The Lenovo Yoga C930 Review: Atmos Acoustics
by Brett Howse on March 1, 2019 8:00 AM ESTBattery 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.
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eastcoast_pete - Wednesday, March 6, 2019 - link
@Brett: Not 100% related to this specific article, but could you or one of your AT colleagues also do a "best used notebooks" article? I don't mean the classics from 1992, but which 2017/2018 notebook held up well and has good reliability. Also stratified by price and use range. Might be interesting for some of us here.LJS - Wednesday, October 9, 2019 - link
Its unclear how the reviewers test the battery; however, just looking at emails and a little web searching-no videos-no plug in in browser using edge I only have 3 hours usage on battery. This is a brand new computer. Once I turned off bluetooth, USB power, prevented background apps from running, put on battery saver, reduced brightness to 70% which is as low as I can go an still be able to see the details on my screen without straining (UHD monitor) I still only get about 4.5 hours. The battery is significantly smaller than Yoga 910 and 920, also the screen brightness is less compared to my Yoga 910 the Yoga 930 at 100% is equal to 70% on the Yoga 910. Although the speakers are better and it comes with a pen which is not very useful, would recommend think pad 1x carbon or another brand of computer. Yogas tend to be glitchy.