Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x review: Snapdragon laptops get more affordable

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x is an ARM-based laptop with the new low-end Qualcomm Snapdragon X chip. Thanks to Snapdragon, this machine has excellent battery life for its class and an NPU 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.

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x: 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. It makes much more sense here in this $749 machine than that $1200 machine. (Qualcomm initially said it hoped this CPU would power $600 laptops.)

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 that Qualcomm initially released. Here’s the official product matrix. 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 a lot when it launched the Snapdragon X platform, and you should be aware the GPU in these machines is much slower than Qualcomm’s marketing might lead you to believe.

However, this machine does have the NPU all Qualcomm Snapdragon X PCs come with. That means that, unlike with the Intel variant, you are getting Copilot+ PC AI features on this machine.

This laptop has a 256 GB SSD, but it comes with a second SSD slot so you can install another SSD if you need more storage later.

• Model number: Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x 15Q8X10
• CPU: Qualcomm Snapdragon X (X1-26-100)
• Memory: 16 GB LPDDR5x RAM
• Graphics/GPU: Qualcomm Adreno X1-45
• NPU: Qualcomm Hexagon NPU (up to 45 TOPS)
• Display: 15.3-inch 1920×1200 IPS display with 60Hz refresh rate and touch screen
• Storage: 256 GB PCIe Gen 4 SSD
• Webcam: 720p webcam with privacy shutter
• Connectivity: 1x USB Type-C (USB 5Gbps), 2x USB Type-A (USB 5Gbps), 1x HDMI 1.4, 1x SD card reader, 1x combo audio jack, 1x power connector
• Networking: Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4
• Biometrics: Fingerprint reader for Windows Hello
• Battery capacity: 60 Watt-hours
• Dimensions: 13.52 x 9.51 x 0.7 inches
• Weight: 3.42 pounds
• MSRP: $749 as tested

At $749, the compromises — the display, speakers, webcam, and GPU in particular — feel like they add up fast.

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x: Design and build quality

The 15-inch Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x has a top made of aluminum and a bottom made of plastic. While plastic isn’t the most premium material, it looks good and feels fine. From a distance, the design looks similar to Lenovo’s more expensive laptops to me, especially thanks to the aluminum lid.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with a good plastic laptop, and the design and build quality here are both good! There’s no weird flexing as you hold the laptop or open it up.

The “Luna Gray” color scheme here looks nice, too — it’s more silver or light-blue than gray in the right lighting.

At 3.42 pounds, this 15-inch laptop could be a little more lightweight if it was made of more expensive materials. But the weight is totally fine, and the 0.7-inch thickness is reasonable too.

The software is a bit obnoxious out of the box, as it tends to be on consumer Lenovo laptops. For example, McAfee antivirus pops up and encourages you to buy a subscription. You can uninstall this stuff, but the laptop would feel better out of the box without it.

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x: Keyboard and trackpad

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x has a fine keyboard, complete with a number pad. I like having the number pad when there’s room. 15-inch laptops tend to include a number pad since they have more space, but some people might want a roomier keyboard without that number pad.

Lenovo makes lots of good laptop keyboards, and this keyboard feels okay, but it’s lower-end and more budget-focused than the options in more expensive premium laptops. As in the Intel-powered Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3 model, there’s some mushiness to the keys. When I type, I notice the plastic around the keys push downward into the machine when my finger goes all the way down on a key. It’s not as bad as it sounds, but this is one of the mushiest keyboards I’ve used on a Lenovo machine. It’s one of those touches that makes the machine feel more budget than premium. But it’s usable and comfortable enough.

The trackpad feels solid, too. It’s a plastic surface rather than a premium glass one, but it’s responsible and smooth, with a fine click-down feel. It’s positioned further to the left than on most laptops. If you find yourself using your touchpad with your right hand, that may be a little inconvenient.

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x: Display and speakers

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x’s 15.3-inch 1920×1200 IPS display is the weakest part of the experience. At 300 nits, it’s on the dim side on paper. In real life, it feels not just unusually dim, but also dull. I cranked this one up to 100 percent brightness and still want it to go higher.

The display does have an anti-glare coating that works nicely to avoid reflections, so it arguably needs less brightness than glossy laptop displays that are more vulnerable to glare. The 60Hz refresh rate is also the bare minimum, here — but 60Hz isn’t a major issue compared to the other problems with the display.

This is a touch-screen laptop, too. That’s a nice feature to have.

The speakers are lacking, too. They’re on the quiet side, but the biggest problem is that the audio quality is tinny. I listen to both Steely Dan’s Aja and Daft Punk’s Get Lucky on Spotify when I review laptop speakers. The instrument separation in Aja and the bass in Get Lucky were both on the bad side as far as laptop speakers go. I’d get a good pair of headphones if you want to listen to music or watch media.

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x: Webcam, microphone, biometrics

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x includes a 720p webcam, which is a surprise since the Intel variant I recently reviewed included a 1080p webcam. The webcam just isn’t great in 2025 — 1080p webcams have largely become standard. The webcam produces an image that’s lower-detail and more washed out than the average 1080p webcam on a newer laptop. Still, it’s fine — if you just need to participate in an occasional video meeting, webcam quality isn’t necessarily the most important factor on a machine like this.

The IdeaPad Slim 3x does have a physical webcam shutter switch above the display — that’s always a privacy feature I’m thrilled to see.

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x’s microphone didn’t do a great job, either. It picked up my voice without background noise, but the sound was unusually quiet and sounded a little low-quality. I would aim to use an external mic in calls and voice chats if you opt for this machine.

This machine doesn’t have an IR camera for facial recognition with Windows Hello. Instead, it has a fingerprint reader at the right side of the laptop, below the Enter key on the number pad. The fingerprint reader works fine, and some people will prefer it to facial recognition hardware. That’s a matter of personal taste.

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x: Connectivity

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x has a decent number of ports for a budget-focused laptop, just like the Intel variant does. On the right side, this machine has a USB Type-A port next to a full-size SD card reader.

On the left side, Lenovo includes a power connector (Lenovo doesn’t include a USB-C charger, which is a surprise for a Snapdragon laptop) along with a second USB Type-A port, an HDMI 1.4 out port, a USB Type-C port, and a combo audio jack.

With so many laptops supporting faster USB speeds and HDMI 2.1 out, the port selection does feel a bit lower-end.

Thanks to the Snapdragon hardware here, this machine does support the future-proof Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 standards. (The Intel variant, with its previous-generation platform, doesn’t offer these.)

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x: Performance

While the Snapdragon chip here is the lowest-end one available, this machine still performs fine in day-to-day use. While the CPU speed is a bit lower, the biggest performance drops are in multi-core performance (this chip has fewer cores) and graphics performance (the GPU here is substantially slower than on higher-tier Snapdragon X Plus and Snapdragon X Elite chips.) Those aren’t the most important for typical desktop productivity performance.

While app compatibility has improved with Windows on ARM, it still isn’t perfect. Personally, all the desktop apps I use regularly run fine — aside from OBS Studio, which has an experimental build that should run.

We ran the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x through our standard benchmarks to see how it performs. However, bear in mind that some of our benchmark tools — like PCMark 10 — don’t run on ARM PCs.

To get an idea of CPU performance, we run Cinebench R24. Unlike many benchmarking tools, this runs natively on ARM PCs, so we can compare performance across the x86 and ARM platforms without Microsoft’s Prism translation layer getting involved.

Cinebench is a heavily multithreaded benchmark that focuses on overall CPU performance. Since it’s heavily multithreaded, CPUs with more cores have a huge advantage.

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x scored 711 in the Cinebench R24 multi-threaded benchmark. That’s substantially faster than the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3 variant with the Intel Core 5 210H hardware and not too far behind the Dell Inspiron 14 Plus variant with faster Snapdragon hardware.

Next, we run a graphical benchmark. This isn’t a gaming laptop — not even by Snapdragon laptop standards — but it’s still good to check how the GPU performs. First, we run 3Dmark Time Spy, a graphical benchmark that focuses on GPU performance.

This particular benchmark runs through the Prism translation layer as it’s not ARM-native. Despite that translation layer slowing things down, the Qualcomm GPU here scored 1063, which was only a little slower than the integrated Intel graphics in the Intel variant. This benchmark reflects how GPU-accelerated apps perform in the real world, as most apps and games aren’t available in ARM-native versions.

We also run 3DMark Night Raid, which runs natively on ARM laptops. With the Prism translation layer getting out of the way, the Qualcomm Adreno GPU here produced a score of 16677. That’s substantially faster than Intel’s integrated graphics.

However, as you can see in both the Night Raid and Time Spy benchmarks, this is unusually bad compared to other Snapdragon laptops. If you plan on using the laptop for gaming or GPU-accelerated professional applications, I would strongly encourage you to look for a laptop with faster graphics hardware.

Overall, the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x did fine, delivering decent desktop performance in the desktop apps many people use all day — browsers like Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, productivity apps like Microsoft Word, and collaboration tools like Slack. But it will lag behind in more demanding workflows — especially anything that needs graphics acceleration.

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x: Battery life

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x has a 60 Watt-hour battery. Combined with a power-sipping Qualcomm Snapdragon X processor, this ARM-powered Windows PC should have great battery life. And it does.

To benchmark the battery life, we play a 4K copy of Tears of Steel on repeat in on Windows 11 with airplane mode enabled until the laptop suspends itself. We set the laptop’s display to 250 nits of brightness for this test. This is the best-case scenario for any laptop since local video playback is so efficient, and real battery life in day-to-day use is always going to be less than this.

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x lasted an average of 982 minutes before suspending itself — that’s over 16 hours. While you can get a few more hours of battery with a more expensive Snapdragon or Lunar Lake laptop — those will often have larger batteries, which means longer life — this is a great number for a budget laptop. There’s a good chance it will last for an entire workday — depending on how demanding the applications you use are and how long your workday is!

Notably, it’s nearly two times more battery life than the similar Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3 and its Intel Core 5 210H processor delivered. That’s a huge improvement.

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x: Conclusion

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x is a tough laptop to pass judgement on. If this was one of the $600 Snapdragon laptops we were promised by Qualcomm’s marketing push, I think it would be compelling. At $749, the compromises — the display, speakers, webcam, and GPU in particular — feel like they add up fast.

On the other hand, this machine is worlds better than the Intel variant I just reviewed. You’re getting a faster CPU, faster GPU, much longer battery life, Wi-Fi 7 support, and an NPU for Copilot+ PC AI features. The laptop runs cooler and quieter. I’d much rather have the Snapdragon hardware in this chassis than that particular Intel chip.

While I haven’t seen another Snapdragon laptop or Copilot+ PC with a starting retail price this low, you can often find laptops with more impressive hardware on sale around the $749 price point. Some of the competing models that frequently drop to that price even have beautiful-looking OLED displays. But, on a good sale, this machine could be an amazing deal if you want an inexpensive ARM laptop running Windows.