Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 review: Gaming power in 16 inches

Design and equipment

From the outside, the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 doesn’t show off its gaming assets, at least as long as it’s turned off. The design is edgy and simple, the Legion lettering prominent but not overly intrusive. The most striking detail is the slightly forward hinge for the display. This makes it look a bit fake when the notebook is closed, but it can open wide up to 180 degrees.

On the run, however, its gaming nature comes to the fore again: Lenovo has of course given the Legion Pro 7i 16 some RGB lighting touches on the case and the keyboard can also light up with all the colors of the rainbow if desired. The notebook case is made of metal and is well made. At just over three centimeters thick, the Legion Pro 7i 16 isn’t one of the slimmest gaming laptops today. In contrast, a thicker case provides more surface area for the interfaces. And this is where Lenovo really deploys and installs a wide range of connections. In addition to the regular four USB 3 Type A ports, two USB Type C sockets are also available, and HDMI 2.1 is also on board as well as the network interface. Wireless connectivity options are also up to date: Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2.

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Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 screen

The narrow bezels give the screen a premium look and the picture quality leaves a little to be desired. Lenovo installs a 16:10 screen with a resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels and a diagonal of 16 inches. The maximum refresh rate is 240 Hz. The specifications promise a sharp and smooth gaming experience. This is confirmed in practice, as the colors are very strong and bright on the screen. This is also consistent with measured values ​​set in the test lab: color accuracy is good and maximum brightness measured at 568 nits is very high for a gaming laptop. Contrast is a bit low at 1280:1, which is due to the type of display being used. An IPS panel is used in the Legion Pro 7i 16. This technology provides a good viewing angle and good colors, but it does not achieve the contrast values ​​​​of an OLED screen.

Too much power

In terms of hardware, Lenovo is based on the Intel Core i9-13900HX as processor and bundles it with Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 in the laptop version. Both the processor and the graphics chip come from the respective manufacturers’ current series and should offer quite a bit of performance in all situations. It is backed by 32GB of RAM and a fast NVMe SSD with 1TB of storage space.

Ordinary work tasks hardly make the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 sweat. This is proven by the very good values ​​in the Geekbench benchmarking program (2020 points in the single-core test and 18876 in the multi-core test) and equally high ratings for the processor and working memory in Passmark. Here the CPU reached 46,197 points and the RAM 3,547 points. The laptop also performs well in more complex 3D computations: in Cinebench R23 it scores 2,082 points in single-core computations and 20,341 points in multi-core computations. The conversion of our test 4k video to FullHD video was completed in a very fast 58 seconds. The very fast NVMe SSD also helps here.

Work is one thing, but what interests you most in a gaming laptop is: How fast is it while gaming? You can read about that on the next page.