We’ve liked Lenovo’s gaming laptop offerings since the company launched the Legion line, and the Legion 7i (starts at $1,529; $2,299 as tested) is another solid entry. It’s Lenovo’s flagship 15-inch model, able to scale to the highest component options and with a slightly slimmer frame than its less expensive Legion 5i counterpart. Our review unit, configured well above the base price, comes with an Intel Core i7 processor, Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2080 Super (Max-Q) GPU, and a roomy 2TB solid-state drive. The system managed the highest frame rates among high-end gaming laptops we’ve tested, even besting those with matching parts. The Legion 7i is a bit less sleek than those machines, which may be important at this price, but it did also boast the longest battery life. The Alienware m15 R3 edges it for Editors’ Choice in this tier, thanks mainly to its standout design, but the Legion 7i is a worthy alternative at a fair price.
The Design: How to Do ‘Understated,’ But With RGB
Design-wise, the Legion 7i is strikingly similar to its recently reviewed sibling, the Legion 5i. The styling is somewhat on the plain side, but it’s chic enough without being boring, and I prefer restrained to overdesigned. The “7” in the model name does not denote that this is a 17-inch version of the Legion (there a 17-inch version of the Legion 5i, but so far not of the 7i), but the fact that it’s the step-up option in power and features.
We’ll get to the components in a moment, but sticking with the physical build, the Legion 7i measures 0.78 by 14.15 by 10.2 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.96 pounds. It’s worth noting that these dimensions are identical to those of the Legion 5i even though the laptops are styled the same: The Legion 5i is thicker and heavier, at 0.93 by 14.3 by 10.2 inches and 5.4 pounds. The slightly slimmer design accounts for part of the extra base cost.
Compared to non-Legion alternatives, the size of the 7i still stacks up well, though it trails the top options. The Razer Blade 15 has long been a benchmark for thin premium gaming laptops, and it’s trimmer at 0.7 by 14 by 9.25 inches and 4.73 pounds. The Acer Predator Triton 500 (2020) (0.7 by 14.1 by 10 inches and 4.63 pounds) and the Alienware m15 R3 (0.8 by 14.19 by 10.86 inches and 4.65 pounds) even have the Razer beat, but on its own the 7i is still reasonably totable as a gaming laptop.
The frame is aluminum, but the sleek, all-metal build of the Blade 15 and Triton 500, and the more daring design of the Alienware, are all a bit more exciting than the 7i. That said, a customizable LED strip runs along the front edge and halfway down each flank, and the rear vents also glow with another set of lights. The LED strip is a bit difficult to see from the front or from above, but you may notice its glow on your desk in a darker room.
A Blazing-Fast Screen and a Comfy Keyboard
The 15.6-inch screen combines full HD resolution (1,920 by 1,080 pixels) with a 240Hz refresh rate, which should be alluring for gamers. Those who favor single-player AAA games may not be as keen on a high-refresh display, but competitive multiplayer gamers stand to benefit from the blistering frame rates. The performance section below will get into just how many frames this system can push, but it’s safe to say the Legion can make use of a refresh rate over the standard 60Hz.
The rest of the build is straightforward, but well executed. As we’ve come to expect from Lenovo, the keyboard—the same redesigned “True Strike” keyboard found on the 5i—is comfortable. It uses the company’s “soft landing” switches to, well, make your keystrokes land more softly. It works, and feels responsive with good tactile feedback overall. The keyboard also includes a full-size number pad on the right, and every key is individually backlit with customizable RGB lighting. You can alter the lighting of both the keyboard and the chassis with the included Corsair iCUE software.
As for the touchpad, it’s extremely simple, but perfectly serviceable. There’s a slight texture to it, but it scrolls smoothly and is responsive to taps and clicks. As on the Legion 5i, the pad is located a bit more to the left of the chassis than normal, a result of the keyboard having a cutout to make space for big arrow keys and the number pad. As such, the touchpad sat a bit more under my palm when using WASD than preferable, which could lead to accidental clicks. Your best bet is to turn it off when playing if you’re using a mouse, which you can do by pressing Fn+F10.
Moving on from there, we come to the ports. On its left side, the Legion 7i includes a USB-C port with Thunderbolt 3 support, as well as a headset jack, while the right flank only includes one USB 3.1 Type-A port. The rest of the ports are located around back on the rear thermal block, including two more USB 3.1 ports, an HDMI connection, an Ethernet jack, and the power connection.
Other features of this laptop include Wi-Fi 6 with Bluetooth and a 720p webcam with a built-in privacy shutter. The speakers are equipped with Dolby Atmos, and the sound quality is pretty solid on this system.
Components and Cooling
The build and feature set certainly contribute to the cost, but a large portion of the price tag is owed to the components. The unit we were sent for review is available through Costco for $2,299, and it comes with an Intel Core i7-10750H processor, 16GB of memory, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super (Max-Q) GPU, a 2TB SSD, and the full HD 240Hz display. Two terabytes of storage isn’t common, but with modern game install sizes, I’m all for it. The Max-Q suffix means this is a slightly down-tuned version of the RTX 2080 Super; Nvidia developed Max-Q technology to limit the thermal output of its top GPUs in order for them to work efficiently in slimmer laptops.
There are several other configurations on Lenovo’s site and at other retailers, but I’ll just speak to the starting model to give you a sense of how drastically our unit is upgraded. The base model includes an Intel Core i5-10300H processor, 8GB of memory, a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti GPU, a 256GB SSD, and a full HD 144Hz display. Between that model and our test unit, there are models with tiered Nvidia graphics options (RTX 2060, RTX 2070 Super Max-Q) combined with varying storage and memory capacities. At the top, there’s a $3,199.99 unit with a Core i9-10980HK processor, 32GB of memory, the RTX 2080 Super (Max-Q) GPU, 1TB and 512GB solid-state drives, and the full HD 240Hz display.
Before we get into the test results, it’s worth mentioning the cooling on this laptop. You can shift the fan modes among Quiet, Balance (automatic), and Performance through the included Lenovo Vantage software or a keyboard shortcut. (The shortcut is Fn+Q, as described by a sticker on the keyboard deck—I wouldn’t have known about it otherwise.) Lenovo has named its cooling system ColdFront 2.0, and while that’s partly just branding, there are some fancy features like a six-point thermal sensor to detect heat and manage fans.
I tested the laptop (and recorded the scores below) in Balance mode, which adjusts the fans as needed. I saw clear improvements over the same tests in Quiet mode, so it definitely makes a difference. The fans are certainly louder, but retain a very tolerable audio level during most tasks. Gaming definitely pushes the fans to higher speeds, and you can hear them as a low constant, but it never gets too bad. Performance mode is a touch louder still. I’d say the cooling is above average in volume and effectiveness—perhaps less so while gaming, but I think most other laptops I’ve tested got louder during our CPU-intensive benchmarks than the Legion 7i did.
Now Testing: Best-in-Class Gaming Performance
In order to judge the Legion 7i’s benchmark test results, I selected a handful of competing systems from our test database. You can see the names and specs of these machines in the table below.
The comparisons here are very straightforward. The Acer Predator Triton 500 ($2,599 as tested), Alienware m15 R3 ($2,159 as tested), and Razer Blade 15 Advanced Edition ($2,999 as tested) are the cream of the crop among premium gaming laptops, and so they make for the most useful comparisons here as the Legion 7i strives to be among the best. The somewhat odd laptop out is the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, not because it’s not excellent, but because at $1,449 it’s substantially cheaper than the others. Still, we deemed the Zephyrus one of the best gaming laptops of the year given its tremendous value, and it also provides an AMD perspective.
Productivity, Storage, and Media Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet jockeying, web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system’s boot drive. Both tests yield a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.
PCMark 10 is not a test to max out a processor’s capabilities, as two of the better CPUs are somewhat behind the curve on this test, but the margins don’t matter much at this tier. All of these are very quick performers, more than capable of chewing through everyday tasks and running multiple applications and many browser tabs. You’ll see some differing results in the processor-focused media tests below, which more fully strain the CPU’s cores and threads. As for storage speed, things are also equal. Each of these laptops utilizes a snappy SSD, which is a boon for any PC’s load and boot times, but especially useful for faster game load times.
Next is Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video editing trial, another tough, threaded workout that’s highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads. In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video (the open-source Blender demo movie ) to a 1080p MP4 file. It’s a timed test, and lower results are better.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and add up the total. As with Handbrake, lower times are better here.
The Legion 7i is one of the better performers here, falling roughly in line with its competitors based on the same processor (the Predator and the Alienware). There are some differences between them, with the former a bit behind the Legion 7i and the latter slightly ahead on average, but it’s the same ballpark of speed. The other two machines have more separation, in opposite directions. The AMD Ryzen-powered Asus, as we’ve come to expect, is a step ahead of Intel’s offerings in multimedia tests. The shorter-burst Photoshop test is more even, but the sustained workloads of Cinebench and Handbrake show a definite edge for AMD. The Razer, meanwhile, has a theoretically step-up CPU to the Legion 7i, but with a lower clock speed and presumably some thermal restraints, it lags behind.
For less of a head-to-head view, these scores mean that the Legion 7i (and its competitors) are good but not great multimedia machines. Some moderate-heft editing or production is certainly doable, especially if it’s a quick job for fun or as a hobby, but professionals will want to seek a more specialized media workstation. The Asus is better equipped than the others thanks to AMD’s superiority in raw cores and threads here, but even that doesn’t quite make the jump to professional-grade.
Graphics Tests
3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff. The results are proprietary scores.
Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes. In this case, it’s rendered in the eponymous Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload scenario for a second opinion on each laptop’s graphical prowess.
3D performance is obviously important in this category, and these laptops cover a range of power between them. The Legion 7i, Predator, and Blade 15 sit at the top of the heap with the same GPU. Their performance here wasn’t quite identical, but close, and handily above the rest of the pack. As expected, the Asus’ RTX 2060 trails behind, the lowest GPU in the hierarchy here (and a big part of why the Zephyrus is so much less expensive).
One thing to note is the Alienware’s RTX 2070 (Max-Q) outperforming two of the RTX 2080 Super (Max-Q) GPUs in 3DMark, and we have seen before that the RTX 2080 is affected more by the Max-Q limitations than the others in Nvidia’s stack. Still, the Legion 7i is the best of the bunch in raw 3D power, but let’s see how that translates to real games before we make any conclusions.
Real-World Gaming Tests
The synthetic tests above are helpful for measuring general 3D aptitude, but it’s hard to beat full retail video games for judging gaming performance. Far Cry 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider are both modern, high-fidelity titles with built-in benchmarks that illustrate how a system handles real-world gameplay at various settings. We run them at 1080p resolution at the games’ medium and best image-quality presets (Normal and Ultra for Far Cry 5 under DirectX 11, Medium and Very High for Rise of the Tomb Raider under DirectX 12).
On average, these real game benchmarks tell the same story as the synthetic tests. The Legion 7i proudly sits atop the pile, with the rest roughly falling in line as they should (the Razer again falls short of expectation). The Legion 7i is the largest of these laptops, so the extra room for thermals compared to those with the same components in a thinner chassis is likely making a difference (or Lenovo’s Cold Front 2.0 is effective). Either way, the Legion squeezes out more frames per second than the competition, including those that should be equivalent. The margins aren’t huge, but as much as 10fps over the Razer Blade 15 isn’t nothing.
Outside of the direct comparisons, the Legion 7i delivers a gaming experience way over 60fps at the highest settings, though that’s definitely the least you should expect from the top tier of GPUs. Indeed, the extra headroom is to make sure the most demanding games can still maintain 60fps, and that competitive multiplayer titles can make use of the high-refresh-rate display. To that end, I also sampled Rainbow Six: Siege as a representative of that style of games since it has a useful built-in benchmark test. On maximum settings (the Ultra preset with 100 percent render scaling at full HD), it averaged a blistering 225fps. Since competitive gamers often play on lower settings to maximize frame rates over visuals, I also tested the game on the Low preset, where the Legion 7i sprinted to a 291fps average. Clearly, this hardware is capable of utilizing its 240Hz screen in esports games of this grade.
Battery Rundown Test
After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop in airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the same short we use in our Handbrake test—with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system quits.
The Legion 7i’s battery life is superior to its counterparts, a perhaps unexpected bonus for this machine. This is undercut slightly by the Lenovo’s not being the most physically portable of the bunch, but nobody’s going to turn down more battery life. It’s still plenty practical to put this laptop in a bag or backpack (even if it would be pushing it as a daily commute partner). Obviously, if you’re going to play games off the charger the battery will diminish much faster, but for web browsing, word processing, and watching videos, you’ve got plenty of unplugged hours available.
A Worthy High-End Flagship
Lenovo has consistently made a strong case for its gaming laptops, and the Legion 7i is no exception. The design and build aren’t the sleekest or most glamorous, so if your main aim is style and portability, the others have a leg up (although the Lenovo does have good battery life).
In pure gaming performance, the Legion 7i claims the advantage—and since it’s the second cheapest among the premium 15-inch gaming rigs, it scores high for value despite boasting double the SSD storage of its rivals. The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 reigns supreme in the midrange price tier, and the Alienware m15 R3 clings to its Editors’ Choice for its slicker design and slightly lower price tag, but the Legion 7i is well worth a look from hardcore gamers everywhere.
