The 2024 Lenovo Legion 7i is best looking 16-inch gaming laptops we've seen this year.
Summary
Our analysis of the 2024 Lenovo Legion 7i gaming laptop.
Table of contents:
Introduction
The 2024 Lenovo Legion 7i is a 16-inch gaming laptop. This year, it’s donned in a new Glacial White color, carries the significantly more powerful Intel 14th-gen HX series processor, and offers either an Nvidia RTX 4060 or 4070 GPU. But even without glancing at the internals, we're enamoured with its classy design. With that said, the HX processor in this laptop doesn't run at full performance, and it's impacted performance drops on battery power. Let’s dig into the reivew to weigh its pros and cons.
Design
We love the Legion 7i's new Glacier White color option. Combined with the brightly lit RBG keyboard, it's a stunner on both a gaming or conference desk. In fact, this is the best looking 16-inch gaming laptop we’ve seen this year; we prefer its aesthetics over both the Razer Blade Mercury White and the redesigned Asus Zephyrus G16.
We appreciate that the memory, storage and Wi-Fi are all easily replaceable by the user. The back panel can be easily removed to reveal the laptop’s internals.
Display
The IPS display is gorgeous, featuring a 2,560 x 1,600 resolution and 240Hz refresh rate. It supports Nvidia G-Sync and Nvidia’s Advanced Optimus technology, which allows the display to directly connect to the GPU to reduce output latency. However, this issue is now less significant with the release of Microsoft's CASO, which reduces display latency without the need of a MUX switch or specialized hardware.
In terms of panel performance, the Legion 7i’s display reached an excellent 565 nits of brightness. We measured 100% sRGB and 79% AdobeRGB color space coverage, but it doesn't fully cover DCI-P3. Lenovo does offer a dimmer display (430 nits) option that covers 100% of the DCI-P3 gamut, but it isn’t available in the United States.
Performance
CPU
The new Intel Core i9-14900HX is Intel’s best mobile processor and it’s a powerhouse. It's important to note, however, that the CPU can't sustain its ful performance for long. To slot this CPU into such a compact device, Lenovo had to apply a more conservative CPU power setting to lower the heat output, which in turn leads to lower performance.
Despite this, the Legion 7i still topped our charts as the fastest compact 16-inch laptop in Geekbench 6, outpaced only by the much costlier Apple MacBook Pro 16 with its M3 Max chip.
GPU
The Legion 7i’s graphics performance is also impressive. Because its RTX 4070 GPU is fed up to 140W of power, our review unit consistently ranked at the top in gaming benchmarks.
However, the laptop's performance drops sharply on battery power. In our multi-core Cinebench test, the Legion 7i’s CPU performance dropped by 24%. This is definitely something to keep in mind if you're doing performance tasks on the go.
Battery Life
Even with its enormous 99.9Whr batteries, the Legion 7i will only last around an hour at most while gaming. You can still get through a few hours of watching movies and doing productivity work, but don’t expect ultraportable levels of longevity. After streaming Netflix for four hours, the Legion 7i had 42% battery remaining, so it may struggle to reach 7-8 hours of continues use in this scenario.
Keyboard, Trackpad and Webcam
The keyboard is gorgeous to look at and excellent to type on. It’s tactile, features a standard layout, and isn’t overly loud. The trackpads are consistently accurate as well. It has a have a 1080p webcam that is adequate for online conferencing.
Ports
The Legion 7i comes with a good selection of ports, so users won’t need to scramble for a dock. We like that the HDMI port is placed at the rear so the cable stays out of the way. We do have issues with its port placement, though. Since they're placed near the wrist rest, protruding cables and dongles may interfere with mouse movement. SD card reader is a UHS-1 port, video editor.
The port list:
- USB-A 3.2 Gen 1
- USB-C 3.2 Gen 2
- Thunderbolt™ 4 (DisplayPort 1.4, 140W power delivery, 40Gbps)
- Headphone / mic combo
- USB-A 3.2 Gen 1
- USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 (DisplayPort™ 1.4, 140W power delivery, 10Gbps)
- SD Card Reader
- HDMI 2.1
Audio
The speakers on the Legion 7i is nothing to write home about. Its sound quality and volume are just average, and doesn't come close to the fantastic speaker quality of the MacBook Pro 16.
Thermals
Here’s where the Legion 7i suffers a bit. Regardless of the task, it just feels warm. This is the consequence of putting Intel’s hottest mobile processor inside such a compact chassis.
Under heavy load, such as gaming, the heat can be uncomfortable. Fan noise, which is a little audible under light tasks, becomes distracting in high-performance scenarios. Due to its constrained thermal management, we think the laptop can benefit from using Intel’s Core Ultra processors with lower power consumption instead. We believe the tradeoff will be meaningful to address the heat, but the sacrifice will ofcourse be lower performance.
Pricing and Conclusion
Between the Legion 7i and the Yoga Pro 9i, Lenovo is dominating the premium compact 16-inch performance laptop category. The other Windows laptops we’ve tested just feel subpar in comparison.
We are pleasatly surprised to see that the Legion 7i is actually $100 cheaper than last year’s mode. Starting at an MSRP of $2,290, you get 16GB of memory and 1TB of SSD storage. For an extra $70, you can bump the memory up to 32GB. Better yet, Lenovo frequently offers discounts, so keep an eye open on our website for the best deals on this device.
The Legion 7i earns high marks on aesthetics. Clad in the new Glacier White color, it’s stunning on any desk. It’s fast too, coming with upgraded CPU performance over the last year's Legion Slim 7i it replaces. The alternative is the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i, which only maxes out with an RTX 4060 in the United States but is noticeably cooler, has longer battery life, and has a sharper mini LED display. For gamers, the Legion 7i is the better option, but for overall productivity and lighter gaming, the Yoga Pro 9i may be the better choice. Another solid alternative is the Asus Zephyrus G16, but that device has significantly louder fan noise, particularly in models with the RTX 4060 and 4070 GPUs.