Lenovo Yoga A940 All-in-one

The IdeaCentre Yoga A940 (starts at $2,299.99, in the model tested) is Lenovo's take on Microsoft's Surface Studio concept: that is, a convertible all-in-one desktop. Like the Studio's, the A940's touch screen reclines for use as a digital drafting board, making it possible to sketch, model, and do general tasks all on one PC. Two useful accessories, a stylus and the Surface Dial-like Precision Dial, come bundled, and the A940 packs a bit more speed than the Studio 2 at a lower price. By and large, the A940 hits its target, but it underwhelms in places, notably in the quality of its build and screen. The Surface Studio 2 remains our top pick in this admittedly niche category of PCs, but if you're on a tighter budget and the concept syncs with your workflow, the Yoga 940 is a unique, functional alternative.

Living Up to the Yoga Name: A Convertible All-in-One Desktop

On its own merits, the IdeaCentre Yoga A940 is a uniquely handy desktop. The concept behind all-in-one (AIO) PCs like this and the Surface Studio is that they simultaneously serve as professional PCs for work and as sketch panels for digital creation.

To this end, Lenovo's desktop works. The display measures 27 inches diagonally, with a two-pronged rear hinge that lets you stand it upright like a normal desktop monitor, or lean it back at a steep slant for easier drawing and other creative endeavors, stopping at any degree of incline in its range. The maximum recline angle is 25 degrees—it doesn't go completely flat, nor could it with the base in the way. The hinge takes a tad more force to move than you may expect, but it won't slip out of position too easily when in use.

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One design decision I had to get used to (a seemingly intentional one) is that, when you're reclining the screen, the bottom of the panel will hit the desk about midway through the tilt range. A pad on its bottom edge cushions the impact, stopping your free motion briefly, which can be jarring. This initial spot of resistance is a good angle at which to use the A940 screen while standing, so it braces itself against the desk somewhat. If you keep pushing on, it slides (not overly smoothly) along your desk surface until it hits the lowest incline point, should you prefer a lesser angle. Overall, though, the recline function is intuitive and works.

While it's not the only other reclining all-in-one we've tested, the Surface Studio 2($3,400.00 at Amazon) is the obvious comparison here. And to put it simply, the Yoga A940's build isn't as high-quality as the Studio 2's construction. I'll cover each of these in more detail, but it's thicker, it's less sleek, it uses lower-quality materials, and the screen isn't nearly as sharp. But those quality differences are reflected in the price, as even the lowest-end configuration of Microsoft's device is $3,499—a significant $1,200 gap. It's clear, by comparing components, that much of that dollar difference goes toward the Studio 2's build quality. The Yoga A940 isn't cheap, by any stretch, but even so, those are two very different price tiers. If you're at or near the top of your budget in looking at the Yoga A940, a Surface Studio 2 is likely out of reach.

At 0.7 inch thick, the display panel is only "thick" compared to the Studio's super-slim panel, not that it really matters for anything other than aesthetics. The base, however, will eat up more of your desk. It is twice the height of and much wider than the Studio 2's small square, stretching the full width of the display itself. To be precise, it measures 25 inches horizontally and is 1.7 inches tall. A speaker is also built into the front, offering solid, if not booming and impactful, sound.

Part of this extra width is taken up by a Qi-compatible wireless charging mat on the right side, and I think that's worth the real estate. While I'm personally not big on wireless charging for my smartphone, many users love the feature, so having it built in at a convenient spot should be a plus. The base portion also has a divot for the included Active Pen (more on that below).

The material is all dark grey plastic, which feels...merely okay. Again, the all-metal Studio 2 is much more expensive, but its chassis is a major part of the difference. The Yoga A940 feels far less premium. Don't take that as cheap. But given that it's an investment in its own right, I wanted it to feel more like a multi-kilobuck PC.

This extends to the most important part of this system, the display. On paper, the panel sounds great. The screen employs favored in-plane switching (IPS) technology and features a 4K (3,840-by-2,160-pixel) native resolution. It also supports multi-touch input, and it covers 100 percent of the Adobe RGB color spectrum. In reality, though, several sets of eyes on it came to the same conclusion: Its panel quality is lackluster. I expect better from a pricey all-in-one's screen.

The picture looks a little dull overall, not crisp or vibrant, even when cranked to maximum brightness. Despite the IPS panel and the 4K resolution, the colors don't pop much, and even the desktop doesn't look overly sharp, with a default design that Lenovo could have chosen to highlight the panel talents. It doesn't come close to the Studio 2's brilliant display, and even among average AIO PC screens, it's underwhelming.

I had more than one colleague echo my sentiments when I asked them to check out the screen, so it's safe to say this isn't a personal bias. One even suggested that pushing the screen to maximum brightness might help, and I told him it was already at its limit (to which, he grimaced). The display is serviceable, just disappointing for the price and for the kind of PC the Yoga A940 means to be. Creative types, in particular, are likely looking for an especially good screen for media, not a merely average one.

Despite its shortcomings, the Yoga A940 represents value because of the type of PC it is. It falls into a niche group of systems that make direct comparisons difficult, as few offer the same combination of features in one package. The Surface Studio 2 is the obvious parallel, and you also can't help but draw comparisons to the 27-inch Apple iMac. That machine does have a brilliant high-resolution display, but no touch support (and, as such, obviously no need for a reclining display and no pen). Similarly, the Dell OptiPlex 7760 All-in-One($3,400.00 at Amazon) features a beautiful 4K display, but you can't pair that resolution with touch technology. Neither offers the ability to replace both your data-crunching PC and your standalone drawing tablets and peripherals, making them imperfect competitors for this type of product.

Among recent systems that we've reviewed, that really just leaves the Surface Studio 2 as a 1:1 comparison. If we go a little further back, the Dell XPS 27 (now discontinued) also fits the bill. That system features a reclining 4K touch display, but it was released in 2017, making the components dated for current-day shoppers. This relative uniqueness will come into play more in the performance breakdown coming up, but it's important to keep in mind when looking at a PC like this.

Ports and Components

The upside of the chunky base is that it has room for plenty of ports. Many of these are located around back, while others are on the left side. The rear holds four USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI port, and an Ethernet jack. On the left, you can find one USB 3.1 port, a USB Type-C port with Thunderbolt 3 support, a three-format card reader, and a headset jack.

The left-side ports are easier to reach than the rear ones, which is a leg up on the Surface Studio 2. All of its ports are located on the back side, which makes plugging in common peripherals or flash drives cumbersome, as you have to look and reach around the large screen or turn the whole system to see what you're doing.

Now that I've covered the design and exterior in detail, let's take a look inside this unit. The IdeaCentre Yoga A940 model being reviewed here is available at Best Buy, priced at $2,299.99. For that, you get an 8th Generation Intel Core i7-8700 processor, 16GB of memory, AMD Radeon RX 560X graphics, a 256GB boot-drive SSD plus a separate 1TB hard drive, and, of course, the reclining 4K touch display.

Another model, available through Lenovo's website, is quite similar but offers 32GB of memory. That model is priced at $2,599.99, though it's currently on sale for $1,949.99 at the time of publishing, a pretty steep discount. Whether that will still be in effect when you read this is uncertain.

Dialed In: The Included Accessories

In addition to a bundled keyboard and wireless mouse, the system comes with the Lenovo Active Pen to facilitate your drawing and creation, so you don't have to buy a stylus separately. As an aside: The keyboard and mouse are only a modest bit above budget-basic, but the base portion of the computer has a custom-size stowage spot for the keyboard (under the screen) that more or less binds you to that keyboard if you want to maintain the system's clean aesthetic. You might want to put the included keyboard there to get it out of the way when you pull the screen forward or aren't typing, or just to clear your desk. Putting a different keyboard there may well overhang the space to either side.

The stylus is satisfying to use, with a comfortable cushioned tip for smooth drawing. It features pressure sensitivity, crucial for artists, and the screen has appropriate palm rejection to prevent stray touch input from your hand when it's leaning on the display. The combination of a reclined screen angle and the Active Pen make the A940 feel like a digital drafting board, so mission accomplished on that front.

The Active Pen is useful, if a fairly standard stylus of its kind. The other main accessory is the more interesting of the two. Lenovo packs in the Precision Dial, a twistable knob that plugs in to the side of the system. You can use it to manipulate menus and the like in content-creation software. I hope you can forgive another comparison to the Microsoft Surface Studio, because this is a clear analogue to the Surface Dial, a very similar accessory. Both are meant to allow physical manipulation of digital programs, prompting bespoke menus to make precise selections easier.

The implementation, however, is quite different. The Surface Dial is designed to be used on your desk, or placed directly onto the screen, as a standalone item. The Lenovo Precision Dial, in contrast, must be attached to a USB port on the left or right side of the display (a helpful switcheroo option for righties and lefties). The USB ports on both sides have circular magnetic lids for when the Dial isn't in use on that flank. Keeping these covers on keeps the smooth aesthetic intact, and since they're magnetic, you can just position them on the back of the display to keep from losing them.

The Precision Dial has spinnable outer and inner rings, which you can turn to control the UI in various ways depending on the program. It also has a button on its end, which you can tap or long-press for different commands. The Precision Dial is supported by Windows 10, Microsoft Office 2019, and Autodesk's Sketchbook Pro for Enterprise (2018, and versions 8.0, 8.6.0), as well as a host of Adobe applications:

• Photoshop: Creative Cloud 2019 and 2018; CS6 and CS5
• Illustrator: Creative Cloud 2019 and 2018; CS6
• Elements: Creative Cloud 2018; versions 14 and 15
• Premiere Pro: Creative Cloud 2018
• Lightroom: Creative Cloud 2019; Classic CC 7.0, 6.4

The Dial is entirely customizable, so you can set the inputs to whichever commands you use most often. For example, if you're using Photoshop, you can set the button tap to show or hide the brush panel, while the inner ring can scroll through your action history. This way, you don't have to take your eye or hand off your work to click menus or use keyboard commands. It does work as described, and it is mostly seamless to understand. Considering it's an add-on, it's a strong selling point of the system as a whole.

There's also something satisfying about using physical input. The Precision Dial may have been inspired by the Surface Dial, but it's very much its own thing, and well-executed. Plus, unlike the Surface Dial, you don't need to worry about it sliding down an inclined screen when you place it there (though the onscreen radial menu that appears around the Surface Dial is very cool). The Precision Dial's own aesthetic fun comes from an LED ring that changes color to match the theme of the program you're using. It's not an essential accessory, but I can absolutely see it speeding up an artist's workflow, and unlilke the $99 Surface Dial, it's included in the box.

Performance Testing: A Good-Grunt AIO

The uncommon design of the Yoga A940 makes relevant head-to-head benchmark testing a bit tricky. As mentioned, few systems directly match up in function or power, but I've compiled a batch of desktops that match the A940 in as many facets as possible. Whether that's design, components, pricing, or some combination of the three, the systems listed in the table below can provide some context for the A940's performance, even if they can't all serve as digital drafting boards, too. While the aforementioned Dell OptiPlex 7760 All-in-One and Dell XPS 27 are good comparisons for the design and feature sets, I had to leave them out of the testing mix because they were reviewed under our old suite of benchmark tests, and we no longer have access to those systems.

That leaves us with three all-in-ones of various kinds, and one standard desktop. On the high end, the Surface Studio 2 and the 2019 27-Inch Apple iMac($3,400.00 at Amazon) set the bar for the category, while the much more affordable Acer Aspire Z 24, at just $1,099, can show us the difference between a more budget-minded system and this one. These are rounded out by the Maingear Vybe, a boutique desktop in the same price range as the A940. It doesn't have a built-in screen, so the functionality is completely different, but it demonstrates the raw component power you can get for around the same price in a standalone tower. It's always possible to buy separate drawing devices and connect them to a desktop, but that, of course, adds significantly to the cost and is a wholly different usage model.

Productivity and Storage Tests

PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet use, web browsing, and videoconferencing. The test generates a proprietary numeric score. The PCMark 8 suite, meanwhile, contains a specialized PCMark 8 Storage test that we use to assess the speed of the PC's subsystem. This result is also a proprietary numeric score.

The Yoga A940 acquits itself well on PCMark 10, beating all but the full-powered Vybe. This productivity-centric test isn't the most strenuous benchmark, but it is a good sign that this PC will do well with day-to-day tasks. One of our complaints about the Studio 2 was that it uses a mobile-class processor, unusual for an expensive desktop that should be aiming for professional-level muscle, and as you can see here, it is slightly outpaced. The Yoga A940's SSD also comes out on top, by a thin margin; you won't find anyone complaining about too-fast boot and load times. Note that the iMac is unable to run these Windows-based tests, so it has been excluded.

Media Processing and Creation Tests

Next is Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads.

We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and, at the end, add up the total execution time. The Photoshop test stresses CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters. Systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see an added boost.

The Yoga A940 does fairly well here again, flexing its processing power on some more demanding tests. It doesn't match the iMac's and Vybe's beastly Core i9-9900K CPU on either test, but it holds its own. It's comfortably ahead of the much less costly Aspire Z 24, as well, and the Studio 2's mobile chip shows its constraints much more clearly here, especially in Cinebench. This isn't workstation-level performance, but it's suited to the creative tasks you would do on a machine like this. For heavy multi-threaded applications like modern video editors that lean on the CPU, the A940 shows a lot more raw horsepower than the Surface Studio 2.

To put that to the test, we also ran our Handbrake video conversion test, in which we re-render a 12-minute 4K video file to 1080p...

Again, you can see the benefit of a "true" desktop processor, like the ones in the first four systems, versus the mobile chip in the Surface Studio 2.

What this slate of tests tells us: The iMac and Vybe, though very different animals from the A940, are indeed closer to true pro-grade speed. Still, the Yoga A940 can be your one-stop shop for both drawing and editing your content, a rare option. The Studio 2 is one of few PCs that also offers this combination, but the less expensive Yoga A940 is in fact more CPU-muscular. Microsoft opting for a mobile CPU puts a big caveat on the Surface Studio 2 despite its best-in-class design.

Synthetic Graphics Tests

Next up: UL's 3DMark suite. 3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff. The results are proprietary scores.

Next is another synthetic graphics test, this one from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes. In this case, it's rendered in the company's eponymous Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload scenario and a second opinion on the machine's graphical prowess.

These tables show the very clear effect of a top-notch gaming GPU. The Yoga A940's AMD Radeon RX 560X GPU isn't bad, and certainly better than integrated graphics would be, but there are clear tiers of performance here. The standout Vybe and its monster video card aside, the Yoga A940 also lags behind the Studio 2's Nvidia GPU by a fair margin. The Yoga A940 can hold its own on modest 3D work, to be sure, but it's not going to be the most effective option for churning through tasks that benefit from GPU acceleration more than just CPU grunt, such as certain graphics programs and video editors. Once again, though, few systems let you create and process data on the same hardware, so if that sounds like it would fit your workflow, it may be worth the lesser performance. Unlike the CPU results, though, the superior choice for more graphics-processing-intensive tasks in this form factor is the Studio 2.

As a side note, these two AIOs aren't really meant for gaming. The Studio 2 could barely pull off 60 frames per second in some AAA testing titles, which means it's a big stretch for the A940. Less-intensive games, those with simple visuals, and those that can scale graphics options way down and not affect your enjoyment too much are playable on the A940. And that's fine for a system of this type. If you're looking for a real gaming desktop, though, we have many other suggestions for varying budgets. Considering that you can't upgrade the graphics card in this one, it's ill-suited for gaming as the primary reason to buy.

Draw, Partner?

When you look at the IdeaCentre Yoga A940's design and performance as part of the larger AIO field, this system is hit-and-miss. The display quality isn't quite up to what you'd expect from a 4K panel for creative types, and the build feels more like a budget AIO than its pricing would suggest. The Surface Studio 2's screen draws you in with its sharpness and brightness. The A940's display just doesn't have that wow factor, despite its high native resolution.

The screen aside, though, its feature set is solid, including the ports, the storage capacity, and the dial-and-stylus duo. The convertibility concept works as intended, even if it's executed with middlebrow hardware. (The Surface Studio 2 is, after all, more expensive in even its most basic iteration.) For everyday work and CPU-intensive tasks, the IdeaCentre Yoga A940 is, in fact, faster for less money, though that doesn't hold true across 3D performance.

It's clear to see where the extra cost of Microsoft's system is going, between the better GPU and its stellar design. If your budget is constricted but Microsoft's machine seems like a huge boon to your workflow, the Yoga A940 is accomplished enough to take its place. If you're shopping for a business, it may be worth it to splurge on the Studio 2, but neither machine is truly workstation-grade if raw performance matters most. A convertible desktop like this or the Studio 2 only makes sense if you'll leverage the draw aspect, so consider how you'll use it carefully. If performance is primary and you don't legitimately need the reclining touch screen, you can invest in an Apple iMac (if macOS is a viable option), or a cutting-edge traditional desktop, and get more pep for your money.

Lenovo IdeaCentre Yoga A940

The Bottom Line

Lenovo's IdeaCentre Yoga A940 is a rare convertible all-in-one desktop, with a reclining 4K display and well-done creative accessories. The build quality and screen leave us wanting, but it's a serviceable, cheaper alternative to Microsoft's Surface Studio 2.

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Lenovo Yoga A940 All-in-one

Source: https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/lenovo-ideacentre-yoga-a940

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