- Soon Kai Hong
10 Games Tested On Lenovo Legion Pro 7i
Updated: Dec 19, 2023
This is one of the most powerful gaming laptops you can buy right now and it’s the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i. So in terms of specs, we’re talking an Intel Core i9-13900HX, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080, 32GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD storage. Now yes, it might not be the RTX 4090 and the laptop version of the 40-series are way weaker than their desktop counterparts but Lenovo has at least pumped a whopping 175W for the RTX 4080 in here. Needless to say, the gaming experience was fantastic.
But before we get into all the performance benchmarks and all that stuff, let’s quickly go through what we’re dealing with here.
We Love The Design If you’re familiar with the Legion lineup from Lenovo, the new Legion Pro 7i is basically a refinement of that design language. For most, it’s probably going to be a love it or hate it kind of thing. Fortunately for us, we’re in the former camp. We do especially love that RGB strip that adorns the front lip, it looks awesome.
One thing we did actually find peculiar with this new design is the fact that the size of the lid is actually slightly smaller than the chassis itself. So when you do close the laptop up, you can actually see that the two parts don’t actually line up. Now whether that would irk you or not, that’s entirely on you but we can at least say that with what Lenovo has done here, they’ve basically managed to keep the bezels as thin as possible but not affect the overall volume capacity of the chassis itself.
Which is actually really important this generation given how much heat the RTX 40-series will dish out.
Ports, Lots of Them
On the contrary, you do get quite a lot of ports to use.
On the left, you do get a Thunderbolt 4 Type-C port as well as a USB Type-A port while on the right, you’ll get a USB Type-A port, a webcam privacy shutter toggle switch and the 3.5mm headphone/mic combo. Most of the ports however will be found on the back. You still get RJ45 Ethernet, a Type-C port which supports 140W charging, HDMI 2.1, two more USB Type-A ports and the proprietary power input.
16:10 Is The New 16:9
16:10 is probably the latest aspect ratio trend that’ll stick around for quite some time and the Legion Pro 7i is yet another laptop that welcomes that. You get a 16” IPS panel that has a resolution of 2,560 x 1,600 running at 240Hz. On top of that, it supports both FreeSync and G-Sync, covers 100% sRGB and is Display HDR400 certified with a max brightness of 500 nits.
All in all, it’s a fantastic display that really makes for a great gaming experience. Say what you may but we feel that the 15.6” or 16” class of gaming laptops is the sweet spot when it comes to gaming on the go.
Now we won’t dive too much into the keyboard, touchpad, speakers and the webcam. They all work great, as to be expected from Lenovo. The one thing to take into consideration however is that while you do get the larger 16-inch display and all that powerful components under the hood, the laptop does weigh in at a hefty 2.8kg or 6.17lbs. So you might want to pack a bigger backpack.
In general, we do quite like how the Legion Pro 7i looks. It’s one of the more minimalist looking gaming laptops in the market and in our opinion, should be the way to go.
Performance
But now let’s talk about the performance.
Starting with this review, we’re going to use a standard benchmarking of 10 games. So in the future, when you do see “10 Games Tested”, expect full performance coverage for these 10 games in the 3 popular resolutions whenever applicable. On top of that, do note that we’ll be using the MUX switch or NVIDIA Advanced Optimus depending on the laptop and we’ll only play games using the best performance and fan profile available.
We also understand that more and more laptops will sport a 16:10 display but we will keep our testing to just 16:9 in order to structure our data collection in an easier manner. So when you do see the results, do expect just about 3-5% lower fps at most when gaming at 16:10.
With all the new RTX 40-series stuff, we’re looking to expand and cover things more in-depth. In the future, do expect even more testing with FLIR guns, decibel and wattage metres and much more. If you want that to happen sooner, go ahead and subscribe to us right now and remember to click that notification bell too.
Anyways without further ado, let’s jump straight into the performance.
Pssst. Now's a good time to watch our video up above!
Hopefully, our testing gave you a little bit of insight as to what you can expect from the Legion Pro 7i or how the RTX 4080 performs for gaming laptops in general. Compared to the previous 30-series, you are indeed getting much better performance.
But all of that comes at a cost. Literally.
Price & Thoughts
With what we have here, this will set you back a S$5,299. As for the US pricing, we actually don’t know the actual price at the time of recording as the RTX 4080 model isn’t available on the Lenovo US site. But given that the RTX 4070 model goes for US$2,299, the RTX 4080 model would put it just shy of, or just above US$3,000 we reckon.
Regardless of what it may be, it is still a hefty sum. All we can really advise is this.
Only consider getting this if you really need such a powerful machine on the go, or perhaps you really don’t have desk space for even a Mini-ITX PC setup. Because while the RTX 4080 performs great and is indeed better than the previous 30-series especially with support for
frame-generation and whatnot, NVIDIA has seriously gimped the performance of the laptop GPU variants this generation.
You simply aren’t getting anywhere near the performance of an actual desktop RTX 4080. And you’re paying way more even. Just our two cents.
Even so, we’re really impressed with what Lenovo was able to achieve with their new Legion Pro 7i and even though we did just say it is pretty expensive, in comparison to other laptops, Lenovo still remains the better buy. In fact, we do have one other laptop that we’re testing at the moment that has an RTX 4090 but yet this Legino Pro 7i with the RTX 4080 beats that. So that’s saying quite something. If you really need a gaming laptop, this should be at the top of your list.