Lenovo Legion Pro 7i (Gen 9) review.

The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i easily earns its place as the ultimate guide to gaming laptops, and when you set it to full power, it does so with flying colors. I’m not just talking about RGB illuminated edges. This massive 16-inch PC packs a punch, with a great core configuration and great supporting specs.

Of course, there’s a caveat to this, right? Something must be stopping this beast. It took some testing, but aside from a base price that rivals most RTX 4090-equipped gaming laptops today, I think I noticed it: gaming battery life. Seriously, what’s a laptop without portability?

If you take the massive aluminum mass out of the box, you will see that the Legion Pro 7i case is not only fat but beautifully understated. Matte black with a silver Lenovo badge on the back and Legion in larger letters in the opposite corner. The cover closes softly and, unlike the RedMagic Titan 16 Pro, it does not have any exaggerated design elements emphasizing its gaming character. The back and sides have a distinct speckled look – like classic glitter – although you won’t see it unless you stick your nose into the vents.

None of it is offensive to the eye, and while some may object to the RGB illuminating the front edge and keyboard, you can always turn it off when your co-workers are watching.

There’s a USB Type-A port on both sides of the Pro 7i, as well as one of the USB Type-C ports, but all the other ports are on the back – something that helps keep your desk tidy, it means cables won’t get in the way of your mouse . In addition to the side ports, there is another USB Type-A port on the back and a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 Thunderbolt 4 port, which also doubles as DisplayPort 1.4. The second USB Type-C port is another DisplayPort 1.4, which also offers an impressive 140W of power. So, a good selection of ports.

After four years of testing gaming laptops, you’re starting to get a feel for them. If the weight alone didn’t give it away, turning on the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i made me realize I was in premium gaming laptop territory. And boy does it go.

One thing I noticed after the initial setup is the pop-ups. Some bloatware was installed, including Tobii and McAfee. Tobii runs in the background from the moment you launch it and uses over 150MB of memory, which isn’t ideal, so it’s worth uninstalling when you first get your hands on the Legion Pro 7i. That said, the included Lenovo Arena software does a great job of keeping all your game libraries in one place, and Vantage is great for system monitoring and one-click overclocking.

Other than the usual clicking in everyday apply, I was impressed with the Legion Pro 7i’s speed. This is completely unchangeable due to the mass of tabs open in Chrome. All thanks to the 32 GB of dual-channel DDR5-5600 RAM that Lenovo placed under the hood. Two sticks of 16GB of memory mean more bandwidth, something many gaming laptops overlook. Lenovo didn’t do anything like this with the Legion Pro 7i, and the attention paid to supported components also extends to storage. It’s just frustrating that in a cheaper 16GB configuration this only means one stick of memory rather than a pair of 8GB, halving the potential bandwidth on offer.

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But the setup I’m considering is two 1TB NVMe SSDs. It’s not just regular proprietary storage – these are SK-Hynix PCIE Gen 4×4 drives that can handle every storage test I throw at them. We’re talking excellent throughput and some of the lowest memory access times I’ve seen on similar laptops.

Roaring from below are two 2-watt Harman speakers, which I tested with a bit of Sleepnet. They’re a little gaunt, but they handle deep, bassy synth really well and don’t crackle when I whack them at full volume. They miss a few holes, but luckily they make the table shake.

When we get down to the key components, the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i is a fantastic combination of Nvidia’s RTX 4080 and an Intel Core i9 14900HX processor. This makes it a star in weighty CPU benchmarks, meaning the Pro 7i is absolutely second to none when it comes to rendering.

Out of the box, I was getting about average frame rates for a device in this weight class, but there was no noticeable stuttering and the fans weren’t screaming and tearing my ears off the entire time, so the game was enjoyable throughout.

Turn on Thermal Mode and the 175W GPU will unleash its full potential with an additional 10-20 frames per second, and in some cases up to another 30 frames per second. Although this does push the components to their limits. Once the 175W RTX 4080 GPU hits full performance, the cooling system is still able to maintain a decent GPU temperature, but the CPU maxes out at around 100°C – warm enough to boil water – and you can bet it’s soaking up the load battery .

Which brings me to my main concern. Unplugged under weighty gaming load, the Legion Pro 7i can only last 40 minutes. This is one of the worst gaming battery life numbers this generation, and even compares poorly to most RTX 4090 gaming laptops we’ve tested this year.

Please note that this is a gaming laptop with an MSRP of approx $3,220/3,060 lbs in a sea of ​​sub $3000/£3000 machines with almost the same specifications. At this price, it’s not worth compromising. Yes, you get a current-generation Intel processor to support this processor, but unless you work as a game developer or in the film industry, this particular configuration will be a bit overkill for most gamers.

Of course, there are configuration options and they are already heavily discounted, and if previous Lenovo Legion computers are anything to go by, I would expect them to actually become the standard price. With white LEDs only, it’s £30 cheaper (although this is a UK-only option). You can also save $200/£170 if you upgrade to a second SSD and opt for 16GB of single-channel RAM. What I’m saying here is that this is one customizable machine, and it’s definitely more common in the UK.

The Legion Pro 7i is a wonderful machine, but in this configuration you could spend much less money to buy a ROG Zephyrus G16 with similar specs and a super-slim OLED panel – currently our favorite gaming laptop. And while it’s not exactly the same $3,600 premium as the latest Razer Blade 16 with the same processor, our favorite 17-inch RTX 4090 gaming laptop, the Gigabyte Aorus 17X AZG, is available for the same price.

That said, the Pro 7i can often be found on Lenovo’s website at a huge discount, and will likely continue to be so for some time. If you can give up the extra memory and disk space, it’s worth looking into.