Lenovo Yoga 6 13ALC6 R7 Laptop Review

Introduction

As part of a recent promotion, Lenovo was selling a Lenovo Yoga 6 (13″) 2-in-1 laptop for $799.99. This was considerably lower than the regular price of $1099.99, so I decided to buy one for my wife. This will be a brief Lenovo Yoga 6 13ALC6 R7 Laptop Review.

This laptop weighs 2.91lbs (1.32kg) and it has a 13.3″ 1920×1080 IPS touchscreen. It has a 4 cell 60Wh battery that Lenovo claims is good for 18 hours of battery life. There is a 720p webcam with a privacy shutter.

For wireless connectivity, there is a Realtek RTL8852AE 802.11ax 2×2 (WiFi 6) and a BT 5.0 module. There are two USB-C 3.2 Gen 1 ports, two USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports and a 3.5mm combo headphone microphone jack. You also get a touch fingerprint reader.

The case is aluminum on the top and ABS plastic on the bottom, both in Abyss Blue. The top is actually covered in a denim-like blue fabric that might be controversial. I think it looks nice and it will keep the top from being covered in fingerprints. Some professional reviewers worry excessively that it will quickly get dirty and be impossible to clean. I would say that depends on how you treat the machine.

Lenovo Yoga 6 13ALC6 R7 Laptop Specifications

This 13.3″ laptop comes with an 8C/16T AMD Ryzen 7 5700U processor, which is very impressive for a machine in this price range. But it is not as good as it may sound due to AMD’s confusing CPU naming scheme. You might think it is a Zen 3 mobile CPU, because of the Ryzen 5 5xxx naming, but it is actually a Zen 2 Cezanne mobile CPU. This is still a pretty decent mobile CPU, but it is not as speedy as a Zen 3 Ryzen 7 5800U would have been!

The Ryzen 7 5700U APU gives you a base clock speed of 1.8GHz and a max boost clock of up to 4.3GHz, with 8MB of L3 cache. It has a decent CPU-Z ST score of 525.1 and a CPU-Z MT score of 4710.9. This level of CPU performance is amazing in a laptop in this price range!

CPU-Z Benchmark Scores

I recently reviewed a less expensive Yoga 6 with an AMD Ryzen 5 5500U processor, and it’s CPU-Z scores are shown below. The higher max boost speed of the Ryzen 7 5700U gives it a 6.2% higher score on this benchmark.

Memory

This particular Yoga 6 SKU comes with 16GB of DDR4-3200 RAM, which I think is sufficient for normal usage with Windows 10 and Windows 11. The memory is soldered to the motherboard, so you cannot upgrade the RAM. Luckily, it is in dual-channel mode, running at 3200MHz as confirmed by CPU-Z.

Storage

The storage situation is better than I expected, which was a pleasant surprise. It has a 1TB M.2 NVMe PCIe 3.0 SSD running in x4 mode. Most new lightweight laptops have M.2 NVMe SSDs now, since M.2 NVMe SSDs save weight and space compared to 2.5″ SATA SSDs. This machine came with a Western Digital SN730 M.2 2280 SSD.

This is a decent 1TB OEM M.2 NVMe SSD that has quite good performance. Before the laptop arrived, I was planning on replacing the stock SSD with a 1TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe SSD. After testing it with CrystalDiskMark, I have changed my mind.

Here are the CrystalDiskMark results for the stock SN730 SSD. These results are pretty close to a 1TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus, so I am leaving the stock SSD in there.

If I did want to replace the SSD, it is easy to remove the bottom panel (after removing six tiny Torx screws). The storage is the only thing you can upgrade on this machine, but that is fine.

Operating System

I was happily surprised that the Lenovo OEM image of Windows 10 Home, Version 20H2 was pretty clean as far as bloatware goes. It had McAfee LiveSafe and Web Advisor, which I removed. It also had Lenovo Smart Note, Lenovo Vantage Service, and Microsoft Office 365, which I left in place.

Normally, I like to install a fresh copy of Windows 10 when I buy an OEM machine like this, but I have to give some kudos to Lenovo here, since they did a pretty good job on their image.

I did upgrade the OS to Windows 10, Version 21H1. After that, I installed the latest AMD chipset drivers and the latest AMD Radeon GPU driver.

If you do want to install a fresh copy of Windows 10, I showed how to create Windows 10 installation media in this video.

Here is what Windows Task Manager looks like.

Final Words

I think this is a pretty nice laptop for this price range, especially if you can find it on sale. It does not have any glaring faults for casual everyday usage. I actually paid $743.99 for this machine, since Lenovo offers a discount for military veterans.

This machine has a much faster CPU than the AMD Ryzen 5 4600H in the Lenovo Legion 5 15ARH05 Laptop Review that I wrote last November. It also costs less money than that machine did. With integrated graphics and only 16GB of RAM, this is not a gaming laptop. The relatively low amount of RAM could also be a problem for more intense productivity workloads.

Upgrading the SSD to a 2TB or larger model (which is easy) would give you more disk space, but I think 1TB is going to be enough for a while. This machine should be perfectly fine for many users right out of the box.

If you have any questions about this post, please ask me here in the comments or on Twitter. I am pretty active on Twitter as GlennAlanBerry. Thanks for reading!