Lenovo Legion 7i – the best gaming notebook of 2020?

Gaming tests – dedicated GPU

Lenovo Legion is no longer a start-up brand, quite the contrary. In recent years, it has gained a strong position among gaming brands such as Asus, MSI and Gigabyte. This is mainly due to gaming tournaments, where we see Legion quite often, but especially on the gaming laptop market. The new flagship Legion 7i must not only resume where its great predecessor left off, but also beat strong competition.

Basic specs

Details

Similar to Legion Y740S, the 7i offers an interesting package with a black glossy title, too.

In the package you will find usual accessories in the form of chargers and manuals.

The Legion 7i is a new flagship, which builds on last year’s successful series. The Legion Y740 was one of the most interesting notebooks last year, so the novelty has no less ambition. The tested piece received an 8-core Core i7-10875H, which debuts in our tests. That will be assisted by 16 GB of RAM, 1 TB of SSD and the RTX 2070 Super Max-Q takes care of the game performance. The main competition will therefore be the ROG Zephyrus M15 and OMEN 15. There are also other configurations with Core i5, hexa-core i7 and the highest octa-core i9. In the field of graphics cards, you can choose from GTX 1660 Ti, RTX 2060, RTX 2070 Max-Q to RTX 2080 Super Max-Q. However, in my opinion, the tested configuration has the best balance and offers the best price-performance ratio.

The design of the Legion 7i is a direct follow-up to the Y740 and previous Legions, but again raises the bar a little higher. The gray aluminum body looks elegant and less of a fingerprint magnet than, say, the black GS66 Stealth. The typical slightly advanced position of the display and hinges closer to the keyboard is not only effective, but also allows for more sophisticated cooling and optically enlarges the display while using, as it is slightly closer to the user.

I also consider the relatively reasonable weight of around 2,250 grams to be positive, which is only a little more than the M15 or GS66, which were not as robust as the new Legion. Build quality is one of the main advantages of the novelty. On the back we can see the Lenovo and Legion logos, while the gaming logo is even backlit. It is one of many illuminated elements on the laptop, but we will discuss this more later.

The port selection of the new Legion is above standard good. On the right side there is one 5 Gb USB-A port with charging support, on the left are two USB-C ports and an audio jack. One of the USB-C connectors is Thunderbolt 3 and thus supports 10 Gb USB and DP 1.4 video output. The second one is only 5 Gb, but also supports video output.

A substantial part of the connectivity is hidden on the back, which makes it easier to dock and organize the cabling, which will not hinder on the sides. There is HDMI 2.0, two 10 Gb USB-A, Ethernet (RJ-45) and power connector. This really is a very solid port selection that you just won’t find so easily. The only complaint is the absence of an SD card reader, which we saw recently in OMEN 15.

At the back, you can only see the massive openings of the cooling system and the advanced hinges of the display.

The display lid is protruded for easier opening. An interesting detail is that there is a miniature Legion logo on this edge.

The view from above will again show you the gray lid with the black port part, but more interesting is the lower part, where we see a massively perforated part for cooling. I commend the use of Phillips screws, which facilitate the access to components.

After removing the bottom cover, you get to the components. Another interesting detail is a plaque on the cover, which says: Welcome to the inside of Legion. What a sense of detail. Unlike Asus or MSI, the interior is more or less black, so don’t expect any blue or red motherboards.

The tested configuration offers probably the most sensible Legion 7i equipment on the menu. Specifically, the processor is Intel Core i7-10875H with 8 cores and a clock speed of up to 5.1 GHz for 1 core or 4.3 GHz for all-core turbo. Two SO-DIMM slots are occupied by 16 GB of 3200 MHz RAM, but you can easily increase the capacity after removing the cover, as you can see in the picture below. I praise a pair of slots for the PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD, one of which is occupied by a 1 TB SSD. You can use the second slot to expand the internal storage. The graphics performance is taken care of by the latest mobile RTX 2070 Super Max-Q, we will see how the notebook thrives in competition with other notebooks with this GPU.

In addition to the removable RAM modules, the notebook also offers the option of expanding the storage using the M.2 SSD, for which the second free slot will be used. The WiFi card is also easily accessible, but it supports the latest WiFi 6 802.11ax standards, so it will not be necessary to replace it in the near future.

The cooling, where the manufacturer did a good job, certainly deserves attention. They refer to it as Coldfront 2.0, which consists of a 2 mm vapor chamber, 6 thermal sensors and a pair of fans made of liquid crystalline polymers. With Q Control 3.0, you can switch between three performance modes that affect both performance and noise. Cooling has been a strength of Legion laptops in previous versions, and it looks like the novelty will continue this trend. I myself am curious what results we will see in the tests, but the expectations are definitely high.

Opening the lid is possible up to a straight angle, ie to the full plane with the base, which is my favorite feature, that is not quite common with gaming notebooks.

Another important part of a gaming laptop is the keyboard. The 7i offers a keyboard called TrueStrike, which has a 100% RGB backlight and anti-ghost function. The layout, which I consider to be more or less ideal, is also important. Large arrows, two-line (ISO) Enter, a number of multimedia keys and function shortcuts or a full numeric part. The very good response to presses and minimal bending of the base also deserves praise. So I really have nothing to complain about and I can only commend.

The touchpad has a nice surface, supports gestures and has Windows Precision drivers, so it has the best possible user experience on Windows. It is easiest to press at the bottom, almost impossible at the top. I don’t have much to complain about in terms of use, but it didn’t surprise me in any way. However, you will still use the mouse while gaming, so the touchpad is a kind of emergency solution when carrying and on the road.

The camera offers a standard resolution of 720p and, unlike its predecessor, it is at the top edge of the display and not the bottom. It also offers a Privacy Shutter to cover the camera when not in use, which is one of the already iconic features of Lenovo laptops. Unfortunately, the Legion 7i does not offer any biometric security, which is actually the first thing I can blame it for so far.

We mentioned that the laptop has plenty of RGB LEDs. The following two pictures are used to demonstrate this. In addition to the classic RGB backlight of the keyboard with various effects, you will also find a backlit strip on the sides and the entire front of the notebook.

The two cooling vents are also backlit, along with the aforementioned Legion logo on the display lid.

From a practical point of view, this is an unnecessary function, but a certain “cool” factor cannot be denied here. The backlight looks especially fancy at night and I believe it will find its fans, especially among younger gamers.

The speakers consist of two 2 W modules on the bottom of the notebook. They support Dolby Atmos and you can adjust them in the utility application. However, the sound is not exceptional, it lacks bass and is a bit metallic. Unfortunately, I’m comparing it to the MacBook Pro 16, which has the best speakers on the market, so it’s not a very fair comparison.

The notebook is equipped with an 80 Wh battery, which is definitely not a bad value, but we have already seen larger ones. For example, the GS66 has a 99.9 Wh battery. The Legion 7i compensates for the “smaller” battery with Hybrid mode and Advanced Optimus technology, which are used to switch between dedicated and integrated GPUs, although we have a G-Sync display here. The notebook comes with a 230 W charger, which has a typical USB-like connector. The power connector is on the back, it will not bother you on the sides of the laptop as usual with the competition. Charging is surprisingly fast. After 30 minutes you have 67%, an hour is enough for 97% and I recorded a full charge after an hour and 11 minutes. This is the fastest charging in a gaming laptop I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, you cannot use the Thunderbolt 3 for charging.

Despite the relatively normal battery capacity, the battery life in our demanding YouTube test is very solid. We recorded 4 hours and 35 minutes, which is slightly less than the Zephyrus M15, but more than the OMEN 15 and the GS66. Given the more powerful processor and very bright display, this is a respectable result, but nothing revolutionary and it is definitely not as good a result as we saw with the Zephyrus G14 with AMD processor.

Lenovo Legion is no longer a start-up brand, quite the contrary. In recent years, it has gained a strong position among gaming brands such as Asus, MSI and Gigabyte. This is mainly due to gaming tournaments, where we see Legion quite often, but especially on the gaming laptop market. The new flagship Legion 7i must not only resume where its great predecessor left off, but also beat strong competition.

Testing methodology

We tested the notebook at home, not in a laboratory environment. Nevertheless, the effort was made for the most accurate results. These are therefore the average of the measured values from repeated tests.

The tests include synthetic benchmarks to compare the performance of both the processor and the graphics card. We also measure storage speed, battery life, charging speed and in-game performance. The goal is to test laptops and desktops in various scenarios and get a comprehensive overview of their performance and operating characteristics.

Lenovo Legion is no longer a start-up brand, quite the contrary. In recent years, it has gained a strong position among gaming brands such as Asus, MSI and Gigabyte. This is mainly due to gaming tournaments, where we see Legion quite often, but especially on the gaming laptop market. The new flagship Legion 7i must not only resume where its great predecessor left off, but also beat strong competition.

Gamut, brightness and color difference

We measured the image properties of the display using the Datacolor Spyder5Elite color analyzer. The display is one of the key features of gaming laptops for a full travel experience. The last laptops had either 4K 60 Hz displays with great colors, or fast Full HD panels, where the colors were not bad, but it was not the very top. G-Sync has also somehow disappeared from the pieces we’ve tested recently.

The Legion 7i offers perhaps the best solution in the display area we tested in 2020. 144 Hz is more than enough to play games and although we’ve also had a 300 Hz display here, in reality such FPS will be quite difficult to achieve, especially for AAA titles. Conversely, image smoothing technology would be more useful than unreasonably high FPS, and Legion therefore offers G-Sync. You can say that it will be a kind of average fast gaming panel, which is not suitable for graphic work. The opposite is true. 100% AdobeRGB support, 500-nit brightness and DisplayHDR 400 are parameters you won’t find easily in gaming notebooks.

We’ve more or less confirmed the specs stated by the manufacturer. 100% sRGB, 100% AdobeRGB, 98% DCI-P3 and 100% NTSC are really great values. Gamma 2.1 with a slight deviation, relatively good color uniformity and backlight, and brightness of 418 nits are also respectable values. The average color difference of Delta-E with a value of 1.68 is also great.

The paper specs and the real measured results are really great and the display is one of the best we’ve had here and I’m not afraid to even say that it could be the best gaming display ever.

To make matters better, the manufacturer also offers the X-Rite Color Assistant application to control the display and color profiles, where you can choose from several dedicated color profiles.

Lenovo Legion is no longer a start-up brand, quite the contrary. In recent years, it has gained a strong position among gaming brands such as Asus, MSI and Gigabyte. This is mainly due to gaming tournaments, where we see Legion quite often, but especially on the gaming laptop market. The new flagship Legion 7i must not only resume where its great predecessor left off, but also beat strong competition.

Rendering, Geekbench

The tested Legion 7i configuration is equipped with an 8-core i7-10875H, which debuts in our tests. It can be expected to give better results than the 6-core i7-10750H in Omen 15 or Zephyrus M15. At the same time, it will probably be a bit slower than the fastest i9-10980HK in the GS66. In practice, however, cooling and temperatures also play a role, which were not exactly the strengths of MSI. We’ll see how this factor weighs.

Let’s start traditionally with Cinebench R15 for a first look at the raw performance of the processor. Single-core results show a slight 2% lead of MSI over Legion, which is 4 and 7% faster than OMEN and Asus. In multi-core, the GS66 is again slightly higher, namely by 4%, but the higher number of cores and threads in the Legion means a 20 and 23% lead over OMEN and Asus. The newer R20 shows even similar results, i.e. a 4% lead of the GS66 over the Legion in single-core. It is again faster than OMEN and Asus, this time by 4%. In multi-core, for the first time, the Legion is also 2% faster than MSI, while OMEN and Asus are beaten by 20%.

The practical tests of Blender and POV-Ray will be affected by the capabilities of the cooling system, so it can be expected that Legion could reach a slightly better result than the competition. This was more or less confirmed in Blender, when the Legion defeated MSI by 4%, and OMEN with Asus by as much as 26 and 31%. In POV-Ray, there is only a 2% difference between MSI and Legion in favor of GS66, while OMEN and Asus again lag behind by 19 and 23%.

Single-core results in Geekbench 3–5 are similar as Cinebench and thus a -3/-3/-3% loss against the GS66, a 3/5/4% lead over the Omen and 9/10/8 over the M15. Multi-core is again -5/-7/-6% compared to the GS66, 24/18/16% over OMEN and 29/25/23 lead over the M15. These are very similar results to the previous tests. The result is a slight loss in SC against the GS66 with a processor with higher clock and, conversely, a slight lead over the two laptops with a weaker i7. A similar result is also in MC, where the Legion lags a bit more behind MSI, but the difference compared to the competition with i7 increases due to more cores and threads to about 20%. GPU Compute tests show a stable 3% lead over the OMEN and at first a slight 3–4% loss against both MSI and Asus, which increased to 10–13% in the latest version of the test.

Lenovo Legion is no longer a start-up brand, quite the contrary. In recent years, it has gained a strong position among gaming brands such as Asus, MSI and Gigabyte. This is mainly due to gaming tournaments, where we see Legion quite often, but especially on the gaming laptop market. The new flagship Legion 7i must not only resume where its great predecessor left off, but also beat strong competition.

3D/PCMark and Unigine Heaven/Superposition

The combined PCMark 10 test shows Legion dominating with a 16% win over MSI, 23% over the OMEN and up to 29% over Asus. As it is a long, 20–40 minute test, the cooling, which is very good in the 7i, certainly weighed here.

Gaming-oriented 3DMark Firestrike, Time Spy and Sky Diver confirm the dominance of the Legion from PCMark. In Firestrike it is only a hair faster than the M15, but has already won by 2 and 11% against MSI and OMEN. In Time Spy, the differences are larger, 2/6/20% against Asus/MSI/OMEN. Sky Diver, as the least demanding test of the three, surprisingly shows even bigger differences. MSI loses by only 2%, but OMEN by up to 25, and Asus, which the test didn’t favor at all, by even 81%.

Tests focused on RTX and DLSS again show measurable differences between the Legion 7i and the competition. In Port Royal, the Legion is 5% faster than MSI and by up to 21% than OMEN. In DLSS 1 tests, Legion closely wins against MSI in both on and off modes, namely by 4 and 6%, but in practice it is only 1–2 FPS. The newer version of DLSS 2 shows very similar results, i.e. 3/4% win against MSI and 15/17% against OMEN.

New tests have been added to 3DMark, which we will also use in the future. However, we do not yet have anything to compare the Legion with, so commentary on the results is irrelevant.

Unigine Heaven gaming tests again show higher performance of the Legion 7i against the GS66. The M15 is also doing well in this test, it’s even a bit faster than the Legion. We’re talking 3–5% in favor of Asus.

The latest graphics tests of Unigine Superposition do not change the situation. The Legion defeats both MSI and OMEN, but again we see Asus on the top, this time with 6% lead.

Lenovo Legion is no longer a start-up brand, quite the contrary. In recent years, it has gained a strong position among gaming brands such as Asus, MSI and Gigabyte. This is mainly due to gaming tournaments, where we see Legion quite often, but especially on the gaming laptop market. The new flagship Legion 7i must not only resume where its great predecessor left off, but also beat strong competition.

Gaming tests – dedicated GPU

In the gaming tests, there is again an interesting difference between the GS66 and the Duo 15, both equipped with the RTX 2080 Super Max-Q and also the M15. Although it has a weaker RTX 2070 Super Max-Q, its external dimensions and slim body are more similar to the GS66, while the Duo 15 has an obvious advantage due to its larger size and AAS cooling.

In GTA we see the Legion’s victory over the competition, Asus lost by 5%, MSI 43% and OMEN up to 64%. These are really big differences and only the M15 offers comparable performance to the Legion in this game.

In Far Cry you can again see the Legion’s lead, although the average FPS are the same as MSI has. Asus loses by 6% and OMEN 14%.

Odyssey shows very balanced results of average FPS between Legion, MSI and Asus, while OMEN lags behind by 12%. So let’s look at the minimal FPS, where Legion and MSI give better results than Asus and OMEN.

The new tested title is AC Valhalla, where we observe similar results as in Odyssey. So it looks like the new title will be similarly demanding as the older title from the family.

SOTTR confirms the trend of Legion’s dominance over MSI by 3%, OMEN 18% and Asus by up to 47%.

Surprisingly, Asus gives very good results in Metro and the Legion loses by 3%. However, MSI loses to the 7i by 6% and OMEN by up to 27%.

With RTX enabled, the difference in Metro increased to 5% between Asus and the Legion, and decreased slightly to 4% between the Legion and MSI and to 25% against OMEN.

Lenovo Legion is no longer a start-up brand, quite the contrary. In recent years, it has gained a strong position among gaming brands such as Asus, MSI and Gigabyte. This is mainly due to gaming tournaments, where we see Legion quite often, but especially on the gaming laptop market. The new flagship Legion 7i must not only resume where its great predecessor left off, but also beat strong competition.

Encryption, encoding

In both encryption and decryption, the Legion 7i loses by 8% against the GS66, but is 26/28% faster than the OMEN 15. The M15 surprisingly excels in this test and is 20–23% faster than Lenovo.

Video editing shows only a small difference between the 7i and GS66, specifically at the level of 3 and 0.5%. On the contrary, the Legion is 20–30% faster than the OMEN and M15 in both tests.

Lenovo Legion is no longer a start-up brand, quite the contrary. In recent years, it has gained a strong position among gaming brands such as Asus, MSI and Gigabyte. This is mainly due to gaming tournaments, where we see Legion quite often, but especially on the gaming laptop market. The new flagship Legion 7i must not only resume where its great predecessor left off, but also beat strong competition.

Memory and storage tests

The Legion 7i offers slightly lower speeds than the GS66, but there are differences by a few percent. Likewise, the lead over the OMEN and M15 is not huge. But the latency is very good, which is one of the lowest measured.

SSD speed is very good, almost 3.5 GB/s read and 3.0 GB/s write. Again, these are some of the highest recorded values, and I commend Lenovo for not saving on SSDs.

Lenovo Legion is no longer a start-up brand, quite the contrary. In recent years, it has gained a strong position among gaming brands such as Asus, MSI and Gigabyte. This is mainly due to gaming tournaments, where we see Legion quite often, but especially on the gaming laptop market. The new flagship Legion 7i must not only resume where its great predecessor left off, but also beat strong competition.

Temperatures and battery life

The maximum CPU temperatures of 99 degrees were not surprising. However, this is the maximum measured value across the tests, i.e. values that are usually the result of a rapid increase in performance and then decrease slightly. A nice 66 °C GPU temperature is a surprise, which is one of the best measured results ever. We will look at a more detailed analysis when comparing the modes and extended tests of Blender. It will be interesting mainly due to the results of rendering tests but also GPU and gaming benchmarks.

Battery life is relatively good considering the battery capacity, brighter display and 8-core processor. The M15 achieved a slightly better result, while the OMEN 15 and GS66 lagged behind.

Lenovo Legion is no longer a start-up brand, quite the contrary. In recent years, it has gained a strong position among gaming brands such as Asus, MSI and Gigabyte. This is mainly due to gaming tournaments, where we see Legion quite often, but especially on the gaming laptop market. The new flagship Legion 7i must not only resume where its great predecessor left off, but also beat strong competition.

Blender – comparing CPU and GPU

We are introducing a new type of test in which we want to show you the differences between CPU and GPU rendering and at the same time take a closer look at thermal management, clock and power draw in practice and not just the maximum or average values as in the previous pages.

So we’re comparing the course of the BMW test in the latest version of Blender, where in addition to the classic CPU and GPU render using CUDA, we also have the opportunity to use the new Nvidia OptiX, which uses the new hardware resources of RTX graphics cards. While CUDA works with shaders, OptiX also uses RT cores and tensor cores for acceleration. Such a more complex involvement of computing units brings higher performance and efficiency is at a better level. At the same time, the application support is already quite decent and comprehensive. For an overview of the editors supported by the Optix API, see the Nvidia website. Nvidia is serious about this interface and has been developing “studio” drivers for some time, in addition to game ready drivers, which are better and faster optimized for changes in supported applications.

In the first graph, you’re looking at the progress of the CPU clock during rendering. The classic CPU mode starts somewhere around 4100 MHz and decreases towards 3600 MHz, where it remains until the end of the test. Cuda recorded an even larger drop in clock, at about 3.4 GHz, while OptiX more or less stays around 4.4 GHz.

The CPU Package power draw shows that the CPU mode at full load takes about 90 W. CUDA gradually decreases from the initial value of 100 W to somewhere around 70 W. OptiX starts at about 65 W and gradually decreases to about 50 W.

Very important is the graph of the processor temperature where we see that the notebook maintains the maximum stable temperature at about 95 degrees. In connection with power draw and clock, it can be said that the notebook excellently resists thermal throttling and we do not see any performance drops, which could not be said about the competition.

The GPU load in CPU mode is practically minimal, on the contrary, in CUDA and OptiX you can see full load.

The load also corresponds to the clock, where it is interesting that at OptiX it holds at 1900 MHz, while in CUDA you can see a lower clock at around 1.7 GHz. Of course, the CPU is at minimum, as it is not used.

Power draw of the GPU copies graphs of load and clock, but with one difference. CUDA now has a higher power draw, around 90 W, while OptiX stays at about 80 W. In CPU mode, the power draw is practically zero.

Finally, a glance at GPU temperatures. A straight line with no large fluctuations with 53 degrees is visible in the CPU. A large part of the chip is used in CUDA and therefore the temperature rises above 65 degrees Celsius. In contrast, the curve stops just above 60 °C with OptiX and the temperature curve itself is less steep. This is logical, as smaller part of the chip is used, which does not create such a load.

The differences between the modes in Blender are considerable. The fastest is OptiX as expected with a value of 44 seconds. For comparison, Asus had 42, MSI 43 and HP 47 seconds. CUDA is 39% slower with a time of 61 seconds. Asus also had 61 seconds, MSI was slower with a time of 65 seconds. HP with a 6-core had 72 seconds. CPU render is naturally the slowest with 242 seconds. Differences against the competition can be seen here, too. MSI had 251 s, the M15 285 s and HP up to 367 s. The 8-core i7 Legion therefore delivers respectable results.

Lenovo Legion is no longer a start-up brand, quite the contrary. In recent years, it has gained a strong position among gaming brands such as Asus, MSI and Gigabyte. This is mainly due to gaming tournaments, where we see Legion quite often, but especially on the gaming laptop market. The new flagship Legion 7i must not only resume where its great predecessor left off, but also beat strong competition.

Performance modes

The notebook offers a choice of Performance, Balance and Silent modes in Lenovo Vantage.

All tests were done in Performance mode, but it’s worth looking at the differences between the modes. Therefore, we compare the performance course of combined load using 3DMark in the Fire Strike benchmark.

Processor clocks show a big difference between Silent and Balance with Performance. Silent has significantly higher clock, which is not a coincidence. You’ll see why in a moment.

Power draw copies the progress of clock and again we see that Balance and Performance have almost identical curves, but in this case Silent has a significantly lower power draw.

Likewise, the temperatures are higher in the case of the Silent, which corresponds to higher clock, but not lower power draw. The reason will likely be the lower fan speed. For the first time we see at least a slight difference between Balance and Performance, where the latter has slightly lower temperatures.

How’s the GPU? No load differences unlike with Blender, so it always works at full speed.

Very interesting clock graph, where we see that the modes affect the GPU more than the processor. Silent has significantly lower clock, Performance has a slight lead over Balance.

Power draw confirms the findings from clock graphs in an even better light. Silent apparently limits the GPU to 80 W, Balance is around 95 W and Performance jumps up to 110 W.

We see surprising results with GPU temperatures. Performance has the best results here, which could not be expected given the highest power draw, but the opposite is true. The reason is higher fan speeds. On the contrary, Balance tries to be quieter and therefore has the highest temperatures among the modes. Silent stays somewhere in the middle.

The differences between the modes can be seen mainly in comparison with Silent, but Balance and Performance are more or less similar. Silent loses by 14 and 18%. Balance thus lags behind Performance by only 4%, which is a relatively small difference, but definitely noticeable, especially in the GPU part.

Lenovo Legion is no longer a start-up brand, quite the contrary. In recent years, it has gained a strong position among gaming brands such as Asus, MSI and Gigabyte. This is mainly due to gaming tournaments, where we see Legion quite often, but especially on the gaming laptop market. The new flagship Legion 7i must not only resume where its great predecessor left off, but also beat strong competition.

Lenovo Vantage

The already known Lenovo Vantage application, which has a Legion gaming theme, is used for controls.

Here you can manage your device, change the performance modes, activate the hybrid mode or fast charging. You can also overclock the GPU here.

The application is also used for power controls, to save battery or activate USB charging, adjust speakers and microphone sound, display and camera, or to control functional keyboard shortcuts.

Other application options include WiFi protection, technical support or Migration Assistant for data transfer from the old device.

The application is also used to update drivers and BIOS.

Lenovo Legion is no longer a start-up brand, quite the contrary. In recent years, it has gained a strong position among gaming brands such as Asus, MSI and Gigabyte. This is mainly due to gaming tournaments, where we see Legion quite often, but especially on the gaming laptop market. The new flagship Legion 7i must not only resume where its great predecessor left off, but also beat strong competition.

Rating

Lenovo Legion 7i 15IMHg05 (81YU0054CK) is an amazing gaming laptop that offers a lot of positives and only slight flaws. I consider the main advantages to be a very good CPU and GPU configuration, which, thanks to sophisticated cooling, achieved above-standard results across tests and also beat a significantly more expensive configuration. ColdFront 2.0 cooling is really well designed and allows components to get the most out of performance, which is often a problem with thin gaming notebooks. The build quality, materials and overall impression of the device is excellent, but nothing else can be expected from Lenovo. I praise the keyboard and the port selection. I also give a big plus for the display, which offers great parameters for playing and graphic work.

Negatives are really hard to find. Perhaps the only one is the absence of biometric security, which is really a shame. What I would improve in the future are speakers, camera and maybe the touchpad, but this is very much played by the fact that I am used to a different class of equipment and criticism of these areas is really far-fetched. The overall rating, including the price, I think is clear. This is the best gaming laptop we tested in 2020, for which I award it the ‘Top notch’ award!

You can buy this notebook at our partner’s website czc.cz for 59,989 Czk/2,290 Eur

English translation and edit by Lukáš Terényi

Thanks to Spacebar for providing games for testing

• Contents
• Specs and details
• Testing methodology
• Display tests
• Rendering and Geekbench
• 3D/PCMark and Unigine Heaven/Superposition
• Gaming tests – dedicated GPU
• Encryption, encoding
• Memory and storage tests
• Temperatures and battery life
• Blender – test of CPU, CUDA and Optix
• Performance modes
• Utility app
• Rating