Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 9 Review: Gaming Laptop Sweet Spot

It isn’t all that common to call a laptop that retails in the neighborhood of $3,000 a good deal. That, however, is exactly the case with the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 9, which retails for a good chunk less than the Legion Pro 9i and offers similar performance in a fantastic overall package.

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 9

The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 9 offers plenty of gaming performance thanks to its Intel Core i9 processor and RTX 4080 GPU, plus the 16-inch form factor means it’s still portable enough to bring anywhere.

Pros

• Impressive performance
• Sharp, colorful display
• Great keyboard
• Surprisingly good sound

Cons

• Battery life isn’t great
• Not very portable

Price and Availability

Unlike some laptop manufacturers, Lenovo doesn’t give you too many choices with the Legion Pro 7i. The CPU is a 14th-generation Intel Core i9–14900HX, and the laptop comes in just one color: Eclipse Black. Your main choices are storage, RAM, and GPU.

My review unit was effectively the near-max model, with 32GB RAM, 2TB storage, and an Nvidia RTX 4080 with 12GB GDDR6 RAM. The only available upgrade from here would be to the RTX 4090, which is available as an option. As configured, the model I tested retails for $3,019 on the Lenovo website.

Note that this is not to be confused with the Legion 7i (non-Pro), which is similar but a slightly different configuration. More on that later.

A Sturdy Design, But Not The Most Portable

This generation of Lenovo’s Legion line looks largely similar to the previous generation, but realistically, how much can you change the look of a gaming laptop? It’s got to be on the big side to fit the hardware and necessary cooling, and it’s got to have LED lighting because we decided that was important at some point.

While the Legion Pro 7i is chunky and solid, it doesn’t feel oversized for the screen size. That said, while it will just barely squeeze into my bag meant for a 15-inch laptop, the weight is another story. Pushing six pounds without the power brick, the laptop is certainly not the most portable.

That weight isn’t always necessarily a bad thing. When combined with the sturdy base of the laptop and the heavy rubber feet, you’d have to be in the middle of a pretty intense gaming sessions to get it moving around on your desk. This is clearly where the Legion Pro 7i is most at home.

Looking at ports, the left side features a single USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 port and a single USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port, which supports both DisplayPort 1.4 and 140W power delivery. On the right, you’ll find another USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 port and a 3.5mm headphone connector.

The rear is where the bulk of the ports reside. Here, you get the proprietary power connection, two more USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports (one of which features always-on 5V2A power), another USB-C port with power delivery and DisplayPort, an HDMI 2.1 port, and a wired Ethernet connection.

Great Keyboard and a Perfectly Serviceable Touchpad

I’m typically a fan of the keyboards on Lenovo laptops, which isn’t something I can say about all that many laptop keyboards. Fortunately, the keyboard on the Legion Pro 7i has everything I like about Lenovo’s keys.

There is plenty of space between the keys, and they feature 1.5mm travel, which doesn’t sound like much but gives a nice solid keypress. The keys don’t have any sponginess to them, and both typing and gaming felt responsive. The keycaps here are even actually swappable–you can order a swappable kit as an option for $15 when you buy the laptop.

That per-key LED lighting is effective here, almost too much so. When I first opened up my review unit, I had trouble entering my Wi-Fi password because the keys on the keyboard were flashing so much. Fortunately, holding the Fn key and tapping the Space bar a few times coaxed the lighting into a more subdued mode.

The lighting is bright, and the keycaps do a great job of showing it off, as does the LED bar on the front of the laptop. That said, the Las Vegas-inspired lighting can be a bit distracting in a video call if it’s reflecting off of your face. Fortunately, it’s easy to turn it off, which also gives the laptop a more understated, if still chunky, look.

One interesting touch Lenovo used for the keyboard here is offset arrow keys. Instead of lining up perfectly, as on most laptop keyboards, the arrow keys sit slightly “below” the rest of the keyboard, which gets you full-sized arrow keys without sacrificing elsewhere on the keyboard.

The touchpad is standard for what you’d expect on a gaming laptop, which means it’s fine for browsing the web and installing games. For gaming, you’ll want to plug in a mouse or use a controller. I’d have loved to see the touchpad used on Lenovo’s ThinkPad Z13 Gen 2, but I’m sure that would have added to the price tag.

Super Smooth Display and Surprisingly Powerful Sound

The Legion Pro 7i features a 16-inch display with a resolution of 2560×1600 pixels and a maximum refresh rate of up to 240Hz. The display supports both Dolby Vision and Nvidia G-Sync. It also uses an anti-glare coating that is effective indoors but less so under direct sunlight.

While the screen isn’t ultra-bright, it’s rated at 500nits, which is somewhat higher than the 400nit displays found in even some higher-end gaming laptops. In terms of color, this display covers 100% of both the sRGB and DCI-P3 color spaces.

In practice, this means that the screen looks sharp and colorful. Motion is smooth and fluid, from desktop animations to scrolling webpages to gaming.

For speakers, the Legion Pro 7i uses a 2-watt Harman speaker system, which doesn’t sound like much in writing. The good news is, in use, the speakers were much more powerful than I was expecting. They won’t shake the room, but they’re much more powerful than the tinny speakers in many laptops.

There’s a 1080p webcam, which is mainly nice to have for video calls. Anyone considering streaming will likely want to use a better camera, but it’s handy to have in case you need it.

Some Useful Software, But Too Much Bloat

While you can’t configure much about the hardware for the Legion Pro 7i, you can choose between Windows 11 Home or Pro preinstalled. This won’t matter to everyone, but if you’re looking at this for professional use, this could be a handy detail.

This isn’t unusual for gaming laptops, but Windows Hello does not have onboard biometrics, meaning no fingerprint reader or face scanner. You’ll have to stick to the standard password or PIN.

There is a lot of preinstalled software here. Some are useful, like Lenovo’s Vantage software, which lets you easily adjust various systems. The Legion Arena app is a game launcher that works across multiple storefronts, including Steam, Epic, EA, Ubisoft, Xbox, and more. If you don’t already have a launcher you prefer, this is certainly useful.

Most of the other Lenovo software is less useful, as is the trial of McAfee LiveSafe antivirus, which started bugging me almost as soon as I’d begun testing the laptop.

Speed to Spare

The Core i9–14900HX powering the Legion Pro 7i would have been powerful on its own, but combined with 32GB RAM, it chewed through everyday computer tasks without noticeable effort. Turning to benchmarks, it was as impressive as you’d expect.

The PCMark 10 overall benchmark gave a total score of 8,761, with Digital Content Creation scoring the highest at 15,224. All of these scores are at least double what PCMark recommends for productivity use cases, which shouldn’t really come as a surprise. By comparison, I recently tested the Dell XPS 16 9640 with an Intel Ultra 7 155H and a GTX 4070 scored 7,454 overall.

The Procyon benchmark uses actual Microsoft Office apps to simulate a proper workload for an even better idea of how a PC handles everyday tasks. The Legion scored 7,531 for this benchmark, compared to 6,468 for the XPS 16 9640.

The testing process involves tons of tabs, downloads, and running processes installing various software, but the Legion Pro 7i never missed a beat.

Great Gaming Performance With a Few Surprises

Of course, nobody buys a Legion-series laptop strictly for office work, so next up, I turned to 3DMark’s Steel Nomad benchmark, which is meant for gaming PCs. The Pro 7i scored 3,339 with an average framerate of 33.40FPS, compared to the RTX 4070-powered XPS 16 9640, which scored 1,877 with an average framerate of 18.79FPS.

I also ran the Speed Way ray tracing benchmark, which gave a score of 3,781 and an average framerate of 37.81. This wasn’t the only case in which a benchmark with ray tracing enabled was faster than one without, though in the next case, I have a good idea why.

To test actual game performance, I fired up Cyberpunk 2077, with the benchmark giving me an average of 64FPS on Ultra settings at 2560×1600. Bumping up the settings to the Ray Tracing Overdrive preset climbed the average framerate to 80FPS, but more than anything, this just shows how effective Nvidia DLSS (enabled by the preset) is.

Turning to Forza Motorsport, I got an average framerate of 70 frames per second, again on Ultra settings at the screen’s native resolution. This wasn’t just the benchmark, as the game felt silky smooth across multiple tracks.

Unimpressive Battery Life

By their sheer nature, gaming laptops aren’t exactly battery-friendly. With power-hungry CPUs and GPUs, they don’t sip power the way laptops meant to last you all day, and so they don’t. By a long shot.

Running PCMark 10’s built-in Gaming battery life test, which simulates gaming while tracking battery life, the Legion managed just 44 minutes. The Modern Office battery benchmark saw it fare slightly better, managing two hours and 31 minutes, but this still isn’t going to get you through a workday.

Gaming laptops are typically meant to stay plugged in, but I was surprised when I walked away from my desk with the Legion only to find it pleading with me to plug it in a little more than an hour later.

Competition: Best Performance For the Price?

You’ll find plenty of roughly comparable laptops, including Lenovo’s own 9i series. That said, very few of them offer the same price-to-performance ratio you can get with the Legion 7i Pro right now.

Looking at other 16-inch models, the ASUS ROG Strix Scar 16 offers similar build options but is more expensive for the same configuration my review unit came in. On the other hand, the Alienware M16 R2 can be had for a cheaper price, but only with an RTX 4070, not the 4080 found in the Legion.

On the other hand, if you’re looking to save money and you don’t mind that step down in graphics capabilities, Lenovo has another option worth considering. We’ve also reviewed the Legion 7i Gen 9, which is nearly the same as the Legion Pro 7i but comes with an RTX 4070 and only 1TB of storage for a more affordable price.

Should You Buy the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 9?

Performance is obviously the main strength of the Lenovo Legion Pro 9i Gen 9. If you’re looking for a laptop that will pull double duty as a mobile workstation during the day and a gaming powerhouse at night, you won’t find many comparable options for the price. The extra 1TB of storage included in the model I reviewed was especially welcome.

The downsides are similarly predictable. It’s not the easiest laptop to carry around, and that’s before you factor in the weight of the massive power brick weighing down your bag. The battery life is also par for the course for gaming laptops, which is to say it’s largely there to keep you going when you can’t find anywhere to plug in.

Even with those downsides, the Legion Pro 7i remains a fantastic laptop overall, and while the above issues are worth mentioning, they don’t hold it back. This is a great choice if you’re looking for a desktop replacement and don’t want a massive 18-inch display.

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 9

The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 9 offers plenty of gaming performance thanks to its Intel Core i9 processor and RTX 4080 GPU, plus the 16-inch form factor means it’s still portable enough to bring anywhere.