It’s not often we give a gaming laptop a score in the high 80s, and there’s a very good reason for that. We’re famously tough when it comes to scoring, so for a laptop to reach those heady heights it really has to be something fantastic.
So when the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 9 received a score of 88% in our review a mere day ago, you can guarantee that it’s a good ‘un. What’s truly surprising, however, is you can pick one up at B&H Photo right now for $2,000.
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I know, I know, that still looks like a lot of money. But when you see the specs on offer here and compare it to, well, almost every other new laptop with an RTX 4080, it’s an early Black Friday gaming laptop deal stunner.
Let’s have a perusal through the highlights, shall we? An Intel Core i9 14900HX in the CPU slot means 24-cores of blazing performance, even if it does have a tendency to run hot. It’s got 32 GB of DDR5-5600, the correct amount for a super-high performance machine in this day and age. A 240 Hz 1600p display? Superb.
Oh, and a 175 W RTX 4080. That’s literally as high as we’d go in a modern gaming laptop, as while you can find RTX 4090 machines (for huge amounts of cash, I hasten to add), it’s almost always a waste of money. The full-fat mobile RTX 4080 though? Yep, that’s a mega GPU, and here it’s surrounded by components that can really push it to its limits.
I should also point out that 1600p display again. It’s a 16-inch panel, which means that resolution is plenty good enough to keep things sharp. But the RTX 4080 is a hell of a performer even at 4K, meaning that it’ll have absolutely no issues at all pumping frames towards that display at a serious rate of knots. That 240 Hz refresh rate makes a whole lot of sense now, doesn’t it?
So what didn’t our Katie like about the Legion Pro 7i? Well, it comes with a fair amount of bloatware installed, although that’s a pretty easy fix. The glittery speckled surface looks great, but it’s a bit prone to fingerprints and smudges. Oh, and it only gets 40 minutes battery life when gaming, but then that’s modern high powered gaming laptops for you.
They’re almost all a bit rubbish in that regard, so you’ll want to keep it plugged in to take advantage of that hardware at speed. Our review sample also had 2 TB of storage, whereas this deal machine has a single 1 TB drive, but that spare slot is just begging for a cheap SSD addition at some point in the near future.
Did I mention that we have a Black Friday cheap SSD page just for that? I know, we’re good at this sort of thing.
But honestly, that’s a pretty small list of critiques for a PC Gamer laptop review. We put these machines through the absolute wringer, with a highly demanding set of benchmarks mixed in with hour after hour of real world testing. And the Lenovo came up trumps. Impressive, ey?
There was one other critique: Price. With a $2,729 MSRP, we felt it was a bit expensive compared to its competition. But for $2,000? Well, that’s just dandy.
