Lenovo’s Legion laptops are some of the best performing devices in their class and they’re very popular for good reason.
This is the Legion 7i. This is a Legion Pro 7i and they’re marketed a little bit differently this year. So this product here the Pro 7i still we’re gonna get the most powerful hardware for the best performance for competitive gamers. But this product, the regular Legion 7, is a little bit different this year. This replaces the slim, monocurred product. It’s just, it’s kind of like a hybrid product where it’s built to be really good for enthusiast gamers, but also still has the styling and weight characteristics of like a more normal laptop. It’s not like super gamery, it’s thinner and lighter than the pro product.But let’s dive in.
So this device is where I’m going to start. The new regular Legion 7. They had white laptops in the Legion product line before, but they were never available in North America. I think they were like, region specific. This is the first time I’ve seen a white laptop from the Lenovo Legion line. It looks awesome. Like this is, it’s so clean. Like it’s just pure white. The keys are white. The bottom panel is also white. Like everything is just super white. Even the rubber strips on the bottom. These things might get slain if you’re using it on like really dirty materials, but very white laptop. I love the look of it. It’s an all-new design where they focus on keeping the device thin and light But they also increase the system wattage and the overall performance. Which is really difficult to do the way you would do it though is by tackling the thermal system.
So this here is the predecessor of that product. This is last year’s Legion slim 7 and if you look at the thermal system here cold air gets sucked in and then it gets exhausted at the sides and the back this is very kind of standard thermal design on a lot of laptops. But the thermal system on the Legion 7 is a little bit different. So if you look at the back panel here, you’ll notice a bunch of vents.
But when you open this up and you look at it, you’ll realize that half of these vents are covered up, maybe even more than half. And there’s also there’s foam outline here and there’s also foam elements here. And the purpose of this kind of covering and these foam pieces is that they’re creating a middle section here that they call the hyperchamber. It’s a sealed off section so that the airflow is driven in a very particular way.
So the air will come in through the fans here just being sucked in and then there’s obviously some that blows out the back here But there’s a huge chunk of air that’s blown across the middle into the sealed section and then it goes out the back. So if you’ll notice this whole device has no side ventilation but all of the ports or all of the exhausts are in the back but basically the entire back segment is an exhaust and the difference it makes is surprisingly significant. They’ve been able to increase wattage and performance while having measurably lower temperatures and quieter fans. All in the same kind of form factor and weight class as before. It’s really well done.
Now granted, this is a early kind of pre-retail version of this, so imagine there’s like more tuning involved, but first impressions, pretty good. Now the Legion Pro 7i still has the same thermal design as the previous generation that uses a vapor chamber, which is a little bit beefier, but very effective. Now both of these devices are running Intel’s new 14th gen core processors, which for my testing on these early samples, there’s only a slight bump up in performance compared to the 13th gen, but if you want the highest possible CEP performance, these are the chips to do it. And because they are overclockable in Lenovo software, you can let them rip at full blast.
There’s a lot of control in that software, but there’s also a new chip from Intel out right now called the Meteor Lake Core Ultra chips. And those are very cool, they’re very energy efficient, But they don’t have the same kind of top-end performance as these devices if you want like just the best possible CPU performance these are still the kings and so if you’re looking at these products and like you’re trying to decide between the two if you’re Just playing like mid-tier gaming or if you’re kind of like kind of medium content creation You don’t really need the fastest CPU that stuff is great But if you want like literally the best possible performance you can get in laptops you do have to get one of these chips. So they’re a little more power hungry but they get the job done the pro models can be configured with up to an RTX 4090 the regular models can go up to an RTX 4070 now when it comes to battery life both these devices are very good for their products class because they both have very big batteries the biggest battery you can get but these are gaming laptops with performance focused chips They’re not gonna have the longest battery life. They are heavy, but that’s the trade-off you get for the performance.
