If you’ve ever wanted to game at work on your lunch break, the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i is the perfect laptop. It handles work tasks with ease and has no problem with most games, all while looking like the kind of laptop an office worker would use. The subtle sleekness of the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i almost doesn’t match its power. It’s like Superman in civilian clothing.
The Legion’s kryptonite is its battery life, fan noises, and the fact it can get a little hot when it comes to using the laptop for high-intensity activities and games. But for a starting price of $4,599, the Legion is serving true gaming power at a comparable cost to the competition.
This mid-range gaming laptop competes with giants like the MSI Titan, Razer Blade and Asus ROG in terms of specs, with a price tag to match.
First impressions
For a 16-inch laptop, the Legion is slick and weighs a moderate amount considering it houses a huge – but necessary – battery for running high-intensity games on ‘ultimate’. It was easy to set up and its charging port sits at the back of the device, out of the way of hands, arms and spillable drinks.
The most notable thing about the Legion though, is the clean and simple design. Solid black surfaces help to hide the absolute powerhouse under the hood. No crazy colours or logos, just ‘LEGION’ printed subtly on the lid. Even the keyboard is unassuming, unless you decide to turn on the per-key RGB lighting. In saying that, you can create a variety of keyboard lighting profiles and switch them quickly, so taking your laptop from work to play is as easy as pressing a button.
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i specifications
| CPU | 13th Generation Intel Core i7-13700HX |
| GPU | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 8GB GDDR6 |
| RAM | Up to 32GB (2 x 16GB) Overclocked 6000Mhz DDR5 Memory |
| Display | 16-inch 2560 x 1600, 240Hz |
| Storage | 1 TB SSD M.2 2280 PCIe Gen4 TLC |
| OS | Windows 11 |
| Connectivity | 1 x Thunderbolt 4 USB Type-C 1 x USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 4 x USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 1 x HDMI 2.1 Ethernet Combo audio jack |
| Price (RRP) | $4,599 |
| Warranty | 1 Year PremiumCare |
| Official website | Lenovo Australia |
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i performance
After spending two weeks with the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i doing a wide variety of activities (including day-to-day use for work, playing a few different games, and running benchmark tests), it proved itself to be a gaming laptop worthy of the mid-range price tag.
General Use
With specs like this, who needs friends? The Legion easily ran various applications without any sort of strain. Occasionally, programs would take a while to load when the laptop wasn’t plugged in. Plus, the battery life is a little short for a 99Whr capacity, meaning that you’ll want to have it plugged in most of the time anyway. For a day of general use, the Legion’s battery will last around eight hours, but as soon as you boot up a game or program with a heavy load, it depletes much faster.
Speaking of heavy loads, the Legion also became unexpectedly noisy and hot while running games and intense applications. The heat was less of an issue but the fans were loud enough to hear through a gaming headset, which was concerning at first.
The keyboard feels good to touch and the ability to have per-key RGB lighting (with six different profiles) is fantastic for gaming. Being able to switch lighting profiles between general use and gaming is always a bonus.
Gaming
As for gaming, the laptop can run most games on the highest graphics quality with only the fans and heat being an issue.
Starting with the newly released Park Beyond, a theme park management game, I was curious to see if the laptop could keep up with the constant on-screen movement from customers and rides. It sat nicely at 67-70 fps the whole time and everything looked amazing. Apex Legends at the highest graphics quality hit 190 fps. The thing that shocked me most though was the fact that I had to cap League of Legends at 240 fps. Uncapped, the Legion is able to run League of Legends at an average of 608 fps. Of course, this kind of power comes with stability issues in-game, but I struggled to believe the numbers I was seeing. The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i is not messing around.
Benchmarks
CPU
| Device | CPU (Single-Core) | CPU (Multi-Core) |
|---|---|---|
| Lenovo Legion Pro 7i (Gen 8) | 2870 | 17089 |
| Asus ExpertBook B6 Flip | 2223 | 12950 |
| Asus Zenbook Pro 16X OLED | 2269 | 11867 |
| Apple MacBook Pro (M2 Max) | 1975 | 15303 |
| Apple Mac Mini (M2 Pro) | 1940 | 15105 |
| Asus TUF A16 | 1986 | 9632 |
| Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 | 1730 | 6296 |
| Device | CPU (Single-Core) | CPU (Multi-Core) |
|---|---|---|
| Lenovo Legion Pro 7i (Gen 8) | 1952 | 22008 |
| Asus ExpertBook B6 Flip | 1731 | 16009 |
| Apple Mac Mini (M2 Pro) | 1645 | 14666 |
| Apple MacBook Pro (M2 Max) | 1609 | 14732 |
| Asus TUF A16 | 1510 | 12529 |
Synthetic benchmarks only tell part of the story when testing computers, but what a story these numbers tell. Coming ahead a clear winner, the i7-13700HX is the most powerful CPU we’ve tested in a laptop so far in terms of rendering and performance under load.
This bodes well for multitaskers and creatives rendering large files, as in you should have no trouble working on anything from 3D modelling to visual effects editing and livestreaming. Remarkably, there’s room for improvement, too. You can get the Legion with an even more powerful i9-13900HX processor if you need that extra performance.
Graphics
| Device | Score |
|---|---|
| Lenovo Legion Pro 7i (Gen 8) | 158787 |
| Asus Zenbook Pro 16X OLED | 82480 |
| Apple MacBook Pro (M2 Max) | 72833 |
| Asus TUF A16 | 69434 |
| Asus ExpertBook B6 Flip | 67165 |
Aside from pushing high frame rates across a wide range of games, the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i, equipped with an Nvidia RTX 4070 laptop GPU, also posted huge numbers in synthetic graphics tests. It nearly doubled GadgetGuy’s previous top performer in the Geekbench OpenCL test that assesses a system’s capacity for gaming and visual editing.
On the commonly-used 3DMark Time Spy test, the latest Legion Pro 7i scored 13,796, another strong result. For comparison, the TUF A16 scored 9,196, which is still a respectable result. As GadgetGuy tests more
An important thing to note is that GadgetGuy hasn’t tested many gaming laptops in the past, so the database of results mainly compares to non-gaming devices. Regardless, the results show that the Legion is an extremely powerful laptop.
Disk speed
Game install sizes are ridiculously large these days. Some modern games eclipse the 100GB mark, so having storage that can quickly read and write data helps during installation and when copying files to different drives. Considering the Legion wields extraordinary power for content creation too, fast disk speed also benefits you when working with large image and video files.
Using CrystalDiskMark, the included SSD returned figures of up to 6,600 MB/s read speeds and up to 4,950 MB/s write speeds. These are healthy numbers that compare reasonably well alongside other laptops GadgetGuy has tested. While the Legion Pro 7i’s write speeds don’t reach the lofty heights of an M2 Max MacBook Pro’s 7,000 MB/s, it’s no slouch, easily beating the sluggish SSD in the affordable Asus TUF A16 gaming laptop.
Who is the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i for?
If you can find it on sale (at the time of writing, it’s heavily discounted to $3,099), the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i is for anyone who is looking for a good, powerful gaming laptop instead of a stationary desktop PC. If you’re looking for portability and subtlety, the Legion can deliver gaming on the go without the look of a gaming laptop.
If you miss the sale but still want the Legion, it’s perfect if you have the extra money, but really you’re paying for the convenience of a portable gaming laptop more than the specs.
The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i is a fantastic gaming laptop, especially if you’re in the market for a mid-range powerhouse that can run games with an intense load easily and if you can ignore the whirring in the background.
The post Lenovo Legion Pro 7i (Gen 8) review: Big power, big price appeared first on GadgetGuy.
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