New Lenovo Legion 7 Gaming Laptops

Lenovo’s Legion gaming laptop series has two new products: the Legion 7/7i and the Legion Slim 7/7i. The “i” stands for “Intel,” which means the other model is AMD-powered.

These laptops have 16-inch screens, and we like this trend a lot. With all the progress made in industrial design and how much power can be crammed into such small spaces, we felt like the display real estate needed to increase, especially for graphics applications.

You would have guessed by the product naming that the “Slim” laptop is more about mobility, while the “non-Slim” is oriented towards performance.

Lenovo claims these laptops are the “most powerful” and the “most mobile” 16-inch gaming laptops. That’s a bold claim we’d love to put to the test in the future.

Lenovo Legion Slim 7 and 7i

Weighing in at only 4.5 Lbs, the Slim gaming laptops can be configured with a Core i9-12900HK or Ryzen 9 6900HX processor and a GeForce RTX 3070 (100W) or Radeon RX6800S GPU. The actual mix and match will depend on your configuration, but these are great options for such a light computer.

There’s 8GB of onboard RAM (4800MHz DDR5), paired with one slot that can accept a maximum of 16GB of RAM for a maximum of 24GB. Storage-wise, you can order up to 2TB of SSD connected via PCIe Gen4.

Lenovo has several options for the 16-inch display with refresh rates of 165-240Hz and excellent color capabilities, going from 100% sRGB to 100% DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB. All have a 3ms response time and brightness going from 500 NITs to an incredible 1250 NITs for the mini-LED option.

Depending on your GPU selection, you will be redirected towards the G-SYNC display (or not). The highest resolution is 2560×1600, which is excellent for gaming, but there’s also a more affordable 1920×1200/350NITs display.

I haven’t tested the 2x2W speakers, but they look pretty good on paper and are supported by the increasingly popular Nahimic Audio software.

The battery capacity of up to 99.99Wh  is the maximum legally allowed in laptops, but a Super Rapid Charge looks very promising. Lenovo says it can charge from 0% to 70% in ~30mn, making it much faster than any ThinkPad we tested. Hopefully, this technology will spread to other Lenovo laptops.

Last but not least, I like the RGB keyboard (with NumPad) with 1.3mm-travel keys. It looks and feels great for playing and typing.

Lenovo Legion 7 and 7i

These two 5.5 Lbs laptops are similar-looking to the Slim models, but the extra space allows Lenovo to have even more powerful components, thanks to an even more robust cooling.

Lenovo has done a lot of work on the cooling system, including software, to achieve the best cooling and noise level ratio. An AI has also been trained with popular games to balance Power between CPU and GPU usage, and usually, this allows the GPU to draw more power than it would otherwise (= higher graphics performance).

All the Legion 7 series share the same industrial design language with the CNC-aluminum chassis and the extra camera ridge at the top of the screen. The non-Slim laptops have environmental RGB lighting on the front and sides.

There are great details like the port names being illuminated in the back of the chassis. In a dimly lit environment, that makes a big difference. Sometimes, it’s the little things.

You can opt for an Intel Core i9-12900HX or Ryzen 9 6900HX CPUs, and up to a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 16GB or AMD Radeon RX6850M XT 12GB, depending on your configuration.

The memory configuration is a bit more flexible, with two 4800MHz DDR5 memory slots, for a maximum of 32GB. The display options and ports are identical to the Legion Slim 7, including the general battery configuration.

In conclusion, the new Lenovo Legion 7 series has impressive specs, and they felt very well built when we handled them in the real world. On paper, these laptops seem capable of achieving what Lenovo claims and pack a massive punch for their weight.

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Computers, Gaming
Tags: Gaming Laptops, Laptops, Lenovo Laptops, Social Hit