Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x: Snapdragon laptops become more affordable

It's the cheapest Copilot+ PC I’ve seen yet—assuming you don’t count sale prices.

- BY CHRIS HOFFMAN

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x (fave.co/469gL4z) is an ARM-based laptop with the new low-end Qualcomm Snapdragon X chip.

Thanks to Snapdragon (fave.co/44KMYgm), this machine has excellent battery life for its class and an NPU (fave.co/4kORFMP) for the shiny Copilot+ PC features Microsoft is releasing.

It's the lowest launch price for a Snapdragon X Copilot+ PC I've seen yet. The build quality and design are good, too. But the compromises here would feel a lot more justifiable at $599 than $749. Still, this machine beats the Intel variant—no question.

The big problem is that this laptop is launching a year after the first Snapdragon X Copilot+ PCs, with slower internals than those in earlier models. At this machine's initial retail price, it’s competing with Copilot+ PCs with stronger hardware that have been out for months and are frequently on sale for a similar price.

SPECS

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x has the same lower-end Qualcomm Snapdragon X X1-26-100 CPU I initially reviewed in Asus‘s featherlight $1200 Asus ZenBook A14 (fave.co/441Nczf). It makes much more sense here in this $749 machine than in that $1,200 machine. (Qualcomm initially said it hoped this CPU would power $600 laptops; fave.co/40eKLbE.)

While this laptop's price makes a lot more sense for this CPU, it’s still worth noting that this is a newer, lower-end Snapdragon X SKU. It's slower than the Snapdragon X Plus chips Qualcomm initially released. Here's the official product matrix (fave.co/4nlkPPH). As it shows, Snapdragon X ranks at the bottom of the pack with the slowest CPU (up to 3 GHz) and the slowest GPU (1.7 TFLOPS).

Qualcomm talked up GPU performance and gaming (fave.co/3Sb779H) a lot when it launched the Snapdragon X platform, and you should be aware that the GPU in these machines is much slower than Qualcomm's marketing might lead you to believe.