Lenovo’s Legion brand of gaming laptops has gradually earned a decent name in the gaming market despite its niche target. The Legion 7 Pro (16IRX9H), a premium gaming laptop priced at Rs 3,55,179, aims to fulfil pretty much all your gaming needs with a slight bit of mobility with it.
Let’s try and see if it’s really worth that price tag: First things first, this laptop clearly prioritises performance over portability. It weighs a little over 2.6 kg while measuring an inch in thickness. Both the top and bottom casing is done out anodised aluminium and the laptop does feel really well-built with no obvious build quality issues.
The keyboard casing area is all plastic but it doesn’t feel cheap at all. The front side that’s parallel to the user has an LED strip that’s quite bright, adding a bit of a gaming character to go with that RGB backlit keyboard. The keyboard has a full number keys partition on the right and the keys here are some of the most comfortable I have seen on a laptop in a while. Even though it might not be this gaming laptop’s biggest USP, the Legion team has really made a quality keyboard with no flex issues that I could notice. The mouse trackpad is standard for a Lenovo laptop and does a fine job of tracking taps reliably and for basic Windows gestures.
On the left side, you have large vents, USB A 2.1 Gen 1 port and a USB C 3.2 Gen 2 with Thunderbolt 4; while the right side has more vents, another USB A 3.2 Gen 1 port along with the privacy shutter button for the webcam and 3.5mm audio jack. The back has some more vents most of the ports – LAN port, power connector, HDMI 2.1, another USB type C port but with fast charging at 140watts and DisplayPort 1.4. The I/O options are quite a lot and should be sufficient for pretty much all kinds of users. At the bottom, you have long rubberised short height stands and some more vents.
The laptop has a 16-inch WQXGA (2560x1600) IPS display with an aspect ratio of 16:10. This is a really nice and sufficiently bright display with support for higher refresh rates of up 240Hz. This is how you know it’s a high-end gaming machine. The display is sharp with good viewing angles and doesn’t have any retention issues when playing something fast moving, be it games or videos.
The Legion 7 Pro runs on Windows 11 Home (version 23H2) and is equipped with Intel’s 14th gen i9 chip (i9-14900HX up to 2.2Ghz and 5.8Ghz boost) plus Intel UHD graphics, along with 32GB DDR6 RAM, 1 TB of m.2 SSD, and nVidia’s GeForce RTX 4090 GPU. Again, these tell you how high-end a machine this is. Some might even say that 4090 for a gaming machine like this a little bit of an overkill. You can expect to play games like Horizon Dawn Zero at above around 100FPS and above 130FPS if nVidia’s DLSS has been enabled for giving frame rates a boost. If you’ve plugged in power, then that GPU and highest resolution isn’t going to be a problem, but if it’s on battery, might want to tone down settings inside the game you’re playing, which is pretty much a norm for a gaming laptop.
Another thing is, you have to keep a watch on the laptop’s temperature when playing these games for longer hours, given temperatures these days. You should be using it with sufficient cooling space around. This is also a good laptop if you need to do video editing and some graphic designing work given its display as well as GPU power available underneath.
Battery life on the laptop is quite average, lasting about 4.5 hours with an hour of Dirt Rider while doing other tasks things such as watching YouTube videos, writing Word documents and downloading a large file in the background. This is with the display brightness at 50 per cent at most times and keyboard lighting switched on.
All in all, the Legion 7 Pro is a tank of a laptop that’s meant to give you plenty of gaming power when plugged in to a power source. It can handle some of the most graphic-intensive games at their highest settings smoothly and doesn’t let you down with its keyboard and display quality either. It might be advisable that you get a decent 4k display powered by the laptop to really use that GPU underneath to even a higher potential for your gaming requirements.