going to reuse the same pink bubblegum
as before during the reinstall because recycled bubblegum is the best bubblegum.
Where was I? Oh yeah. The coolest part of this laptop that we can't really see without
killing it is the display. Many LED technology combined with Lenovo's strict Puresight Pro
requirements take color accuracy to the next level, with over a billion different colors,
3.2K resolution and 165 Hertz refresh rate, mini LED is far more accurate for editing than OLED,
and far superior to a normal LCD since instead of having tens or hundreds of local dimming zones we
get bumped up into the thousands of local dimming zones. Long story short, I'm genuinely excited
about this laptop and it's just a fun little coincidence that workstation hardware naturally
doubles as solid gaming hardware. It makes the purchase more justifiable when one machine is good
at everything. And it's a bonus that the Tidal Teal color represents Lenovo's commitment to the
environment. Every 100,000 of these Yoga Pro 9i's that Lenovo makes uses about a million pop cans
worth of recycled aluminum. The last little trick I didn't notice until almost done reassembling the
Pro 9i was that the metal back panel also doubles as a heatsink for the SSD. It has thermal foam on
the back side of the panel and extra foam already preinstalled for the open M.2 expansion slot
for when it comes time to add even more memory. Very nice.
If you're looking to turn recycled pop cans into your next top of the line mobile
battle station, I'll leave a link down in the description for the new Lenovo Slim Pro 9i.
Thanks a ton for watching. I'll see you around.