The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 9 16 ($2,441.49 as tested) challenges many high-end gaming laptops for hundreds less. It doesn't have all the frills of Lenovo's flagship Legion 9 rigs, but it comes close, giving you a premium build and powerful components without hitting the laptop pricing stratosphere. Packing an Intel Core i9-14900HX CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 driving a 2,560-by-1,600-pixel screen with 240Hz refresh rate, it's ready for the most demanding games. For giving $3,000-plus portables something to worry about, the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 9 16 wins our Editors' Choice award for deluxe gaming laptops.
Configurations: Two High-End Models and a Ringer
Lenovo doesn't make waves with the Legion Pro 7i Gen 9 design-wise: It looks and feels much like the previous generation, but why mess with a good thing? In fact, you can't mess with much, period, as the company only sells the system in two hardware configurations (though there is a choice of Windows 11 Home or Pro).
Both versions boast Intel's Core i9-14900HX processor, 32GB of DDR5-5600 memory, two 1TB NVMe solid-state drives, and the 240Hz, 16:10 aspect ratio display. While our RTX 4080 review unit is $2,441.49 (with Win 11 Home), stepping up to Nvidia's RTX 4090 brings the price to $2,899.99.
Don't confuse the Legion Pro 7i Gen 9 with Lenovo's Legion 7i Gen 9, which has the same CPU and screen but steps down to a GeForce RTX 4070 GPU. Starting at $1,738.49 with 16GB of RAM, it's thinner and lighter (4.93 pounds versus 6.17) and has a different arrangement of ports, including the Thunderbolt 4 port that this Pro counterpart oddly lacks.
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Design: Gaming Incognito
Like the Gen 8, the Pro 7i Gen 9 is tanky but well-built, presenting a sturdy platform made of aluminum and magnesium. It sits on thick rubber feet, has a 180-degree display hinge, and includes extensive ventilation with ports occupying roughly half of each side plus the rear edge. The shroud around the vents has a rougher texture than the rest of the system, lending to the somewhat brutalist design.
By "brutalist," I don't mean "over-the-top gamer"; while there's RGB lighting on board, you can turn it off and let the Legion pass for a productivity or workstation laptop. I could squeeze its 1.01-by-14.3-by-10.3-inch chassis into a carrying sleeve meant for 15.6-inch laptops, but not easily. It's awfully hefty for a backpack or briefcase, and that's not even counting its weighty 330-watt power brick.
Per-key RGB lighting on the keyboard is complemented by front-edge lighting around the base. The lighting shines effectively through the keycaps, fully illuminating the legends. Lenovo provides a tight numeric keypad next to the keyboard, and cleverly provides arrow keys to avoid squishing any other keys. Like many new Windows laptops, the Legion Pro 7i also sees the right Control key replaced with a Windows Copilot key, though its processor lacks a neural processing unit (NPU) so most interactions with Windows' AI will rely on cloud servers.
What Lenovo calls a TrueStrike keyboard offers a snappy 1.5mm of key travel. It also supports swappable keycaps, though finding fitting caps might be challenging.
One of this Legion's highlights is its screen. The 16-inch IPS panel combines 2,560-by-1,600-pixel resolution with a 240Hz refresh rate, and is surrounded by relatively thin bezels for a gaming laptop. Rated for a peak brightness of 500 nits, the screen has DisplayHDR 400 certification and Dolby Vision and Nvidia G-Sync support as well as Pantone validation. It's also rated for 100% coverage of the sRGB and DCI-P3 color spaces.
The webcam is nothing special, though at least it provides 1080p instead of 720p resolution. As with several gaming rigs, the Legion has no biometrics built in, so you must type passwords instead of using Windows Hello's face or fingerprint unlocking. A pair of 2-watt speakers hide under the laptop's front corners. They're angled out just slightly so they're not strictly a down-firing setup, but they rely on your desk to bounce audio up rather than aiming it directly at your ears.
Lenovo continues to take advantage of its Legion laptops' large rear thermal shelf, fitting most of the ports between cooling vents there. You'll find two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port, an HDMI 2.1 monitor port, and the power connector. The laptop's left edge holds additional USB-A and USB-C ports, while the right side provides a third USB-A port, an audio jack, and a privacy switch for the webcam. Thunderbolt 4 and USB4 are glaring omissions, especially considering this is an Intel-based machine.
Finally, Wi-Fi 6E (with 2x2 MIMO) and Bluetooth 5.3 provide wireless connectivity for internet access, peripherals, and headphones.
Using the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 9: A Big Wonder to Put Your Hands on
Coming from another Lenovo keyboard on my personal laptop, the shift to the Legion Pro 7i Gen 9 16 was natural—Lenovo keyboards are generally topnotch, and this Legion's is no exception. It has well-stabilized keycaps that avoid the squishy feel of all too many laptop keyboards. The actuation force is fairly high, giving a poppy feel that lends to confident typing. I soon reached a typing speed of 122 words per minute with 98% accuracy in Monkeytype, which is right around my peak outside of truly exceptional keyboards. The only downside to using the keyboard is that there's a lot of deck or wrist rest area below it; the hard-angled front edge sometimes dug uncomfortably into my wrists.
Despite its sizable proportions, the Legion features a somewhat dainty touchpad. It's large enough for easy navigation and multi-finger gestures, and its Mylar surface is wonderfully smooth, but it's not nearly as wide as the pads on some recent laptops such as the smaller Dell XPS 14.
The screen's anti-glare finish is quite effective, though it still requires some smart screen angling. Extremely bright reflections can still wash out sections of the display, even with the latter ramped up to full brightness. Otherwise, the screen is quite excellent for both gaming and everyday apps, wonderfully bright and sharp with smooth, zippy animation and video at 240Hz.
The Legion's speakers produce rich sound that comes through cleanly. They don't venture deep into bass, so the weight of music and movies can be lacking, but they're not thin or tinny like many cheaper laptop speakers. A preinstalled Nahimic app provides small but noticeable audio enhancement, but the speakers are respectable even without it.
This Lenovo laptop isn't stuffed with bloatware, just some house-brand utility apps and partner tools. There are no fewer than five Lenovo-specific applications, but they're valuable tools for controlling the system, such as Lenovo Vantage which manages performance profiles and system updates. They're joined by Nahimic and Dolby Vision audio and video tools and, curiously, the Tobii head-tracking app but not Tobii's Game Hub, which is required to enable eye-tracking controls in games (as is an IR webcam).
Testing the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 9: Carrying a Lineage of Success
While you can certainly find higher-priced gaming laptops (including Lenovo's own Legion 9i Gen 8), the Pro 7i Gen 9 doesn't stand out as an expensive choice, approaching the low side for GeForce RTX 4080 machines. Last year's Legion Pro 7i Gen 8 cost about $300 more with less storage. Similar configurations of the Asus ROG Strix Scar 16 and HP Omen 16 cost more than $2,800 apiece, even though the HP has a 13th Generation Core i7 versus a 14th Gen Core i9. The Alienware m16 manages to cost less, but it sacrifices half the memory and storage compared to the Legion Pro 7i.
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
We run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.
Three other benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
Finally, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems, which uses Adobe's famous image editor (Creative Cloud version 22) to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes various general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks, from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
The Legion Pro 7i Gen 9 16 showed that its brand-new CPU was mightier than the Alienware's AMD Ryzen 9 7845HX and the other laptops' previous-gen Intel parts. Its Core i9-14900HX easily ripped through the HandBrake render and pumped out high scores in Cinebench and Geekbench. A fair degree of this success is likely due to the Legion's thermal design, which lets the CPU run at higher speeds for longer than other implementations, though last year's Pro 7i Gen 8's strong performance shows that the processor update likely isn't doing all the heavy lifting.
The Gen 9 also had the best performing SSDs in PCMark 10's storage test by a wide margin. With so much RAM and storage onboard, the Legion Pro 7i shows strength that should last for more than a generation.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
We run both synthetic and real-world gaming benchmarks. The former include two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for systems with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Additionally, we use the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which gauges OpenGL performance. Its tests are rendered offscreen to accommodate different native display resolutions; more frames per second (fps) means higher performance.
Our real-world game testing involves the built-in 1080p benchmarks of F1 2021, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege, representing simulation, open-world action-adventure, and competitive/esports shooter games, respectively. We run Valhalla and Siege twice (the former at Medium and Ultra quality presets, the latter at Low and Ultra quality), while F1 2021 is run twice at Ultra quality settings with and without AMD's and Nvidia's performance-boosting FSR and DLSS features activated.
It should come as little surprise that Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4080 delivers excellent performance. What may be more surprising is how widely results vary for the same GPU in different laptops, as seen here. Lenovo continues to show its excellence in cooling and thermal design, allowing it to deliver more power to the GPUs. The Legion Pro 7i Gen 9 defeated all the non-Lenovo systems here by roughly 10% or more, which is no small thing when talking framerates.
In our real-world game benchmarks, the Gen 9 led the pack apart from a narrow loss to last year's model in Rainbow Six Siege. The system can easily exceed 100fps with demanding visual settings, making the most of the RTX 4080 in ways other systems simply fail to. Since the Lenovo has a 1600p display, I reran the games at that resolution and it still managed 134fps in F1 (170fps with DLSS), 118fps in Valhalla, and 346fps in Rainbow Six Siege. With that kind of performance, it makes sense for Lenovo to provide the 240Hz panel it does.
Battery and Display Tests
We test laptops' and tablets' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We ensure the battery is fully charged with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off before the test.
We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
A high-end notebook's performance is often inversely proportional to its battery life, but the Legion Pro 7i Gen 9 beats the odds. While it's certainly no match for the staggering battery life of many ultraportables and convertibles, it managed more than eight hours in our unplugged video rundown, without the exceedingly dim screen I've noticed in some other Lenovo laptops at the 50% brightness setting. It's a pleasant surprise to see the Gen 9 outlast its predecessor by nearly two hours as well as topping the HP and Alienware.
Lenovo's display is also impressive, with vibrant color coverage that can fairly compete with many OLED laptops'. Combine that with 531 nits of brightness and a 1,290:1 contrast ratio, and you've got a first-class gaming display. Asus shone even brighter, however, with a Mini LED screen that provided even more coverage of the Adobe RGB color palette.
Verdict: Unrelenting Force at a Fair Price
Lenovo's Legion Pro 7i Gen 9 16 is an exceptional gaming laptop that delivers quality at nearly every turn. It steps ahead of similarly configured competitors in performance while often undercutting their pricing. All that power is packed into a quality chassis and appears on a sharp and vibrant display that keeps up with fast-paced gaming. The Legion's size and weight are a drawback, but easy to ignore considering the system is basically a highly mobile desktop. Only the lack of Thunderbolt 4, USB4, and biometrics really disappoint, but they don't keep the Legion Pro 7i Gen 9 from earning our Editors' Choice award.
Lenovo's Legion Pro 7i Gen 9 16 isn't cheap, but challenges gaming laptops that cost hundreds more with great performance and a dazzling display.
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