Lenovo Legion 7i Australian Laptop Review (Gen 9 | 2024)

The Lenovo Legion 7i is a slightly watered-down version of its ‘Pro’ spec’d big brother which won High Performance Laptops’ Laptop of the Year Award in 2023. It’s not quite as powerful or as dripping in bling, but it’s somewhat cheaper in return. Could it be the model to buy?

Lenovo Legion 7i (Gen 9) Specs

Features, Ergonomics and Design

Our Legion 7i came in ‘Glacier White’ which costs $50 more than the ‘Eclipse Black’ variant. It looks very smart and does a (refreshingly) good job of fending-off fingerprints, although time will tell whether it will pick up dirt and yellow. I think it looks great – especially with the pastel-like, per-key-lit, RGB keyboard inside. There are no other RGB flourishes (unlike the Pro version) but the Legion and Lenovo monikers on the lid look good and will better-fit into a stuffy office when required.

It feels very sturdy, stiff and well-built thanks to its CNC-milled, aluminium lid and chassis. The hinge is solid and folds down flat and the lid flexes little when a twisting force is applied.

Opening it up reveals the trademark, lozenge-shaped, low-travel keyboard which is generally comfortable and accurate to type upon. However, wordsmiths can expect to get sore fingertips if they type on it for extended periods as it’s a little stiff. It has a number pad and full-sized arrow keys that are isolated away from the rest which is something I’m a big fan of. There are plenty of useful shortcuts and it’s simple to switch between RGB lighting effects.

The trackpad is smooth and accurate.

Lenovo has placed two, 2-Watt Karmon speakers inside the Legion 7i. They do offer very good fidelity and some punchy bass, but they aren’t the loudest.

The IPS screen has a very-high, 3,200 x 2,000 resolution and supports 100 per cent of the tricky DCI-P3 colour gamut – which designers will like. They’ll also like the Pantone X-Rite factory colour calibration. It gets reasonably bright and colours are vibrant. Both colourful and monochromatic transitions are impressively smooth but it doesn’t support HDR. Indeed, contrast can a bit of an issue as details get lost in highlights a little too easily.

It has a 165Hz refresh rate which (along with a quick pixel response time) helps to keep fast-moving objects smooth when gaming. There’s also G-Sync to keep game imagery tear-free and intact. There are certainly faster screens, but only pro-gamers might grumble.

Above it is a very good, Full HD webcam which does very well at banishing grain in low light. The dual-microphone array is also very good at capturing clear audio in a noisy environment, making it good for web-conferencing and streaming.

All in all, the Legion 7i looks very good and is very good to interact with whether you’re working or gaming on it.

Connectivity

There are plenty of connections on the Gen 9 Legion 7i but they’re not all the latest versions…

Inside there’s Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.1. I’d like to see Wi-Fi 7 but, all in all, few will feel limited here.

Features, Ergonomics and Design Score: 3.5 / 5

Performance

Inside the Lenovo Legion 7i is a 14^th-Gen Intel (previous-architecture, Raptor Lake) Core i9 14900-HX processor which operates between 1.8 – 5.6GHz across its eight Performance Cores and 16 Efficient Cores. There’s no NPU as it’s not a current Meteor Lake-architecture processor but the souped-up older tech is still faster, if less efficient.

3D performance comes via an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 which has 8GB of GDDR6 RAM.

It’s worth noting that the Legion 7i comes with a 230-Watt power brick which means it won’t run quite as fast as a super-premium gaming laptop which uses similar components but has a higher power-draw.

This all combined with 32GB of quick, DDR5-5600 RAM and a speedy 1TB NVMe hard drive to produce the following benchmark scores:

In the general-computing, PCMark 10 test, which uses all components of the laptop, the Lenovo Legion 7i scored 8,317 which is impressive (Score: 4.1 / 5)

In the CPU-based, Cinebench rendering tests, the Legion scored 4,457 in the R15 drag-race and 23,722 in the longer R23 test. Both are above average in the world of laptops. (Score: 3.8 / 5)

In the 3DMark gaming tests the Legion 7i achieved the following scores:

In the difficult, Speed Way and Port Royal ray-tracing tests, the Lenovo scored 3,051 (average 30.5fps) and 7,790 (average 36.1fps) respectively. These results demonstrate that the 7i will play the latest and greatest games, but you may have to drop the resolution or detail settings a little, to keep things smooth.

In the AAA-title-mimicking Time Spy and Fire Strike Extreme Tests, the Legion 7i managed 13,110 (average 77.1fps) and 14,152 (average 61.3fps) respectively, which shows it can play these games with few issues.

In the much-simpler 3DMark Night Raid test, the 7i managed 64,520 which is an average of 598.5fps which shows there are no issues with casual and competitive games.

I also ran the following UL Procyon benchmarks. We’re still in early days with these but I’ll come back and analyse them later:

Procyon Microsoft Office Test: 7,335
Procyon Adobe Photoshop Test: Would not run
Procyon Adobe Premier Test: 27,914
Procyon Microsoft Ai CPU Test: 144
Procyon Microsoft Ai GPU Test: 144

3D Performance Score: 3.4 / 5

Meanwhile, Lenovo’s ColdFront Hyper cooling system can ramp up to a robust whoosh when under load, but it doesn’t get very warm – unlike some ancestors, rivals and siblings. When being used for office work it’s mostly totally silent. Performance only dropped 1.5% when running our Cinebench R23 torture test for 30 minutes, so there’s no significant thermal throttling at play.

Portability and Battery Life

At 2.82KG, the Lenovo Legion 7i isn’t light, but then I’d expect that from a 16-inch, high-performance laptop. The big (albeit slim) power supply weighs an extra 890g.

There’s a max-sized 99Wh battery and it ran our PC Mark Modern Office Battery Benchmark for a modest 7 hours and 10 minutes. That’s just shy of a full day out of the office, but I expect more from 14^th-Gen laptops. That said, Lenovo’s Super rapid charge tech can generate 70 per cent battery life in just 30 minutes.

Lenovo’s software also easily can be used to turn this fast-charging tech off to enhance battery-longevity, which is recommended if it’s going to be plugged in, at the same place, most of the time.

It’s very solidly built and I expect it will survive life on the road.

Ultimately, if you’ve been looking for a portable powerhouse to carry everywhere, this isn’t the best but it’s also not the worst. Portability and Battery Life Score: 2.9 / 5

Price and Value

Lenovo sells multiple variants of the Legion 7i and most of them can be configured before purchase. Our variant costs a steep, $4,748 but, if you’re quick, you can find it on sale for $1,200 off(!) at $3,317 which is enough to push the Value score from 3.5 to 4.3 out of 5. A score of four, here, would win it an award, so watch out for future group tests.

Price: 1.8 / 5

Value: 3.5 / 5

Overall

Ultimately, Lenovo’s Legion 7i does feel like a very solid, high-quality laptop but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s still a bit of a second-rate Legion Pro 7i. While it’s less-expensive, it’s far from cheap and it finds itself in a market where rivals are better but more expensive or cheaper but less well built. If you want to buy a mid-range gaming laptop, there are better-value choices to be made, but do watch out for it in Lenovo’s regular sales.

Overall: 3.5 / 5

Last Updated on 6 August 2024 by Nick Ross