Hello everyone! Let’s talk about some of the problems that we had. So for me, the Lenovo Yoga 730 was an OK machine.
It was rigid build out of aluminum in contrast to the cheaper plastic laptops out there, the thermals were manageable and it had much support which on paper sounds pretty good apart from the thermals but sadly there is much more to computers than just what meets the spec sheet. So while mine was performing within margin of error… you guys have had problems that reach all the way from bedrock to the top of the Himalayas. The list of problems goes as follows:
Screen Flickering, Overheating and thus thermal throttling, Graphics Cards Underperforming, Wi-Fi Cutouts, the lack of documentation on the PCI-Planes on the thunderbolt port which meant that many of you did not know if an external GPU was supported and the Active Pen 2 battery problems.
So to go more in-depth into some of these problems we will start with the screen flickering. It seems that the screen flickering is caused by either a link in the cable of the display connector, the display connector itself, or the display connector on the motherboard. Some people tried to apply my fix of giving the cable more space which resulted in a temporary fix because long behold after some months the flickering returned to many people.
No matter how many times you call Lenovo support telling you guys that this is a driver issue or software problem I can assure you together with my viewers that it is absolutely not the issue and the fact that they have continued this trend for over 2 years baffles me. They must have had over a 1000 complaints by now and have so far suffered zero consequences apart from a few laptops being returned.
The overheating in this machine seems to becaused by the fact that the computer is simply too thin. While the aluminum helps to dissipate some of the heat it is not nearly good enough.
Keep in mind I had the Intel Core i5 model, at the time 4 core processors which was relatively easy to cool compared to the core i7 models and it reached a maximum temperature of 90 degrees in a worst case scenario. You can imagine that the intel core i7’s whichat the time was a 6 core processors had a very hard time being cooled down. They kept on thermal throttling and I’ve had hundreds of not thousands of people reach out on how to use throttle stop or Intel XTUin order to help them undervolt their laptops in order to cool them down. In many cases even this was not enough with people still reaching all the way up to 90 degrees even after an undervolt. Another component that faced issueswas the graphics card.
Problems here for me were relatively easy to fix at the start. As I simply went into the NVIDIA control paneland set power management to “prefer maximum performance”. This seemed to stabilize the frame rate initially but the fact that this was even necessary to game even on a low spec title like CSGO is a horrible user experiance. The default option by the way is “optimal power”.
Lenovo cannot possibly expect average consumers to know about this stuff, or even undervolting. I also tried to remedy the problem with under clocking the GPU so it was more stable rather than having high peaks and low gutters. This seemed to fix the problem somewhat but it was now here near satisfactory and its performance was still inconsistent.
So let’s talk about the biggest elephant in the room and that is Wi-Fi cut outs. The Wi-Fi cut outs were by far the most common problem. The reason this was an issue was because Lenovo was using realtek Wi-Fi cards at the time that were absolutely horrible. They often disconnect or unload their drivers rendering your wifi card unusable and thus unable to connect to the internet. This seemed to only happen when you were busy doing things where you were not using much Internet like: on and off like let’s say the web browser. Whereas if you were playing a multiplayergame for some reason the connection did not cut-out. I told people to buy basically any Intel Wi-Ficard to replace it, which of-course for a new laptop that is over a 1000 euros is absolutely unacceptable. This was a problem for many people from day one and it kept plaguing the same laptop an entire year later.
Regarding the active pen 2 and probably also the first itteration of the active pen (I am not sure) they also had a set of issues. I kept getting complaints about people saying that their batteries ran out really fast. I experienced this issue as well and was quick to find a solution turns out that the battery was making a terrible connection to the metal inside the pen which I fixed by adding an extra spring that I took out of a ballpoint pen. This seemed to fix the problems with the battery but the fact that it was even necessary is inexcusable. And the pen was not cheap either at like 70 euros.
So let’s summarize. Most of these problems people experienced within the first 3 days of owning the laptop so how Lenovo has not caught on to them by now in either product testing or even by the thousands of complaints they’ve already gotten it is like I said inexcusable.
Their quality control has gotten so bad that I can honestly no longer advise a single Lenovo laptop at the moment. So, for now, I want to say whatever you do. Do not buy from Lenovo for the time being. their products seem to be facing the simplest of problems with the easiest solutions that for some reason they fail to address and implement even years later after hearing all these complaints. I am still to this date getting people in the comments section complaining about this laptop and it has to stop.
Now, normally at this point, I would suggest other laptops that I would advise buying instead of this one however, I have not used many laptops in the past so I cannot advise you anything. Except for the Dell XPS 15 which I have been using since I returned my Lenovo Yoga 730. It is holding up great but then again it is a 1600 euro laptop in my configuration so I expect no less. But for the people who don’t need a graphics card I would highly recommend a Dell XPS 13, It has all the benefits of the Dell but at the same price of the Lenovo Yoga at a 1000 euros or so. Which includes a way better screen, better thermal design, and an updated, durable design.
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