Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 9 Gaming Laptop Review

TweakTown's Rating: 91%

The Bottom Line

Lenovo's Legion 7i Gen 9 gaming laptop is as solid as it comes, with top-notch connectivity and performance to match, although it does run hot when loaded.

Pros

• + Intel Core i9-14900HX CPU and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 GPU
• + DDR5 SO-DIMM
• + Gen4 NVMe
• + Thunderbolt 4
• + Wi-Fi 6e

Cons

• - Wi-Fi is CNVio
• - Runs hot

Should you buy it?

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Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing

Lenovo's Legion lineup is one of the most popular gaming laptop brands currently on the market. It encompasses several tiers, including Legion 5, 7, and the flagship 9i, each representing different hardware levels. For our review today, we opted for the midrange Legion 7i, though we did choose the highest SKU, the 16IRX9, in the Arctic White colorway.

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The Legion 7i has two CPU choices from Intel's Raptor Lake lineup: 14700HX and 14900HX. Our model does include the latter. This gives us eight performance cores and sixteen efficient cores for a total of twenty-four cores with hyper-threading enabled thirty-two threads. Base clocks come in at 1.6GHz for the e-cores and 2.2 GHz for the P-cores, while turbo clocks reach 4.1GHz for the E-cores and 5.8GHz for the p-cores. Memory support is over two DDR5 SO-DIMM slots; Lenovo stacked our model with 32GB, though the system does support 192GB. The included GPU was the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU.

The Legion 7i's expansion includes two Gen4 NVMe slots and a m.2 Wi-Fi CNVio slot. Connectivity includes two USB 3.2 Gen 1 and two USB 3.2 Gen 2 using USB-C and a single Thunderbolt 4. A single HDMI 2.1 is also on the rear I/O for additional displays, and an SD Card reader is also available for those in need.

The pricing of the Lenovo Legion 7i, as configured, comes in at $2499.

Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 9 Gaming Laptop

	Today	Yesterday	7 days ago	30 days ago
	$2249.00	$2249.00	$2249.00	$2249.00	Buy
* Prices last scanned on 8/28/2024 at 1:57 pm CDT - prices may not be accurate, click links above for the latest price. We may earn an affiliate commission.

Notebook Overview

Overview

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The Legion arrived in retail packaging, including the box seen above.

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The power adapter for the Legion 7i is a 230W model.

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We start our journey with the Legion 7i, unboxing it. As mentioned above, this white colorway features Lenovo and Legion branding on the machine's lid.

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The left side of the machine offers two USB 3.2 ports, one using Type-A and the other USB-C. Additionally, we have the Thunderbolt 4 port on this side and the 3.5mm audio jack.

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The rear I/O includes the power input on the right side and HDMI 2.1 to the left.

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The right side includes the SD card reader and a second USB-C port. The USB 3.2 port is on the far right.

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The bottom of the Legion includes venting up top and large rubber feet at each corner and across the top.

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Opening the Legion, we have a full-size keyboard with RGB backlighting; the trackpad is offset just below.

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Pulling the cover off the 7i, we have the battery along the bottom of the chassis, while the DDR5 memory slots are just above. NVMe slots flank each side of the chassis, while the m.2 Wi-Fi lives on the left side.

BIOS/UEFI and Software

UEFI

The Legion BIOS offers a quick mode with several options, including thermal mode, graphics mode, and boot device. You can optionally go deeper with the advanced BIOS, which offers hardware information on the first tab. Configuration includes system date and time, wireless LAN on /off, and Graphics device mode. Further options include a quick overclocking mode on the advanced page.

Software

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Performance can be tuned through the Lenovo Vantage software, which provides a section for system tools.

System/CPU Benchmarks

Cinebench

Cinebench is a long-standing render benchmark that has been heavily relied upon by both Intel and AMD to highlight their newest platforms during unveilings. The benchmark has two tests: a single-core workload that utilizes one thread or 1T and a multi-threaded test that uses all threads or nT of a tested CPU.

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Cinebench 2024 gave us solid performance for a single-core; the 7i scored 124 points for 1T, while nT scored 1409.

BAPCo CrossMark

CrossMark™ is an easy-to-run native cross-platform benchmark that uses real-world application models to measure overall system performance and responsiveness. CrossMark™ supports devices running Windows, iOS, and macOS platforms.

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CrossMark picked up 2213, the highest score we have seen to date.

AIDA64 Memory

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Memory performance was 85K read, 76K write, and 77 K copy. Latency landed at 83ns.

Geekbench 6

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Geekbench scored 2909 in single-core workloads and 17743 in multi-core, the best we have ever seen.

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Legion 7i picked up 116K in OpenCL and 117K in Vulkan, the best we scored with an RTX 4070.

Graphics, System I/O, Battery, and Gaming

System I/O Performance

PCMark

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PCMark Extended landed at 10313, a touch better than the X16R2 we recently reviewed.

3DMark

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The CPU Profile for one and two cores has our Legion in the third spot in our charts, with scores of 1163 and 2251, respectively.

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Increasing the core counts, we pick up 4241 at four threads and 7379 at eight. We finish with a score of 9801 at sixteen threads, third in our chart above.

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Time Spy is our first synthetic gaming workload, the Legion pulling out a score of 12593.

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3DMark Storage came in at 434 MB/s.

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Pushing into gaming benchmarks, we have Steel Nomad on the 7i, which scored 2727.

Gaming

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Speed Way landed with a score of 2995, the best RTX 4070 system.

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Getting into Cyberpunk 2077, the Legion 7i scored 78 FPS at 1080p.

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Moving to 1600p, the Legion 7i landed with 47 FPS.

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Last, we have the Legion 7i's battery life using the Modern Office preset in PCMark. This system has 154 minutes of battery life.

Final Thoughts

The Legion 7i wraps up our testing as a fantastic 16" Lenovo offers. Its solid 14900HX/RTX 4070 build fits perfectly into the mid-range category and is priced accordingly. The small area above the keyboard seems to run very hot, likely due to fan exhausts and the heat pipe for the CPU/GPU running through the same location. The keyboard on this machine is quite good, with a solid tactile feel and full RGB backlighting, and is slightly recessed into the chassis. Below is the trackpad, which I found nearly perfect in size, though it is offset left.

As for hardware performance, the 14900HX is still the best Intel CPU offering for mobile, despite Meteor Lake H being available. Geekbench and CPU Profile were both solid workloads for the 7i. We picked up chart-topping scores in both, the Legion grabbing 2909 single thread in Geekbench and 1163 in CPU Profile. Full system workloads like PCMark and Crossmark were quite good. Crossmark got a chart-topping score of 2213, while PCMark came in at 10313, the best RTX 4070 machine we have tested.

Gaming was quite good on the Legion, too; as expected, we picked up solid numbers in both Steel Nomad and Speed Way workloads, the latter coming in at 2995, once again the best RTX 4070-powered machine we have tested. Cyberpunk, too, was quite good; the Legion picked up 78 FPS using the 1080p Ultra preset and 47 FPS using the 1600p Ultra preset.

As for pricing, the Legion 7i 16IRX9 has an ideal price range depending on the hardware build itself, as configured we run around $2499 for this machine, which seems to be the median price for a laptop of this caliber as the Blade 16 and Origin EON15 both have similar builds with nearly identical pricing.