Lenovo Legion 7 review

Now when we say slim, don’t assume that the Legion 7 will give the MacBook Air a dietary shock. It’s slim, yes, but by gaming laptop standards. And that is to say, it hides the excess fat exceptionally well. Mostly down to the way it's designed for how much of that tech it actually squeezes in. 

It’s heavy though. You get premium materials all over. Plated with an aluminium frame and chassis and a little bit of good-feeling plastic as well. At around 2.5kg it’s as dense as thin gaming laptops can get.

You can’t steamroll all the latest heat-generating tech into a slim profile without ignoring thermal management, right? Exactly why there are heat vents all around the backside of the Lenovo Legion 7. It’s even got a perforated underbelly panel around the heatsink and a little bit of it on the top as well. And if you like your machine to look like a nice piece of metal, there’s RGB to distract you from the many vent holes. The RGB is in the vent too so you don’t have to worry about not being cool… literally. It’s also clever enough to suck in air from the keyboard area but the insides are wrapped up in a vapour chamber that manages the excellent thermals. It even has heat shields and thermal pads for the SSDs.

The actual performance on this thing is phenomenal. We tested all the games while connected to the plug because that’s how the Nvidia RTX 3080 can draw more power and scale up to 165W of TGP. The Nvidia Dynamic Boost helps the laptop maintain a systematic power draw which only kicks into high gear when needed.

God of War (2018) gave us a stable frame rate of 100 fps on Original settings at 2K resolution with DLSS set to Quality. Original settings are the same settings the developer used for the PS4 Pro and by that standard, the game runs oh-so-smoothly and effortlessly on the Lenovo Legion 7. It’s also able to run at a stable 100 fps for a longer time without any thermal throttling. 

FIST: Forged In Shadow Torch is another fantastic game to test Nvidia’s GPUs to their limits. It’s plastered with Ray Tracing chops and it’s one title that really squeezes Nvidia’s for its Ray Tracing worth. We’re happy to report that the Legion 7 handles this smoothly as well. Pushing a good 115 frames at High settings and with Ray Tracing enabled. It sometimes drops to 90 when the going gets tough but other than that the game with Ray Tracing runs effortlessly as well.

Ghostrunner was running at the highest settings with Ray Tracing set to high and DLSS set to Quality. The Legion 7 gave us a stable 80 fps with headroom for hitting 90 fps at certain places. You can always turn down the setting or shift the DLSS to Performance. Either way, the Legion 7 is actually shaping up to be one of the best gaming laptops. The GPU temperatures also never really shot up above 80℃ in the hot Mumbai weather. If you throw in a cooling pad and keep the aircon running, the Legion 7 can pull its weight without any thermal throttling.

Forza Horizon 5 is the latest entry from Playground Games. The open world racing game is as latest as any triple A title can get and the Legion 7 handles it with a jaw-dropping smoothness. We got an average of 79 fps from the built-in benchmark test of the game. The settings were set to Extreme which is Forza’s highest setting. Yes, you can tone the settings down but 79 fps for a racing game is great in our opinion and downright fantastic for a gaming laptop.

The Nvidia RTX 3080 with Nvidia’s dynamic boost seems to be the best move for gaming laptops. Drawing power when it’s only necessary and shifting to lower watt when duty calls.

If you’re a designer or anyone juggling Adobe suite to fund their gaming habits Lenovo has you covered. The colours on the 16in display are punchy and the display is quite sharp thanks to the 2560x1600 resolution spread across a 16:10 aspect ratio. It’s also got 500nits of brightness so barebones HDR is there but we won’t compare to the OLEDs out there. Even Dolby Vision is available for Xbox games that support it and your Netflix habits too

Like most gaming laptops, the bottom-firing speakers are average. Mind you, these are better than most budget and entry-level gaming laptops for sure but we’d still recommend wearing headphones or plugging in your speakers for better audio quality.

The backside is busy with all the ports you’d need from a desktop-replacing gaming laptop. Lenovo has also marked the rear with lights for the backports so that you can know which port is where without turning the laptop around. It’s quite thoughtful and handy.

The keyboard also has per-key RGB lighting which can be customised from Corsair’s iCue software. Personally, I don’t like the iCue software because I have been using it on my gaming PC for years. It’s not bad by any metric but it really saps the battery. The keyboard also has a bunch of shortcuts for enabling and disabling many of the features including fan speed and RGB controls so you can really do without the iCue software as well.

The keyboard itself is nice to type one. Although there are Asus gaming laptops that do keyboard a wee-bit better. The track pad is also slightly bigger than most. If you have big mitts, expect the keyboard to eat into your palm rest space while gaming.

There’s also a physical button that cuts off the power supply to the built-in 720p camera. You know, for privacy and stuff but we much rather prefer a physical shutter. Lenovo says this button completely cuts off the power to the camera so I guess that’s fine too.

The Lenovo Legion 7 is one of the best gaming laptops of this year. It’s effortlessly powerful, portable and comes without any frills. Yes, there’s no DDR5 RAM but that marginal push in performance is not felt lacking anywhere. Especially because of the high power draw for GPU and CPU and the fantastic thermals that control the riot.

The AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX processor is as good as the Intel i7, dare I say even the Intel i9. The laptop also manages power extremely well. Dropping down the energy consumption and fan speed when you’re wrestling with work on emails and Google Chrome. It’s really efficient and reliable like the Intel i9 in that sense. For processing grunt, it's a bit shy from the i9 but barely. So you won’t feel the pinch anywhere.

Throw in a Tobii Horizon head tracking for supported games’ camera control, plenty of RGB and keyboard shortcuts and you’ve got a fine gaming package.