I replaced my ThinkPad with a Lenovo Legion laptop for work, and didn’t regret it

ZDNET's key takeaways

• Lenovo's Legion Pro 7i is a top-tier gaming laptop, on sale now for $3,099.
• It effortlessly runs the latest gaming titles, exudes premium power, and features a 16-inch OLED display that demands your attention.
• Besides the high starting price, all that hardware runs hot, it's extremely power-hungry, and it has a big, bulky power supply.

The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i is the latest gaming laptop in the Legion series, sticking to an accessible 16-inch size and putting all its stat points into the quality of the display and hardware. 

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The result is a sophisticated laptop with dramatic (but fully customizable) RGB lighting, a sleek form factor, and stacked set of hardware. It starts out with 32GB of RAM, (upgradable to 96GB), 2TB of storage, a 24-core Intel Core Ultra 9 processor, and Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 GPU. 

All this, combined with the 16-inch 500nit, 240Hz refresh OLED display makes for not only a competitive gaming machine, but a capable workstation for pro creatives, animators, and designers. 

A design with commanding presence

The Legion Pro 7i is hefty, to be sure, but for a gaming laptop, it is actually on the sleek side. This puts it in a sort of middle ground: it's a little too big to be something you'd want to regularly commute with, but it's certainly not bound to the desk. 

Unfortunately, the matte black finish is a fingerprint magnet, like many of Lenovo's other laptops (ahem -- ThinkPads) that, if this bugs you like it bugs me, will compel you to keep a cloth on hand. All of this is mitigated by the keyboard lighting, however, which can be adjusted per-key to be as subtle or loud as you want. 

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The gamer aesthetic is in full effect here, with a dramatic single bar of light across the front of the clamshell that reflects onto the surface and looks absolutely awesome. The back is illuminated across the diamond-shaped fan exhausts, and the "Legion" logo pulses with the rest of the effects. 

The full-sized keyboard with prominent arrow keys, appropriately-sized number pad (and a subtle branding on one letter key in particular) feels premium and well-made, if rather standard. Key travel feels good, and the trackpad -- aligned over the space bar -- is adequate and functional. 

The power button at the top center of the keyboard acts as a visual indicator of your performance profile: Quiet is blue, Balanced is white, and Performance is red. (It's called Silent mode both because of the fan and because muting the laptop automatically disables the lighting effects.) 

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All of these elements are individually customizable in the Legion app and can be shut off entirely if you need to save battery power or keep a low profile in the office or coffee shop. 

That being said, this is not exactly the type of laptop you're going to want to bring to the tiny bistro table in your neighborhood coffee shop. It's big, it's heavy (5.67 pounds), and it is thirsty for power. Even if you do have access to a nearby outlet, the 400W power brick is so massive, it's essentially the weight of another laptop. 

It's chonky, yes, but it's also powerful -- providing 70% battery power in just 30 minutes, a surprisingly rapid amount of juice for the huge 99.9Wh battery. 

The charger connects via a proprietary port on the left side of the laptop (not the back), which some will find more convenient, but is slightly less so if you're using the laptop as a desktop and are used to having your connections in the back.

In terms of other I/O, the laptop has two Thunderbolt 4 ports, an HDMI and USB-A on the left side, two more USB-As, a headphone jack, and a 2.5GB ethernet jack. If you don't want to plug the laptop directly into your modem, it also supports Wi-Fi 7 for fast connectivity. 

The display is all about the visuals

The Legion Pro 7i's display is one of its best features. It is bright and vivid and absolutely pops at 500 nits and a 240Hz refresh rate. It features 100% of the SRGB color gamut, 93% Adobe RGB, and 100% P3 and swirls with deep, inky blacks and rich neons. 

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The 16-inch display is non-touch and has WQXGA resolution at a 16:10 aspect ratio. It is powered by the GeForce RTX 5080 GPU and offers a diverse set of use case possibilities for gamers, creatives, animators, and designers. Just note that this is a particularly glossy display, and will reflect light sources depending on its positioning, especially with how dark the blacks get. 

Performance: Bring on the boss fight

Let me not mince words here. This thing is a beast. The Legion Pro 7i is designed to shred through the most demanding titles out there right now, and the hardware on board well equips it to do so. 

The Nvidia GeForce 5080 GPU paired with the 24-core Intel Core Ultra 9 results in responsive, snappy performance in "Cyberpunk 2077" and "Baldur's Gate 3", with older titles not breaking a sweat.

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That being said, all this powerful hardware heats up. Temperatures during intense gaming sessions can easily approach that 100°C mark, which is too hot for sustained use. In Performance mode, the fans can fire at max power, which significantly brings the temp down, but you'll also have to listen to them cranking. 

The cooling system is efficient, expelling hot air out the back and bleeding a minimal amount of heat out through the front to the keyboard. However, the fan does take some getting used to, as it pops on even during normal day-to-day tasks like multitasking and web browsing. 

The Legion Pro 7i is a joy to game on, however, with its well-designed keyboard, gorgeous display, and fantastic performance. The experience carries over to the audio, as its speakers are above average for a laptop, with two upward-facing and two downward, resulting in a sound that's a little more engrossing and full than most laptops' shallow sound profile. 

In terms of benchmarking, the Legion Pro 7i proves it can hang with impressive numbers, especially in multi-core performance. 

The caveat of a gaming laptop

Like any laptop with this amount of hardware on board, the 99Wh battery is extremely variable. This is not a thin and light Copilot+ PC with a battery that drains at a trickle when it's not on. 

In fact, it depletes surprisingly quickly just sitting around, something to keep in mind if you leave it unplugged for a day or two and expect to come back to it ready to fire up. 

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The performance mode you activate will drastically impact how long your battery lasts, as well as what you're doing. For example, I took this laptop to the office and worked unplugged in Balanced mode, only to find the laptop didn't quite make it through the workday. It got to 1% right around six hours, and this is after normal tasks that aren't particularly demanding. 

If you're talking about gaming, you'll get around 1.5 hours of game time unplugged, which actually isn't all that bad for a gaming laptop of this caliber.  

All of this is to say that the Legion Pro 7i performs about as expected considering the hardware on board and the OLED display. While it's possible to carry around, you'll be forced to keep the charging brick in tow as its thirst for power is real. 

ZDNET's buying advice

The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i feels like an 18-inch gaming laptop in a more sophisticated, 16-inch form. I love the display, the stalwart yet still sleek build, and hardware that provides what you're looking for in a gaming laptop: performance. 

In the end, Lenovo employed thoughtful design here to compensate for the device's weaknesses. It runs hot, but has a very effective cooling system. It's incredibly power hungry, but it charges way faster than you'd expect. 

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The elephant in the room is the sky-high starting price, at $3,500 for the 32GB configuration, going up to $4,000 if you want the top-of-the-line GeForce RTX 5090 GPU. I'd absolutely recommend this laptop to gamers looking for a powerful out-of-the-box gaming laptop that hits all the right notes, as long as it's in your budget. 

The Legion Pro 7i is a sophisticated, powerful machine that dares you to run your favorite game at max settings and will ultimately leave you feeling spoiled. 

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