In terms of gaming, it is all about energy, and the Lenovo Legion Professional 7i Gen 8 (begins at $2,299, $2,749 as examined) brings the warmth with thirteenth Era Intel processing and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 cell graphics chip. The laptop computer could look similar to final yr’s Legion, however that {hardware} swap means huge beneficial properties in gaming efficiency, extra muscle for on a regular basis duties, and even improved battery life (although not as a lot as we might like). Throw in a 240Hz show and help for a number of 4K displays, and it is a visible feast. Topping all of it off with excellent efficiency, with out the sky-high worth of the class leaders, isn’t any small feat, making the Lenovo Legion 7i Professional Gen 8 our new favourite 16-inch gaming laptop computer, incomes our Editors’ Selection award.

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Lenovo Legion Professional 7i Gen 8: Configurations

The Lenovo Legion Professional 7i Gen 8 begins at $2,299 and comes outfitted with an Intel Core i9-13900HX processor, 16GB of DDR5 reminiscence, 512GB of solid-state storage, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 GPU with 8GB of video reminiscence. Our check mannequin of the Legion Professional 7i is a step up in a number of methods, with 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 GPU with 12GB of VRAM. It sells for $2,749.

A 24-core beast, the Intel Core i9-13900HX CPU has eight Efficiency cores and 16 Environment friendly cores with 32 processing threads. The cell Nvidia RTX 4080 in our check machine isn’t any slouch, both. Whereas it isn’t a real equal to the desktop Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080—it truly makes use of the identical chip because the desktop 4070 Ti—it is nonetheless one of the crucial succesful GPUs in the marketplace, and know-how like DLSS 3.0 and ray tracing make it even higher.

If you wish to max out your Lenovo Legion Professional 7i configuration, you’ll be able to ramp as much as an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 with 16GB VRAM, and twin 1TB SSDs for 2TB complete. The additional graphics horsepower and dual-drive storage carry the top-end package deal worth to $3,565.

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Made to Recreation, However Not Promote It

Lenovo’s Legion laptops have a reasonably normal design, with the most recent Legion wanting just about equivalent to the previous Gen 7 and Gen 6 fashions. The 16-inch laptop computer has a boxy design, with an aluminum chassis that measures 1.01 by 14.3 by 10.3 inches. Weighing 6.1 kilos, it isn’t light-weight, but it surely’s transportable sufficient for a 16-inch gaming rig. In contrast with one thing just like the MSI Titan GT77 (2023), a 7.2-pound 17-incher, it is positively light-weight, even when the Lenovo is a bit chunkier than the MSI’s 0.9-inch thickness.

This laptop computer’s design is equal components conservative and gamer. Its base juts out behind the hinge, giving the laptop computer the distinctive profile of a gaming machine or perhaps a robust workstation (and, wanting ISV certification, these two classes are fairly related by way of highly effective {hardware}). Nevertheless, the near-black end and squared-off geometry of the design look extra business-oriented than the anticipated gamer bling—you will not discover any dancing LED animations right here. If informal observers do not acknowledge the Legion title on the lid, they won’t even know that it is a gaming machine.

(Credit score: Molly Flores)

However the keyboard lets your gamer flag fly, if you would like it to. With per-key RGB lighting, you’ll be able to fireplace up a rainbow of colours, full with flowing and rippling RGB patterns, highlights on particular keys, and any variety of customizations with six swappable profiles. If you wish to preserve issues businesslike, you’ll be able to flip the lighting off, or stick with a single backlight shade, however the swappable profiles imply that you would be able to additionally bounce proper again to no matter RGB craziness you favor as soon as the work day is completed.

Past the lighting, the keyboard is satisfying. The formed keycaps have 1.5mm of journey with a snug key really feel for typing and gameplay, and anti-ghosting implies that you may by no means be slowed down by the keyboard. The total-size keyboard has a good structure, with a separate cluster of arrow keys and a quantity pad with half-width keys. I am not all the time a fan of cramming a quantity pad subsequent to a full-size keyboard on most laptops, however the 16-inch chassis is sufficiently big to accommodate the additional keys.

(Credit score: Molly Flores)

Lenovo’s accompanying touchpad is roomy sufficient at almost 5 inches throughout, and whilst you aren’t prone to sport with the touchpad, it delivers tremendous responsiveness and a satisfying tactile click on if you press on the buttonless floor.

Above the show, you may additionally discover a 1080p webcam. Lenovo provides an e-shutter for privateness, and pairs the digital camera with software program from Tobii so as to add some attention-grabbing usability options—extra on that later.

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Recreation at Warp Velocity With a 240Hz Show

With a 16:10 side ratio and a couple of,560-by-1,600-pixel (QHD) decision, the Legion’s 16-inch show is made for gaming, hitting the candy spot between the decrease decision of full HD and the 4K decision that may be an excessive amount of at this display dimension. That is to not say that the laptop computer cannot drive 4K decision—it may well deal with as much as three 4K shows at 60Hz, if most pixels and a number of screens are what you are after.

(Credit score: Molly Flores)

Nevertheless, the upper decision would not do a lot for you on the laptop computer’s 16-inch show, and then you definately would not get the superior 240Hz refresh fee that it helps. That is proper, the Lenovo Legion Professional 7i has a 240Hz display, with Nvidia G-Sync making all the things clean and judder-free.

The show additionally has different options, like 500-nit brightness, Dolby Imaginative and prescient HDR help, 100% sRGB shade, and TÜV Rheinland glass for diminished blue-light emissions. What you aren’t getting (and doubtless would not even need on a gaming laptop computer) is contact help. I do not assume you avid gamers will miss it.

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Huge-Time Connectivity

One of many luxuries {that a} bigger chassis affords designers is the ample room it provides you for ports, and this Legion has wired connectivity in all places. 

(Credit score: Molly Flores)

On the left hand aspect of the machine you may discover each USB 3 (Kind-A) and Thunderbolt 4 ports. On the best is a 3.5mm headphone/mic combo jack, in addition to one other USB 3 port. This aspect additionally features a swap for the webcam’s e-shutter, making it simple to disable your laptop computer digital camera when not in use.

(Credit score: Molly Flores)

Nevertheless, the again of the bottom comprises a complete third I/O panel, outfitted with a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port, two extra USB 3 connections, HDMI 2.1 output, and an Ethernet port for wired networking. You may additionally see a proprietary Lenovo energy connector, highlighted in yellow.

(Credit score: Molly Flores)

If all of these bodily plugs and ports aren’t sufficient, the Legion Professional 7i can also be geared up with Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.1, for your whole wi-fi networking and peripheral wants.

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Lenovo Legion Professional 7i Gen 8: Beneath The Hood

With a thirteenth Gen Intel Core i9-13900HX CPU and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 GPU inside, I by no means had any query of whether or not the Legion Professional 7i could be a succesful gaming machine. And, wanting on the efficiency outcomes we obtained in testing, it is a lot highly effective.

(Credit score: Molly Flores)

However Lenovo has its personal secret sauce to maximise efficiency: the brand new LA-2Q AI chip and Lenovo AI Engine+. This particular chip is the {hardware} that powers the software program, which mixes machine studying and dynamic settings to stability components like fan speeds and refresh charges. The outcome permits the machine to tremendous tune the efficiency to stretch the battery life, preserve the cooling system quiet, or goose efficiency as wanted. Biking by way of preset optimizations for quiet, efficiency, or auto-balancing is so simple as urgent the Operate and Q keys collectively.

On high of that, the Legion Professional 7i helps Tobii Horizon head monitoring, which lets you use the laptop computer webcam to manage the in-game digital camera by merely transferring their head. Whereas it is a area of interest characteristic that is supported in just some video games (60 as of this writing(Opens in a brand new window), with extra on the way in which), it is a cool solution to get a extra immersive gaming expertise, particularly in video games like Flight Simulator.

The opposite Tobii-powered trick the Legion Professional 7i has is presence detection, which is able to preserve a laptop computer awake so long as you are wanting on the display and auto-lock if you depart your laptop computer. This extra {hardware} additionally powers a characteristic known as “peeker detection,” which protects your display content material from prying eyes behind you. Its official title is Tobii Conscious(Opens in a brand new window); it is one other pre-installed characteristic, but it surely’s not enabled by default.

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Testing the Lenovo Legion Professional 7i Gen 8: Prime-Finish Efficiency for Much less Money

Armed with that Intel Core i9-13900HX CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 GPU, the Legion Professional 7i is legitimately one of the crucial highly effective laptops we have reviewed. Nevertheless it’s not totally alone with its high-end {hardware}. For comparability functions, we stacked the Lenovo towards top-flight gaming machines just like the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 and the MSI Titan GT77 (2023), which have equally high-octane CPUs and barely superior Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 graphics. We additionally checked out the perfect methods from final yr, just like the 2022 Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 7 in addition to the Acer Predator Triton 300 SE (2022), which received an Editors’ Selection award for 16-inch gaming laptops.

Productiveness Checks 

Our major benchmark, UL’s PCMark 10, simulates a wide range of real-world productiveness and content-creation workflows to measure total efficiency for office-centric duties corresponding to phrase processing, spreadsheeting, net shopping, and videoconferencing. We additionally run PCMark 10’s Full System Drive check to evaluate the load time and throughput of a laptop computer’s storage. (See extra about how we check laptops.) 

Three extra of our benchmarks deal with the CPU, utilizing all obtainable cores and threads, to fee a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 makes use of that firm’s Cinema 4D engine to render a posh scene, whereas Geekbench 5.4 Professional by Primate Labs simulates well-liked apps starting from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine studying. Lastly, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to transform a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p decision (decrease occasions are higher). 

Our ultimate productiveness check is PugetBench for Photoshop(Opens in a brand new window) by workstation maker Puget Techniques, which makes use of the Artistic Cloud model 22 of Adobe’s well-known picture editor to fee a PC’s efficiency for content material creation and multimedia purposes. It is an automatic extension that executes a wide range of common and GPU-accelerated Photoshop duties starting from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving a picture to making use of masks, gradient fills, and filters.

In processor-heavy assessments like Cinebench and HandBrake, the Legion Professional 7i held its personal towards the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 and the MSI Titan GT77 (2023), two of essentially the most highly effective laptops we have ever reviewed. That is no shock, given the similarity in {hardware}, but it surely places the Legion firmly among the many better of the perfect by way of pure energy for duties like media modifying and different work. In some assessments, like Geekbench and Photoshop, the Lenovo truly edged forward of those top-flight opponents.

Graphics Checks

Regardless, the processing energy is secondary in a machine like this. A premium gaming machine wants severe graphics chops, and we had been particularly interested by how effectively the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 would fare when put next with the top-of-the-line 4090 GPUs used within the Strix Scar 18 and Titan GT77.

We check Home windows PC graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark: Night time Raid (extra modest, appropriate for laptops with built-in graphics), and Time Spy (extra demanding, appropriate for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). 

For much more graphics efficiency measurements, we run the GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses each low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like picture rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Automotive Chase assessments, rendered offscreen to accommodate completely different show resolutions, train graphics and compute shaders utilizing the OpenGL programming interface and {hardware} tessellation respectively. The extra frames per second (fps), the higher.

Lastly, to evaluate real-world gaming efficiency in laptops, we run a set of in-game benchmarks, together with the built-in 1080p benchmarks of three real-world video games, Murderer’s Creed Valhalla, F1 2021, and Rainbow Six Siege. We run Valhalla and Rainbow twice with completely different image-quality presets, and F1 with and with out Nvidia’s performance-boosting DLSS anti-aliasing activated.

We should not have frightened about how effectively the RTX 4080 would do in video games. Although the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 and the MSI Titan GT77 (2023) delivered the highest scores persistently, the 4080-equipped Legion Professional 7i was inside spitting distance of these main machines in each single check. (It even surpassed them in some instances, like with 3DMark Night time Raid.)

Simply as vital for these contemplating an improve, the efficiency of the RTX 4080 totally trounced the perfect RTX 30 Sequence playing cards you may get. Whether or not it was the pretty fundamental RTX 3060 of the Acer Predator Triton or the premium RTX 3080 Ti from final yr’s Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 7, the distinction in graphics and gaming efficiency is stark. Present-gen GPUs outperformed final yr’s {hardware} by big margins throughout the board.

Battery and Show Checks 

We check laptop computer battery life by enjoying a regionally saved 720p video file (the open-source Blender film Tears of Metal with show brightness at 50% and audio quantity at 100%. We ensure that the battery is absolutely charged earlier than the check, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

To check laptop computer shows, we additionally use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software program to measure a laptop computer display’s shade saturation—what proportion of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 shade gamuts or palettes the show can present—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per sq. meter).

On a gaming machine like this, our expectations for battery life are by no means too lofty. The calls for of the {hardware} and the cooling methods required do not lend themselves to lengthy stretches away from an outlet, as a rule. However even with our totally sensible expectations, the Legion Professional 7i fell a bit brief. Lasting simply 6:13, it trailed the MSI Titan GT77 (6:51) and the Asus ROG Strix (8:14), and fell even farther behind the Acer Predator Triton (10:03). Nevertheless, we discovered one brilliant spot on this in any other case mediocre show of endurance: The 2022 Legion 7i, with the equal twelfth Gen CPU and a 3080 Ti, lasted lower than half that (3:00). It is nothing to brag about, however no less than Lenovo has made some actual enhancements to the battery life it was able to earlier than.

The show high quality, then again, is great. This IPS panel delivers 100% sRGB shade, and the claimed 500-nit brightness was proper on the cash, measuring at 515 nits in our testing. Even higher, Lenovo calibrates the show earlier than it leaves the manufacturing facility, so shade illustration is aggressive as effectively. And all of that vibrant shade and brightness is made even higher with the 240Hz refresh fee, which delivers undeniably clean efficiency in even the fastest-paced video games. Wanting paying for one thing extra premium, like an OLED panel or 4K decision, that is pretty much as good because it will get for gaming laptop computer shows.

(Credit score: Molly Flores)

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Verdict: Wild Efficiency at a Tame Worth

Whereas the newest Lenovo Legion Professional 7i seems to be like a easy refresh for 2023, the transfer to the newest Intel and Nvidia {hardware} marks a serious enchancment in functionality for gaming and all the things else. The tried-and-true design could look the identical, however Nvidia’s gaming chops are higher than ever earlier than (particularly when DLSS 3 is supported in a given sport), and battery life obtained a good enchancment, even when it nonetheless has room for extra. Throw in extras—just like the per-key lighting on the keyboard and area of interest options like Tobii headtracking—and you’ve got a improbable premium-level cell PC gaming rig.

(Credit score: Molly Flores)

We cannot act as if this laptop computer is not costly (almost $3,000), but it surely’s loads cheaper than the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 and the ultra-pricey MSI Titan GT77 (2023). It is nonetheless not low-cost, but it surely’s a heck of much more reasonably priced than the almost $5,000 worth that this degree of efficiency has commanded lately. That is sufficient for the Lenovo Legion Professional 7i Gen 8 to interchange the Acer Predator Triton 300 SE as our favourite 16-inch gaming laptop computer, incomes it our Editors’ Selection award.