Lenovo’s Legion 7i gaming laptop (starts at $1,799; $3,269 as tested) has a real need for speed in the configuration we tested, producing best-in-class gaming benchmarks with its Intel Core i9 HK-series CPU and high-wattage Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080. It’s also been revamped since our last review with a taller 16-inch G-Sync screen and PCI Express Gen 4 storage, and continues to impress with its top-notch build quality and connectivity. That said, its dazzling performance comes with some of the shortest battery life and noisiest cooling fans we’ve encountered in a late-model laptop. The Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition R5 remains our Editors’ Choice pick for a well-rounded, high-end gaming rig, mainly for battery-life reasons, but if only the fastest will do, the Legion 7i has no equal.
Nothing But Bleeding-Edge
The Legion 7i sits above the Legion 5 Pro as Lenovo’s flagship gaming laptop. It gets bonus points for offering a choice of Intel “Tiger Lake-H” and AMD Ryzen 5000-series processors, both excellent gaming platforms. The Intel model reviewed here has the elite eight-core, 3.3GHz (5GHz turbo) Core i9-11980HK, a 65-watt chip that runs at higher clocks than the base 45-watt, 2.3GHz (4.6GHz turbo) Core i7-11800H. The equivalent AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX is also no slouch.
Visually, the Legion 7i doesn’t stand out until you switch it on. Bright RGB lighting covers every edge, the keyboard, and the Legion logo on the lid. It’s quite the show, and you’ll be the center of attention until you turn it off. Corsair’s iCUE app provides intricate lighting control, including layered effects and brightness adjustments, which you can save in customizable profiles.
Lighting aside, the Legion 7i’s straight lines and all-gray color scheme look plain next to the m15 Ryzen Edition R5. This can work in your favor if you’re going places where a garish gaming rig might not fit in—simply douse the lighting, and you have a relatively normal-looking laptop. Either way, the all-aluminum build is first-rate. The laptop has an exceptionally solid feel.
The Legion 7i is neither small nor light at 0.92 by 14.2 by 10.2 inches (HWD) and 5.5 pounds, but it’s not unreasonably proportioned for a laptop this powerful. Its 16:10 aspect ratio display fills out its frame nicely, and its inward-sloped edges make it look thinner than it is. The Alienware is similarly sized (0.89 by 14 by 10.7 inches) but heavier at 5.93 pounds. The Razer Blade 15 Advanced Edition is more travel-friendly (0.67 by 14 by 9.25 inches, 4.4 pounds), but it has a narrower 16:9 screen and isn’t in the same performance league as the Lenovo.
The Panel: G-Sync Me Up
The Legion 7i’s 16-inch screen is a major highlight. Its 2,560-by-1,600-pixel resolution shows 11% more detail than the 16:9 equivalent (2,560 by 1,440 pixels), and almost twice that of more common full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) panels. Despite that, it’s much less demanding than a 4K (3,840 by 2,160) screen for gaming; the RTX 3080 GPU took full advantage of the display’s 165Hz refresh rate in our esports testing. (See the performance results a bit later in this review.) The screen also supports Nvidia G-Sync for tear-free gaming, which is hard to live without once you try it.
The picture is top-notch, too. We measured 100% coverage of the sRGB color gamut and 78% of Adobe RGB and DCI-P3. Its peak brightness is an admirable 542 nits. Replete with a glare-killing surface, this screen is superb for gaming and just about anything else.
First-Class Input and Output
Input devices are something else that the Legion 7i gets spot on. The keyboard is tactile and well-laid-out. Though the number pad is undersize, its layout is standard. The properly isolated, full-size arrow key cluster warrants extra credit as well.
The buttonless touchpad also behaves well, with an expansive surface and assertive though audible physical clicks.
As for physical connectivity, most of the Legion 7i’s ports face the rear to keep cables out of sight. Lenovo thoughtfully placed illuminated port labels on the rear overhang; from left to right are Ethernet, Thunderbolt 4 (USB Type-C), a trio of USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports (the rightmost supplying power for charging handheld devices while the laptop’s off), and an HDMI 2.1 video output. The 300-watt power adapter also connects here.
The sides are more sparsely populated, with just one Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C) port and a headset jack on the left and one USB-C 3.2 Gen 1 port on the right. An Intel AX201 networking card provides Wi-Fi 6 connectivity.
The right edge also holds a physical webcam cutoff switch that completely disconnects the camera from the PC for more peace of mind than a sliding privacy shutter would offer. The webcam itself isn’t anything to write home about, a generic 720p unit with a semi-blurry picture. It lacks infrared capability for face recognition. Nor is there a fingerprint reader, though some biometric capability would have been nice on a laptop this expensive.
Testing the Legion 7i: Maximum Performance, No Questions Asked
Though our Lenovo Legion 7i review unit costs a lofty $3,269, the $1,799 base model is already well-equipped with an eight-core Intel Core i7-11800H CPU, a 6GB GeForce RTX 3060 GPU, 16GB of memory, and a 512GB solid-state drive. You can find premium RTX 3060 gaming notebooks for less—Best Buy offered the Acer Predator Triton 500 SE for $1,499 as I typed this—though laptops with higher-wattage GPUs, such as the Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition R5, tend to command as much as the Legion or more.
Our review model is a custom configuration direct from Lenovo. It has the Core i9-11980HK CPU that I noted earlier, a 16GB GeForce RTX 3080 GPU, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB PCI Express Gen 4 SSD. It runs Windows 10 Pro and is backed by a one-year warranty with Lenovo’s premium support tier, Legion Ultimate Support. It’s a lot of dosh but ultimately within what comparably equipped laptops tend to command.
The laptop’s GeForce RTX 3080—or rather, how Lenovo implemented it—deserves a call-out. We’ve seen this GPU limited to 105 watts in the Aorus 17G YD and 125 watts in the elite Asus ROG Zephyrus S17, but the Legion 7i pushes it to 165 watts. (See our primer on why GeForce GPU wattage matters.) It’s also noteworthy that this GPU has 16GB of its own display memory, not 8GB as seen in some gaming laptops.
The Legion 7i got toasty during our testing; the FLIR One Pro image below (taken during a 3DMark Time Spy stress test) shows a peak surface temperature of 116 degrees F, which is a little too warm for comfort. The keyboard and palm rest stayed cool enough—I had no trouble keeping my hands there while gaming—but I learned to avoid touching the metal above the keyboard.
The powerful cooling fans weren’t quiet, either. They were easily audible across my living room and evoked a few comments from my guests. (The hiss of air going through the vents, not fan whine, is what makes the noise.) Fortunately, the internal components stay cool enough; the RTX 3080 hovered just under 80 degrees C, with the CPU in the low 80s C.
For our benchmark-test faceoffs, I compared the Legion 7i to four other gaming notebooks. The Alienware x17 is a larger 17-inch system, but fair game given our Legion’s top-shelf specs. Also present is the all-AMD-based MSI Delta 15. The Razer Blade 15 Advanced Edition is the only unit with a previous-generation “Comet Lake” CPU, though it’s been updated with “Tiger Lake-H” silicon since we tested it. (See more about how we test laptops.)
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
The Legion 7i started off strong in our first test, UL’s PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and includes a storage subtest for the primary drive. The machine did especially well in the latter test, thanks to its PCI Express Gen 4 SSD.
Three additional benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). Let’s take a look…
Our final productivity test is Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s famous image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
As expected, the Legion 7i’s Core i9 CPU posted fabulous numbers and came out on top overall. The Lenovo is as fast as you can expect any laptop to be in these areas.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
For Windows PCs, we run both synthetic and real-world gaming tests. Among the former are two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for systems with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Also looped into that group is the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which we use to gauge OpenGL performance.
Our real-world gaming testing relies on the built-in benchmarks of F1 2021, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege, representing simulation, open-world action-adventure, and competitive/esports shooter games, respectively. On laptops, we run Valhalla and Siege twice (the former at Medium and Ultra quality, the latter at Low and Ultra quality), while F1 2021 is run once at the Ultra preset and, for GeForce RTX laptops, a second time with Nvidia’s performance-boosting DLSS anti-aliasing turned on.
The Legion 7i sparred with the Alienware x17 in the synthetic tests, but it was simply uncatchable in real-world gaming where its high-wattage RTX 3080 came into its own. Its Core i9 CPU also helped drive its amazing numbers in Rainbow Six Siege.
Granted, we run our laptop gaming tests at 1080p, but you’ll want to run them at the Legion 7i’s native 2,560-by-1,600-pixel resolution for maximum sharpness. At that resolution, I clocked the system at 147fps in F1 2021 (Ultra settings with DLSS), 63fps in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (Ultra), and 213fps in Rainbow Six Siege (Ultra). It’s a fluid experience through and through.
Battery and Display Tests
PCMag tests laptops’ battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with screen brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100% until the system quits. Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting are turned off during the test.
We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its software to measure a laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its brightness in nits (candelas per square meter) at the screen’s 50% and peak settings.
The Legion 7i has a great display, as I noted, especially when it comes to peak brightness. But its battery life is a big ouch—you’ll be lucky to get through a streaming movie. I ran the test multiple times and ensured the laptop was using the onboard Intel GPU instead of the RTX 3080, but to no avail. Gaming laptops don’t last as long unplugged as ultraportables, but we still expect at least five or six hours nowadays.
Verdict: Ultra-Fast at an Ultra Price
The Lenovo Legion 7i blew the doors off our gaming tests with its high-powered Core i9 and GeForce RTX 3080. Coupled with its excellent G-Sync screen, it delivers one of the smoothest gaming experiences around.
In fact, the Legion 7i excels in just about every area except for its fan noise and battery life, and it’s mainly the latter’s fault that our recommendation for a high-performance 15- to 16-inch gamer still goes to the Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition R5. But if peak performance is your calling card, the Legion 7i stands as one of the fastest rides you can buy.
