With a retail price close to €4,000, the Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IRX8H, which we now have for review, cannot really be considered a bargain. However, this price offers you a Core i9-13900HX, 32 GB of DDR5-5600-RAM (2x 16 GB), and a 1 TB PCIe Gen 4x4 NVMe M.2 2280 SSD.  

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop GPU with 12 GB GDDR6 VRAM takes care of demanding graphics tasks. The matte IPS display in a 16:10 format with a resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels is rated to achieve 100% sRGB and 500 nits of peak brightness. Lenovo has equipped the 240 Hz panel with support for Nvidia G-Sync in addition to AMD FreeSync, which is a good thing.  Aging Tester

Windows 11 Home comes installed as the operating system of choice.

The Lenovo Legion 7 Pro's primary competition so far is the Razer Blade 16 Early 2023, although it is also interesting to see how the laptop fares is comparison to the previous generation. Therefore, we also include Legion 7 SKUs featuring the following combinations: Core i9-12900HX and RTX 3080 Ti, Ryzen 9 5900HX and RTX 3080, and the Ryzen 9 6900HX and RX 6850M XT.

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The chassis design is quite similar to that of its predecessor, the Legion 7 16ARHA7 with some slight changes such as the redesigned side and rear vents. Even with these changes, the chassis design remains good. The stability and strength of the hinges, which can open to a full 180°, is also above average for the class.

The overall quality of feels great. The metal lid, in particular, looks classy thought it can quickly become a fingerprint magnet. The look is mostly unobtrusive when switched off save for the Legion marking on the lid.

During operation, however, the Legion 7 Pro can be immediately recognized as a gaming laptop owing to the RGB-illuminated keyboard and the LED strip at the front.

At about 2.7 kg, the 16-inch Legion 7 Pro tends to be one of the heavier laptops in its category (the Razer Blade 16 weighs 300 g less). Similarly, the 2.6 cm height is about 4 mm more than the Blade 16, which should theoretically help with better cooling.

The Legion 7 Pro impresses with its abundance of ports. A total of six USB ports are available (2x Type-C, 4x Type-A), which is not the case often even in high-end gaming laptops. Three external displays can be connected thanks to the HDMI 2.1-out and DisplayPort-out support on the two USB Type-C ports. Also impressive is the 140 W power delivery via USB Type-C. 

An RJ-45 port, and an audio jack complete the port selection. Presence of a physical webcam shutter switch on the right side is a plus. The only downside in the Legion 7 Pro is the absence of a card reader.

Since the majority of the ports are located towards the rear of the device, both left and right handers will get their money's worth when using a wired gaming mouse.

We did not find any discrepancies in Wi-Fi performance. The Legion Pro 7 achieved a throughput of 1,600 Mb/s at a distance of 1 m from our Asus ROG Rapture GT-AXE11000 reference router, which corresponds to very good transmission and reception. The Razer Blade 16 settles for a few 100 Mbps lesser throughput.

The quality of the webcam is somewhat above average. The 2 MP camera offers decent image sharpness and passable color accuracy, which is acceptable for a notebook (the standards here are very poor, unfortunately).

The scope of delivery includes a massive 800 g power supply that measures 18.5 x 8 x 2.5 cm, which is on expected lines for a 330 W model. A few information booklets come as standard.

Lenovo could have made disassembling the Legion 7 Pro more customer friendly. Even after removing all the housing screws, the base plate is so tight (especially in the rear) that there's a fear of damaging the chassis if too much force is applied.

Due to this reason, and the fact that this a retail sample from the shop, we did not attempt opening the laptop for safety.

According to the manufacturer's information in Germany, the Legion 7 Pro's warranty can be extended to over three years with Premium Care.

The keyboard offers little room for complaint. The typical Lenovo-style keys with curved lower edges ensures a pleasant typing experience after some familiarization. Actuation and pressure point are quite good, though not exactly near the level of a mechanical keyboard.

The keyboard layout feels convincing in our opinion. Those who rely on arrow keys a lot can look forward to decent dimensioning. A full-fledged numpad is also available. The clear key labeling means that you can turn off the backlight during the day. Otherwise, the backlight offers a useful intensity and several adjustment modes.

The 12 x 7.5 cm smooth touchpad feels sufficient for a 16-inch device and is placed relatively far to the left. We did not find any issues with precision and gliding properties, which lends to a smooth operation.

The click areas near the bottom are very stable and can be easily triggered but sound quite loud and rickety.

The Legion 7 Pro's 240 Hz WQXGA panel offers a high average luminosity of 469 cd/m2, which should augur well for outdoor viewing. The competition also offers similar brightness levels, however.

The 1,278:1 contrast ratio is on similar lines as the Blade 16. However, the Razer flagship offers a higher color gamut coverage. The Legion Pro 7 can manage 100% sRGB but falls short when it comes to Adobe RGB and Display P3 coverage.

That being said, the Legion Pro 7 offers excellent color accuracy out-of-the-box thanks to X-Rite Pantone calibration.

The response times (~6 ms black to white) are on expected lines. The viewing angle stability usually depends on the IPS level, it seems to be relatively good from oblique positions.

In comparison: 53 % of all tested devices do not use PWM to dim the display. If PWM was detected, an average of 19288 (minimum: 5 - maximum: 3846000) Hz was measured.

The present configuration puts the Lenovo Legion Pro 7 in the absolute high-end category, which means that you will have to cough up the pennies accordingly (we consider the current price level to be excessive, nevertheless). 

In any case, this configuration offers enough power to sail through all kinds of workloads for years to come.

The Lenovo Vantage app comes preinstalled within which you can choose from several performance and GPU operating modes. You can also change performance modes via the shortcut Fn + Q. 

We used the Performance mode for all our measurements together with active graphics switching that dynamically switches between the iGPU and the dGPU. A pure dGPU mode is also available (check screenshots below). 

The table below illustrates the effect of different performance modes on the PL1/PL2 values and fan noise.

The Intel Core i9-13900HX is a performance monster. The 10 nm part offers eight performance cores with 2.2 GHz to 5.4 GHz clocks and hyperthreading support along with 16 efficiency cores clocked at 1.6 GHz to 3.9 GHz without hyperthreading, resulting in a total of 32 threads in parallel. 

Solar Battery Tester Ba327 The lush 36 MB L3 cache and 55 W TDP further reaffirm that the Core i9-13900HX is a powerful chip.