- Here we have the Lenovo Legion 7i 16 inch
and it's a gaming laptop,
but it doesn't have all of the gamer looks about it
which makes it great to use as an everyday laptop as well,
it's a great combo.
So thanks to Lenovo Legion and Intel
for sponsoring this video and let's get straight into it.
Power brick first of course.
So let's see here, 300 watts,
that's a lot of watts for a laptop.
I think this thing has a 3080 in it though,
so no wonder.
Oh, got a sticker.
Okay, here we go low.
There's the main event.
Let's have a little look at the I/O here,
so headphone jack, thunderbolt 4, love to see that.
We also have our power input, USB-A three of them,
HDMI 2.1,
we also have another Thunderbolt 4 port right here,
full-size ethernet,
and then USB type C, not Thunderbolt,
and it looks like a little webcam hardware shut off.
The look overall is not too over the top
for a gaming machine.
It just seems like it's all mostly stamped aluminum
with some plastic stuff,
I think that this right here is plastic,
but along here is all metal,
build quality is fantastic.
This thing is like I said, pretty much all aluminum,
very stiff around the whole thing,
no complaints.
It's also just set up in like a logical way for a laptop,
like we've got a nice big track pad,
very generous keyboard, even has num keys,
I know some people love those.
The real star of the show here though, is the display,
what I love most about this display is the 16:10.
It's the sort of thing where it has a lot of versatility
to the laptop,
where you're able to do things
like web browsing, using words, spreadsheets,
basically all of your productivity crap is a lot easier
to do on a display like this, as opposed to 16:10.
But then you also have the 165 hertz
and it makes everything smoother.
Oh and also has G-SYNC support,
this one's a 3060.
I thought we had 3081 Jono, I guess it is good
we get to see how this one holds up as opposed
to the 3080 version that I've already used before,
and is expectedly incredibly fast.
(Jono laughing)
Let's just do a full rundown of the specs here.
So we have an Intel Core i7-11800H,
so that's eight cores, 4.6 gigahertz max turbo,
So we also have 16 gigabytes of Ram,
3,200 mega transfers per second,
512 gigabyte SSD.
I would probably expected it with a little bit more
if you want a bunch of games,
but we'll see if we can upgrade that later.
For wifi we have Intel WiFi 6 AX201.
So that is basically the best wifi card that you can get.
And our RTX 3060,
this right here,
it looks like it's the six gigabyte version.
So this is what I would probably recommend that you get,
it's the kind of thing where this chassis
will handle a 3080 or a 3070.
It's not going to care, it can do the cooling.
I believe this has vapor chamber cooled, but as a laptop,
I would much rather have a 3060
and it's cause it's still...
it's gonna be fine for playing
all of your games, it can, most likely we'll see in a bit,
but do 1440P 165 Hertz in the majority of things
and G-Sync will help you out if it can't quite,
and then you don't have to worry about being super loud
or being super power hungry when you're on battery
and so on.
I think 3060 is where I would go with this one.
Lenovo Legion specifically said in their notes
that they want some high octane gameplay for this.
So should we turn it over the farm in Valheim, Jono?
- Heck yeah!
- Yeah!
We should probably make this guy some clothing first,
haven't really used them yet.
So we've got a bunch of carrots here,
well, a bunch of carrots seeds actually,
here we go,
we're getting 98 FPS while planting carrots.
Lenovo also has their Legion AI engine.
So that basically just allows you to, well,
it decides when it needs to be loud and quiet and so on,
you basically don't have to screw around with Windows
power management profiles,
and I lost about 30 FPS.
Let's go back to auto so it can just figure out
what it needs to do.
Yeah,
and now we're back up to 90 FPS, that's a lot better.
So silent mode does work,
yeah, it just doesn't make your performance great.
So overall I would say that that was an excellent
seed planting experience, I still have 65 carrot seeds,
but those can be for another day.
3060 is doing great as expected.
I am seeing some dips
to like 70, 60 FPS,
not really a problem.
And it is absolutely cranked right now,
so I'm sure that if I wanted to,
I could easily get an extra 30, 40 FPS from it
by just turning off a couple of kind of dumb settings.
Is a situation that we're like,
this screen just looks so good,
at this size you really do not need 4k,
and with this GPU you could not run 4k,
like just full stop, It wouldn't do it,
but it's pretty happy running 1440 P and it looks great,
like it's real nice and bright, colors are good.
165 Hertz.
That's probably my favorite bit along with the G-Sync,
which means that like we are dropping to like 70,
60 FPS in spots,
but the whole thing still feels smooth
and there's no tearing or craps.
So you're not noticing it,
I don't know if you saw that,
but down in the bottom right corner,
a little pop-up came up that said display mode,
dedicated GPU mode only,
which is awesome because this has a dedicated muck switch.
And I think that that means that it has Nvidia Optimist Plus
or two, whatever the crap it is, doesn't matter,
basically means that in some laptops
you have your GPU and your eGPU.
and GPU goes through the eGPU to the display
and you lose like 10% performance.
And this right here goes straight from the GPU
to the display, you get those extra frames, love to see it.
Now we get some real high-octane gameplay.
Oh, HDR, I can enable it.
Let's see what happens.
But we do have Raytracing in this game,
I don't think I'm gonna turn it on,
but what I do think I'm going to do is enable DLSS,
so that's kind of the thing when you have a 3060,
what I would lean on
their tensor AI Raytraicing course to do.
(atmospheric music)
The Legions 7i is powered by the latest 11th gen Intel Core
H series mobile processors.
It offers streamers and content creators,
a choice of high performance processors
for superior streaming, low latency, high FPS,
and close desktop caliber performance.
On mobile it's basically the best gaming processor
you can get these days.
I just love the display,
it's a big selling feature for me personally.
One thing I did notice while we were gaming there
is that the keyboard seems like it's tuned for games.
Yeah.
So the keyboard on this has a really short snappy throw
and not a whole lot of force to hit the keys.
It's quite good for typing on,
although it's not quite as like tactile
as you would want for like a real
productivity focused machine,
but it trades that off to make it way easier to game on.
So sort of thing where when you're hitting WASD,
the low actuation force makes it just easier to do that.
And you're not going to get like hand cramps
from having to push down control and shift
and use a lot of force to do that.
And it's not like the typing experience is bad,
it's just, it's clearly geared towards gaming specifically.
This is the kind of keyboard where it's super easy
to have really fast inputs,
cause it's like a real nice little snap at the start,
so you can really like
(typing sounds)
Track pad's good,
it's the kind of thing where if you have a track pad
on a gaming laptop, that's not bad,
you've basically won.
This one right here it's big enough that I'm not mad at it,
and it tracks well enough that I haven't noticed anything
bad about it again.
And even looks like the latency on it is quite decent
as well,
you can sometimes notice when you have like a high refresh
rate display, like this one right here,
that the experience between using a mouse that's polling at
whatever this is, like 500 or a 1,000 Hertz.
And then you go to your track pad
and it just kind of feels jello.
This one's really quite good.
I'm actually curious what it's pulling at.
Okay yeah, it's not magic,
so it is pulling out 144 Hertz,
like pretty much every track pad does.
You're not going to get super high polling rate track pads
these days,
just because the trade-off is the more Hertz it has,
the more battery life it uses.
(upbeat music)
Okay,
that's not bad, they're like a bit on the muddy side,
but there is some base there,
which is a lot more than you can say about
most laptops speakers,
I would say adequate.
Heck yeah, look at that.
80 megabytes per second over wifi,
that wifi six card is pretty legit.
Oh,
one thing that I forgot to talk about before
that I really like about this laptop
are the markings here for the I/O,
they light up when you have it on
and it makes plugging stuff in
when you're looking like back and around way easier.
(laptop cracking)
That was a very simple disassembly,
just some Phillips head screws.
Now this looks like a pretty typical stamped aluminum part,
which is fine.
I think it's these days probably the most sense-making way
to manufacture laptops because you get the nice rigidity
without it being super ball's expensive,
like unibody chassis.
So it looks like we have two M.2 slots.
There we go, take off this little heat spreader thing,
we see our wifi card and our SSD
it looks like it is, what is this?
It's made by Samsung, excellent.
On the other side,
we have an empty M.2 slot.
As long as you have a Phillips head screw and a guitar pick,
you're going to be able to upgrade your storage in this
without much issue.
That was under right here, the ramp,
I really thought that's upgradable.
Sick, it is.
So here are two Sodimm slots to eight gigabytes,
1Rx16 memory, so this is the more slower stuff,
but also big OEMs can't get the more faster 8X stuff.
So there you go.
This is a sort of laptop where you could easily
do double duty, as like, a school engineering creator,
video editing, or you know, architect laptop,
as opposed to just gaming only.
And the rest of what we see in here is all vapor chambers.
So all the way down here, up here, we've got CPU
GPU presumably, probably a bunch of VRM crap in here.
And it goes to adjust there and there.
There are two fans that have little Legion logo on them,
very nice.
I love vapor chambers,
they allow you to have laptops like this
that are relatively quiet and relatively cool.
And finally we have, what is this?
An 80 watt hour battery,
which is pretty decent for a laptop of this size,
up to 6.6 hours.
Now, if you get the non-i version of this,
you should be able to eack a bit more battery life
out of it.
This is the kind of laptop where what you're doing
is what will determine your battery life.
If you take it down to 60 Hertz on the display
and drop the brightness and don't game,
you'll probably get those six hours.
And apparently there's rapid charging,
it will do zero to 50% in less than 30 minutes,
which is pretty cool,
that's the kind of thing that can save your bacon
if you're doing a big long trip for the library
or group project or something, there you go.
Awesome laptop.
Great display.
Just love the display on this thing,
that's the selling feature for me personally.
Huge thanks to Lenovo Legion Intel
for sponsoring today's video.
And if you liked it, hit like, get subscribe.