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The best laptops for games have a lot of work to do. They need to be as portable as you would expect from a laptop, both in terms of size and battery life. But they also have to run games well enough that you don’t wish you had bought a desktop gaming PC instead. The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i tries to find the right mix between size and portability by having a big, but not too big, body that lets you take some gaming power with you. Even better, it’s on the cheaper end of the high-end game laptop market. The system can come with either an Intel Core i9-13900HX or Core i7-13700HX and an RTX 4070, 4080, or 4090. I got a $2,649 computer with a Core i9 processor and an RTX 4080 graphics card. With its great specs and smart design, it seems like a warning shot to computers that cost more than $3,000.
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Specifications
| Specification | Details |
|---|---|
| Processor | Qualcomm Snapdragon 865+ |
| Display | 6.67-inch AMOLED, 144Hz refresh rate, HDR10+ |
| Resolution | 1080 x 2340 pixels |
| RAM | 8GB/12GB/16GB |
| Storage | 128GB/256GB/512GB UFS 3.1 |
| Battery | 5,000mAh |
| Rear Camera | 64MP (wide) + 16MP (ultrawide) |
| Front Camera | Motorized pop-up 20MP |
| Operating System | Android 10, Legion OS |
| Connectivity | 5G, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.0, USB Type-C |
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i: Design
The Legion Pro 7i is an all-black machine made of aluminum. Other than the Legion logo on the lid and an incredibly well-done RGB keyboard, it doesn’t look like a gaming monster like the MSI Titan GT or the Asus ROG Swift Scar. It’s bigger and more boxy than a typical ultrabook, but that’s because it needs to fit a big battery and a big cooling system. A lot of the back half of the laptop’s base is used for cooling. The fin stacks are visible through side and back vents. There is a row of ports in the middle of the back edge. This makes it possible to set up the laptop on a desk without having a lot of cords sticking out of the side. You can buy this laptop from its official website
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i: Display
Even the handle on the screen doesn’t move when it’s used every day. The metal frame and plastic bezels around the screen make it look a little strange, but the screen itself is beautiful. It’s not a great OLED or Mini-LED model, but it’s a big 16-inch screen with a resolution of 2,560×1,600 pixels and a refresh rate of 240Hz. It also lets you change the refresh rate. The screen has a high-quality matte coating that cuts down on glare and keeps the picture clear. I measured the screen at a high brightness of 532 nits in HDR.
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i: Software
This is a true game machine that’s ready to go right out of the box. It has great specs and works well. The program for customizing is easy to use and works well for adjusting fan speed and overclocking. However, when we tried to overclock, the GPU was slowed down and the framerate dropped by a lot.
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i: Performance
With an Intel Core i9-13900HX, one of the most powerful laptop CPUs available, and an Nvidia RTX 4080 mobile graphics chip, we didn’t have low hopes for the Legion Pro. After testing two systems with slightly more powerful versions of that Intel CPU and more powerful RTX 4090 GPUs, I had at least lowered my expectations. But the Pro 7i changed things in some really exciting ways, at least for people who might buy it. It didn’t change things as much for Lenovo’s rivals, like Razer.
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i: Battery Life
The Legion Pro 7i has a 99.9-watt-hour battery, but I didn’t think it would last long because of its powerful parts and big, high-resolution screen. In fact, the Legion didn’t do much to surprise. It only lasted 3.25 hours in our web-browsing test, 6.75 hours in our video-looping test, and it wouldn’t finish the PCMark 10 Applications battery test. It’s clear that the Legion Pro 7i isn’t meant to be a portable workplace, and in that way, the MacBook Pro 16 is a better choice.
Price and availability
The Lenovo Legion 7i Pro is a bit pricey, but that’s what you’d expect from a powerful game computer. It starts at $2,299.99, which is expensive but not too bad when you consider that it still has an RTX 4070 GPU and an Intel Core i9-13900HX CPU from the 13th generation.
The review model we got cost $2,749.99 (£3,499.99 with VAT, or AU$4,759), but it has a 13th-generation Intel Core i9-13900KF CPU and an RTX 4080 GPU. This laptop is easy to buy in the US, the UK, and Australia. But only the more expensive ones are sold in the UK and Australia. The 4070 is a lower-end type that is only sold in the US.
Final Words
The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i is an amazing machine. Even though it has a 16-inch screen and high-end hardware, it feels surprisingly small for a game laptop. It’s even more amazing that the parts can keep up their speed over time with thermals that don’t break down. It may not be as light or have as long of a battery life as an ultrabook, but it makes the most of its size. And for the price, it would be hard to find a better machine.
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i review: The good and The bad
FAQS
In general, computers last a long time if you take care of them. And legion notes are also pretty sturdy. So, it’s likely to last longer than 5 years.
The Legion 7i’s TrueStrike Keyboard has soft-landing switches, 1.3 mm key travel, 100% anti-ghosting, 1 ms response times, and over 16 million colors with Corsair iCUE support.