Lenovo Legion 7i (16IRX9) Review: Beyond Just Gaming

Gaming laptops were for a long time exempt from the industry-wide race to make everything slimmer and lighter, but these days manufacturers are pushing the physical limits of high-end hardware in order to cram powerful hardware into more fashionable forms. Lenovo’s new Legion 7i (16IRX9) is one such slim new-age gaming laptop – it weighs 2.24kg and is just under 20mm thick, making it more portable than many low-end laptops from not too long ago.

The problem is that gaming requires powerful hardware which in turn requires effective cooling, all of which occupies space and adds weight. While the latest CPUs and GPUs can deliver a lot more performance at lower power levels than before, we’re going to see whether Lenovo has truly found a middle ground here, or whether form has won out over function. More importantly, we’ll see how much performance and value the new Legion 7i delivers for gamers and anyone who needs a powerful laptop.

The keyboard layout is great, and I particularly like that the arrow cluster isn't compressed into one line.

Lenovo Legion 7i (16IRX9) Price in India

For a starting price of ₹1,57,601, you get a 14th gen Intel Core i7 CPU and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 GPU. However, today we’re reviewing the top-end variant which has a Core i9 CPU and GeForce RTX 4070 GPU, plus a better display, more RAM, more storage, and more features which we’ll get to later in this review. This configuration will cost you ₹2,11,991 on Lenovo’s website. 

The Legion 7i, along with its sibling the Legion Pro 7i, can be customised if you order via Lenovo’s website. Certain preset configurations, like the one we’re reviewing, are available at authorised online and offline retail stores. Interestingly, while all these listings are for the Legion 7i with an Eclipse Black body, you can choose Glacier White if you take the custom spec route. It’s great to see that you can choose your own combination of RAM, storage, display, CPU, and GPU, but you might have to wait a few weeks for a custom order to ship.

The Legion 7i has a mostly subtle design, with only the bold logo telling you what kind of laptop it is.

Lenovo Legion 7i (16IRX9) Design

Along with getting slimmer, gaming laptops these days have lost the aggressive, over-the-top style that defined the category a few years ago. There are no illuminated accents or military patterns on the exterior. If anything, the Legion 7i is slick and wouldn’t be too out of place in a professional setting. The lid is solid black with a matte finish. The mirrored Legion logo and a smaller shiny Lenovo tab in opposite corners are flashy but not too distracting.

However, flip the lid open and some personality does emerge. The power button has a ring of LEDs around it, forming the broken O of the Legion logo. The keyboard has per-key RGB illumination (unless you choose the base variant which just has a white backlight). 

Most of the ports are on the sides - you’ll find two USB Type-A (5Gbps) ports two USB Type-C (10Gbps) ports, an additional Thunderbolt Type-C Port (40Gbps), a 3.5mm audio socket, and even a full-sized SD card slot for convenience. Two of the Type-C ports allow DisplayPort 1.4 video output and 140W charging. In addition, you’ll find a DC power inlet and an HDMI 2.1 port on the back, and illuminated logos behind the screen will help you find them without having to lean all the way over. Finally, there’s also a webcam disable switch on the right (except on the base variant). The only thing missing is wired Ethernet.

There are plenty of ports on both sides and on the back of this laptop.

Lenovo Legion 7i (16IRX9) Specifications

The top-end variant is equipped with some serious hardware, starting with a 14th Gen Intel Core i9-14900HX CPU. Based on the “Raptor Lake” architecture, this is Intel’s current flagship laptop CPU, with 8 performance cores running at up to 5.8GHz plus 16 efficiency cores for a total of 24. However, there’s no integrated NPU so you don’t get the AI features that newer ultraportable laptops are getting attention for these days. This variant of the Legion 7i also has 32GB of DDR5-5600 RAM, a 1TB PCe 4.0 SSD, and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 GPU with 8GB of GDDR6 memory.

Lenovo has made some interesting choices with the display here - it’s a non-glossy 3.2K (3200x2000 pixel) 16:10 IPS panel with a 165Hz peak refresh rate. The company claims 100 percent DCI-P3 colour gamut coverage, but brightness tops out at 430nits and there’s no HDR. This resolution and aspect ratio mean that you’ll probably have to run games at lower than native settings, but it’s great for everyday use, multitasking and creative work. Interestingly, the custom configuration options include a 2560x1600-pixel, 240Hz HDR400 panel which might not look as crisp at first but would be better suited to esports.

There’s a 99.99Wh battery, and Lenovo says the Legion 7i can be charged to 30 percent in 10 minutes or 70 percent in 30 minutes with the included 230W mains adapter. USB Type-C charging is convenient as a backup option on the go. You can use up to a 140W adapter but charging won’t be as quick.

The HDMI logo's illumination can be toggled on or off, whereas the power indicator shows battery and charging status. 

Other specifications include a full-HD webcam with electronic privacy shutter, stereo speakers with Harman sound tuning and Nahimic 3D audio, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.1, and a fingerprint reader embedded in the power button.

Lenovo says it has used two “AI-powered” controller chips, called LA1 and LA3, to manage power delivery and cooling. These in-house designed controllers are said to allow for significant performance boosts in gaming and content creation by optimising power consumption by the CPU, GPU and memory using real-time sensor data. There are two fans, and Lenovo promises optimised airflow.

As for software, you get Windows 11 Home, but without the buzzy Copilot+ features – it isn’t clear whether these will be added over time with software updates, but don’t hold out hope. Lenovo preloads a lot of software including its own Vantage configuration tool and a game aggregator called Legion Arena, X-Rite Color Assistant for screen calibration, and more. You also get a full licence for Microsoft Office Home & Student 2021, 100GB of Dropbox space for six months, a three-month Xbox Game Pass subscription, and a one-month McAfee LifeSafe trial. The Lenovo and McAfee software was particularly spammy, throwing up constant notifications about various features and pushing paid subscriptions. Lenovo would like to charge Rs. 1,328 per year to run a weekly “performance and security check” and Rs. 1,958 per year for a cloud-based tool that can locate a lost PC and wipe it remotely. 

Lenovo's hinge design allows the lid opens to almost 180 degrees, and there's an electronic camera switch for privacy.

Lenovo Legion 7i (16IRX9) Usage Experience

The first thing that caught my eye when I flipped open the lid of the Legion 7i was its large keyboard layout - particularly the arrow key cluster, which is nicely spaced out and not crammed into a single line like on nearly every other laptop these days. Typing on this keyboard is actually nicer than on many mainstream and even business laptops. There are no issues with layout except the lack of a right Ctrl key, which not a lot of people will miss. Tiny things like the spacebar having adequate room in front of it and the number pad not being squeezed into a narrow space make a huge difference when you spend all day typing.

The other neat thing about this keyboard is its backlighting. The animations are incredibly fluid and look great. You can cycle between six RGB effect slots, and effects can be assigned to them using the Lenovo Vantage app. The UI for doing this could have been better – you can actually group keys and assign different effects or static colours if you like, but that isn’t immediately obvious. Most of the effects are novelties, like a VU meter effect that reacts to sounds, and I used a static off-white setting most of the time. Another nice touch is that when you press the Fn key, all possible combinations are highlighted in blue.

I found the Legion 7i’s trackpad to be fine, but there isn’t much to say about it. The display is not especially great for entertainment, although streaming video looked fine. The speakers can get pretty loud without distorting but the sound is very thin and there’s very little bass. The webcam is good enough. The fingerprint sensor was easy to set up and worked fine for me.

It was easy enough to get used to using the Legion 7i for my day-to-day work. One annoyance is the LED ring around the power button – I wish this could be dimmed or disabled, especially when watching videos full-screen in a dark room. It doubles as a status indicator, turning green when you can sign in with a fingerprint, blue in power saving mode, and red in performance mode. 

Highlighting all available key combos when the Fn key is pressed is a neat touch.

Lenovo Legion 7i (16IRX9) Performance

All benchmarks and performance tests were run with the Legion 7i plugged in, unless noted. It was set to its default Auto performance mode. Starting with PCMark 10, I got scores of 5,804 in the Express run and 9,969 in the Extended test run. Geekbench 6 scores came in at 2,386 for single-core and 16,521 for multi-core which are around average for the Core i9-14900HX. Cinebench 2024’s GPU test score was 10,193 points, while its single- and multi-core CPU tests returned 101 and 1,210 points respectively.  

Of course with AI being such a significant use case for high-end hardware these days, I tried the Geekbench AI test, and it showed single-precision scores of 3,846 for the CPU and 15,890 for the GPU – again, pretty good for most consumer PCs. 

The Legion 7i managed impressive SSD performance scores, with CrystalDiskMark measuring sequential reads at 7,123.11MBps and writes at 6,511.32MBps. Random read and write speeds came in at 562.73Mbps and 404.29Mbps respectively. 

The old but still standard POV-Ray render test ran in exactly 30s, which is pretty impressive considering that you needed a powerful desktop to break the one-minute mark just a few years ago. The much newer D5 render benchmark, which includes ray tracing, posted a similarly impressive time of 2 minutes, 31 seconds. I also ran the Blender 4.2.0 benchmark, set to target the GPU across three scenes, and it managed a score of 3,544.42. 

When this ring turns red, you know the Legion 7i's fans are running at full speed and you're getting top performance out of its hardware.

For graphics and gaming performance, we start with 3DMark. The Time Spy Extreme test returned a score of 5,308 while the new Steel Nomad scene for high-performance PCs managed 2,388. The Speed Way scene, which uses ray tracing, put up a score of 2,607. The built-in Nvidia DLSS feature test illustrated the GeForce RTX 4070’s image upscaling capabilities, with 14.755fps vs 54.42fps. Unigine’s Superposition benchmark posted 8,661 points using its 4K optimised profile.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider isn’t the newest game around but it’s great for performance testing. Using its built-in benchmark at the native 3200x2000 resolution and the High performance preset without upscaling, I got 68fps. With Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling enabled, that score went up to 90fps. Far Cry 5 managed 62fps on average at the native resolution using the Ultra quality preset – stepping down to 2560x1600 allowed the hardware to push an average of 87fps for a more comfortable balance.

Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey also struggled a bit at the native resolution, pushing out only 57fps on average at its Very High quality setting. Again, switching to 2560x1600 resulted in a boost to 79fps which is a fair tradeoff. Cyberpunk 2077 is of course newer and more demanding. Using its Ray Tracing: Medium preset with DLSS set to Quality, this game’s built-in benchmark reported an average of 33.71fps. Turning ray tracing off pushed that up to 56.35fps without upscaling, which is still a little below ideal, and a far more playable 87.78fps with DLSS. Interestingly, the game suggests using AMD’s FSR upscaling if ray tracing isn’t enabled, and that produced 94.24fps. 

The 3200x2000-pixel panel can be a challenge for the GeForce RTX 4070 GPU with modern games, but they don't look bad running at lower resolutions or using upscaling.

A free run through Super Gore Next level in Doom Eternal 3200x2000, using the Ultra quality preset with ray tracing on and DLSS set to Quality allowed for a very enjoyable 70-75fps in the first big battle. This was measured using the game’s own diagnostic readout. The 8GB of VRAM turned out to be a limitation when trying to push the quality preset up, so you’ll have to tweak settings manually or forego ray tracing. I managed to get around 100fps using Ultra Nightmare, the highest option, without ray tracing.

Control, another game that makes great use of ray tracing, proved to be a bit of a challenge. With the render resolution at 2560x1600 and using the High quality setting with ray tracing at Medium, I was only able to get around 40fps in the Pyramid DLC final battle. Enabling DLSS changed the render resolution to 1485x928 but upscaled to the previous resolution, and didn’t look any worse. Performance jumped to an average of 77fps. Disabling ray tracing brought that up to 96fps.

While performance is great for gaming, the Legion 7i gets hot – very hot. Parts of the keyboard and deck, particularly to the right of the trackpad and above the Fn row, were not just uncomfortably warm but simply too hot to touch for more than a few seconds. This won’t be a problem in everyday use, only when gaming or running GPU-intensive creative workloads for a long time. The WASD area stayed cool enough even under load, and using an external mouse means you shouldn’t be in contact with those parts of the laptop’s body anyway, but it’s worth noting. 

Fan noise wasn’t a problem at all – at full blast you can certainly hear them, but the Legion 7i’s fans are nothing like the jet engines we’ve had to deal with in the past. I ran a 20-loop 3DMark Steel Nomad stress test, and the stability score was 93.2 percent. The best and worst loop scores were 2,537 and 2,365 respectively which means that performance didn’t drop significantly due to throttling. CPU and GPU temperatures were self-reported hovering at a pretty constant 67-68° C with occasional spikes up to 76°. 

Charging is quick if you use the included 230W power adapter, but it will add noticeable weight to your bag.

Lenovo Legion 7i (16IRX9) Battery Life

Battery life is not too bad, but don’t expect all-day runtime from a gaming laptop. I was able to get about five hours of casual use which included some idle time in between YouTube videos and working across various browser-based apps with the screen brightness at 40 percent. A 60-minute YouTube video playing at 1440p at the same screen brightness drained the battery from 100 percent to 72 percent. 

Performance obviously takes a hit while running on battery power, but it isn’t too bad. The same POV-Ray test took 44 seconds while Cinebench 2024 posted 9,156 points for its GPU test along with 89 and 929 respectively for the single-core and multi-core CPU tests. Shadow of the Tomb Raider’s game benchmark averaged a very playable 72fps at the native 3200x2000 resolution using the High graphics preset, DLSS at the Quality setting, and no ray tracing – not too far below its 90fps score with the same values when plugged in.

The Legion 7i was able to charge from zero to 35 percent in 10 minutes, 62 percent in 20 minutes, and 78 percent in 30 minutes using the included 230W charger. That’s pretty quick, and what’s even better is that the charger has a standard 6A Indian plug, but it’s heavy at around 650g. Using a 65W USB-PD charger, the Legion 7i went from zero to only 12 percent in 10 minutes and 32 percent in half an hour.

The Legion 7i is a premium all-rounder for gamers, students, and creative professionals.

Conclusion

Thanks to Lenovo’s hardware and design choices, the Legion 7i isn’t just suited for gaming but could also be an everyday productivity and multitasking machine for those who need more power than the average laptop provides. It's expensive but you can tweak the configuration to your liking, which very few companies in India offer. The large, high-res screen is good enough for creative work and the abundance of ports did come in handy. 

Gamers can expect enough power to run current games at slightly less than top-tier settings. I’m particularly happy with the Legion 7i’s keyboard design, but the promotional popups were a bit too much. The biggest problem is how hot this laptop gets when under load – but that’s not something you’ll need to worry about if you’re gaming with an external mouse and keyboard, like a lot of people will.