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I wanted to love the Yoga 3 14's performance. It's such a good-looking laptop, and I enjoyed performing casual tasks with it. However, when I went to run it through our gauntlet of benchmarks, the machine froze during 3DMark's Ice Storm test, which has never happened to any of the devices I've tested. I hoped this was an anomaly and that the suite of tests would prove this device worthy of even the most arduous tasks, but I was disappointed. Although the Core i5 processor put this device slightly above its competitors in some benchmarks, it wasn't able to offer enough of a tangible performance boost to make it stand out from the crowd.
Benchmarks
Here's how the Yoga 3 14 performed in our suite of benchmark tests:
- 3DMark: Cloud Gate: 4,468; Sky Diver: 39,315; Fire Strike: 572
- Cinebench CPU: 203 points; Graphics: 23 fps,
- PCMark 8 (Home Test): 2,199 points
- PCMark 8 Battery Life: 3 hours and 40 minutes
In our suite of benchmarks, the Yoga 3 14 performed on-par with the Yoga 3 Pro and the Surface Pro 3 in terms of gameplay. The Yoga 3 14 outperformed the Yoga 3 Pro and Surface Pro 3 in the 3DMark graphics test, with a Fire Strike score of 572, compared to the Yoga 3 Pro's 329 points, and the Surface Pro's 347 points. Unfortunately, this was only slightly better than the Transformer Book Chi's 516-point performance on the same test.
In the PCMark 8 test, the Yoga 3 14 finished with a speed that merited only 2,199 points. That's more than double the Yoga 3 Pro's 1,147 score, but just narrowly edges out the Surface Pro 3's 2,190 points and actually narrowly loses to the Transformer Book Chi's 2,273 points.
For gamers, the Cinebench graphics test proved that the Yoga 3 14 was capable of producing 23 frames per second, which is just slightly worse than the Surface Pro 3 (25 fps) and the Chi (25 fps), but better than the Yoga 3 Pro (13 fps).
The battery life on the Yoga 3 14 is better than its lightweight competitors. It scored a rating of three hours and 40 minutes on PCMark 8's battery life test, which is just slightly better than the Transformer Book Chi (3:37). However, that's much better than the Surface Pro 3 and its fourth-generation Core i5 processor (2:38), as well as the Yoga 3 Pro (2:57).
In terms of real-life usage, the Yoga 3 14 was able to play a YouTube video on 50% screen brightness and 50% volume for 7 hours and 30 minutes. This should encourage business users who would like to perform at least basic tasks during a workday without running to a socket every few hours..
