Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 review: The new king of gaming laptops | usagoldmines.com

At a glance

Expert’s Rating

Pros

• Top-notch performance
• Excellent display
• Fast wired and wireless connectivity
• Supports USB-C charging

Cons

• Premium pricing
• Still has the short battery life of a gaming laptops
• Trackpad could be bigger

Our Verdict

The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 continues its family’s knack for delivering extreme performance in a quality chassis at a competitive price. There are little areas for improvement, and the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 can’t get away from typical gaming laptop issues like weight and limited battery life, but it’s still excellent for what it is.

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Best Prices Today: Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10

Lenovo’s Legion laptop family has been setting a high bar for gaming laptops over the last few years. While the Legion 9 series may be top dog in that family, the Legion Pro 7 series tends to mark a balance of class-leading performance, build quality, and value. The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 continues that legacy nicely, offering extreme CPU and GPU performance all in a robust chassis with an excellent display. 

With a starting price of $2,849 and a bump up to $3,599 to get the RTX 5080-equipped system tested here, the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 is solidly in the high-end gaming laptop category. But from our first benchmark to the last, it wastes no time cementing itself as one of the best gaming laptops you can get right now. 

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10: Specs and features

• Model number: ‎82WQ002SUS
• CPU: Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX
• Memory: 32GB DDR5X-6400 CSODIMM
• Graphics/GPU: Nvidia RTX 5080 (175-watt TGP)
• Display: 16-inch 2560×1600 240Hz OLED, Anti-glare
• Storage: 2X 1TB PCIe Gen4 SSD
• Webcam: 5MP
• Connectivity: 1x Thunderbolt 4, 1x USB-C 10Gbps (with DP 2.1 and 140W PD input), 1x USB-A 10Gbps, 2x USB-A 5Gbps, HDMI 2.1, 2.5GbE, 1x 3.5mm combo audio
• Networking: WiFi 7, Bluetooth 5.4
• Biometrics: n/a
• Battery capacity: 99 watt-hours
• Dimensions: 14.35 x 10.9 x 1.05 inches
• Weight: 5.84 pounds
• MSRP: $3,599 as-tested ($2,849 base)

At the time of writing, the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 is available in just a few largely similar configurations. The one tested here costs $3,599 and is built around the RTX 5080. It is the only configuration listed on Lenovo’s website, but B&H also has configurations that swap in the RTX 5070 Ti for $2,849 or the RTX 5090 for $3,999. Lenovo often starts off some of its laptop models with just a few configurations but expands on them later on, so don’t be surprised if more options trickle in later on. For now, all of these configurations include the same 32GB of DDR5 memory on two CSODIMM sticks, the same pair of 1TB PCIe 4.0×4 SSDs, the same OLED display, and the Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX. 

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10: Design and build quality

IDG / Mark Knapp

The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 is a hulking machine, much like its predecessors. It packs a lot inside and aims to let it run at high wattages, so the size and weight make sense. Lenovo didn’t push much beyond the necessary bounds though, with the screen featuring narrow bezels and the rear of the laptop sticking out just an inch behind the display hinge to accommodate the beefier cooling required for this kind of application. Unsurprisingly, the laptop ends up over an inch thick. 

The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 is blacked out with a matte black aluminum frame spanning the keyboard deck, display lid, and underside of the laptop. This metal build has some minor flex to it but altogether feels quite sturdy. 

Despite being a gaming laptop, the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 offers a tame look. There’s no needlessly aggressive embossing or angularity to most of the chassis. It has per-key RGB keyboard lighting and a thin light bar at the front edge of the deck, but beyond this lighting (which is easy to turn off), the only real hint to the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10’s gaming nature is the fighter-jet-like exhaust at the rear of the system, which houses a massive radiator that spans the entire rear edge. 

There are three intake fans tucked behind the bottom grille — two large ones on either side and a smaller one slightly offset from the center that seems meant for the memory modules. They pull air in from the bottom and sent it out of the aforementioned radiator. 

 While some of Lenovo’s prior gaming laptops situated extra ports along the back edge of the system, the dedication to heat dissipation in the rear meant Lenovo had to shift all of its I/O to the side of the laptop. 

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10: Keyboard, trackpad

IDG / Mark Knapp

The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 offers a solid keyboard. The keys are lightly contoured, helping me keep my fingertips centered on them. They’re also very well stabilized for a laptop keyboard, helping keep the stroke even and avoiding rolling off the edge. They’re also not mushy and offer 1.6mm travel. Despite these quality aspects of the keyboard, the deck is long and can make it a bit uncomfortable to type on unless the ergonomics of the desk/table are just right. I was able to get up to 116 words per minute with 97 percent accuracy in Monkeytype, but this was a hair slower and more error-prone than I’d like to see, and it required removing my watch to manage.

The rest of the keyboard is quite nice as well. The backlighting is bright and thoroughly illuminates the key legends. Lenovo includes full-size arrow keys slightly offset from the rest of the keyboard, making them easy to use and feel out — great for quick navigation. There’s also a large number pad, and while the keys are slightly narrower than the rest of the keyboard, they still allow for convenient touch typing.

The trackpad is a slightly sore point in the inputs. It’s a fine trackpad, offering smooth swiping and a satisfying tactile click when depressed. But it’s rather small for a system this large, and it’s so far to the left that I find I’m almost constantly right-clicking. This may not be a concern if you’re left-handed, but righties will likely find it a slight bother reaching so far over to use the trackpad. 

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10: Display, audio

IDG / Mark Knapp

The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 includes an excellent display. It’s wonderfully sharp thanks to its 2560×1600 panel, and gamers will get a lot out of its 240Hz refresh rate. Better still, it’s an OLED panel that effectively eliminates ghosting, which can be quite a bit worse on laptop IPS displays than desktop ones in my experience. That combines with infinite contrast, a bold peak brightness of 509.8 nits, 100 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 color space, and color accuracy with a maximum dE of 1.47 — good enough for professional uses. 

Lenovo says the display is anti-glare, and while it’s certainly no mirror, it’s not matte either. I can clearly see my reflection in it when I’m in bright environments. It can get bright enough to help subdue some reflections, but that will draw more power and still leave reflections visible in darker areas of the screen. 

The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 boasts a set of four speakers. Two are situated above the keyboard on an elevated shelf by the display hinge, and two are on the underside of the laptop. These pump out a ton of volume with crisp mids and a nice bit of bass. If you’re trying to game or watch movies on the laptop, you won’t immediately be running for headphones or external speakers here. They’re quite excellent for laptop speakers.

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10: Webcam, microphone, biometrics

You’ll get a great-looking webcam on the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10. It offers 5MP resolution stills and can record at 1440p/30FPS. Even without perfect lighting, it’s surprisingly low on noise, and it does an impressive job exposing the picture without blowing out highlights. Its wide field of view will also help if you want to record yourself and a friend side-by-side. It comes paired with a solid microphone system as well. Even in a large room, my voice sounded clear and full to the mics, avoiding room echo. 

Unfortunately, you won’t get any convenient biometric login capabilities on the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10. There’s no fingerprint reader or facial recognition. 

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10: Connectivity

IDG / Mark Knapp

The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 has decent wired connectivity for a laptop of its size. It has USB-A ports on either side, a 3.5mm jack and 2.5GbE port on the right side, and two USB-C ports and an HDMI 2.1 port on the left side. Only one of those USB-C ports is Thunderbolt 4, but the other at least supports DisplayPort 2.1 and 140W PD input. That USB PD input actually lets the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 recharge over USB-C when it’s set in Hybrid Mode (the GPU would drain too much power otherwise), providing some bonus flexibility if you don’t want to carry the 400W charger everywhere you go. An SD card reader would have been a good addition given the system’s productivity and creative application chops. 

Wireless connectivity is a strong point, with the system supporting Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. In testing, it had no issues on the wireless front and offered plenty of bandwidth when downloading games on my Wi-Fi 6 network. 

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10: Performance

The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 is geared up for major performance, and it’s no surprise to see it zoom through our benchmarks with aplomb. It’s one of the first few gaming laptops powered by an RTX 50-series GPU that we’ve tested, so it presents a good opportunity to not only see the potential of the chips in mobile platforms but also see what improvements have come over the prior generation, if any. 

Lenovo tends to make well-rounded configurations with its Legion series, and the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 is no exception. In the holistic PCMark 10 benchmark, we see strong overall performance. By combining a fast CPU, GPU, memory, and storage, it performs impressively in every test that PCMark 10 throws at it, leading the pack here. That said, it’s only a minor uptick over the earlier Legion 9i Gen 9. Impressively, it beat the MSI Raider 18 HX A2XW — a bigger, heavier laptop that ought to have benefitted from extra cooling to run faster but showed a particular weakness in office productivity tasks.

The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 gets a high-end CPU, so it’s no surprise to see it ripping away at encoding tasks. It pulls off our 4K video encode in just under seven minutes — an impressive pace that pulls ahead of even the Core i9-14900HX in some of its competitors. It didn’t quite keep up with the MSI Raider 18 HX’s Core Ultra 9 285HX, which has the same core configuration but benefits from slightly faster clock speeds. That said, Lenovo didn’t let the MSI’s high-end CPU always take the lead.

In Cinebench R20 and R23, it actually led the MSI Raider 18 HX in single- and multi-core performance, though MSI takes back the performance lead in Cinebench R24, which can benefit from extra cooling thanks to its longer run time. While the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 and MSI trade blows with narrow margins, offering extreme CPU performance, they simply blow the rest of the pack out of the water here with double-digit performance advantages. 

The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10’s CPU is matched well with its GPU. In 3DMark’s synthetic gaming benchmark Port Royal, the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 offers the fastest performance we’ve seen from a laptop. It not only clears the MSI Raider 18 HX with its own RTX 5080 but also beats the RTX 4090 in the Legion 9i and Gigabyte Aorus 17X. 

While synthetic benchmarks are a useful guide for gaming performance, it always helps to see actual games run on a GPU, so we put each gaming laptop through a battery of demanding game benchmarks. Unsurprisingly, the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 keeps up its lead. Despite its age, Metro Exodus remains a demanding game at its Extreme graphics setting because of its heavy use of ray-traced effects. Still, the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 is able to run it at nearly 100 fps on average, leading all of the other systems here and yet again offering some of the fastest laptop performance we’ve seen in this test.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider also proves a rather demanding game but isn’t quite as hard on the GPU and therefore lets the CPU help push performance even further. Here, the powerful combination of the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10’s Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX and RTX 5080 achieves an impressive average of 238 frames per second, nearly topping our charts.

The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 is even capable of running Cyberpunk 2077 at native 1080p with Ultra settings without ray tracing or DLSS at 151 fps. That drops to just 41 fps with the fully path-traced RT Overdrive mode, but again, that’s before tapping into DLSS for any performance improvements. 

The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 will default to the performance power profile when plugged in, helping ensure you get the most out of it. But that’s not to say this is its peak. Lenovo’s Legion Space software offers customizable performance settings that could see it eke out even higher speeds. 

All this performance does come with some cost: the fans kick up when the system goes into high gear. It’s not too shrill, but it’s fairly loud, and there is still a high pitched element to it that will wear on you after long. Also, the system relies on a massive 400W power brick.

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10: Battery life

To help conserve battery, Lenovo has set the Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 to go from Windows’ Performance mode when plugged in down to its Balanced mode when it’s running on battery. Not having to manually make this change can help ensure you don’t find out the laptop is needlessly churning through battery power only after it has wasted a good chunk of charge. And you’ll want to conserve as much as you can. That said, laptops have been making improvements to battery life in leaps and bounds, with some Windows machines scratching 24 hours.

While gaming laptops have made improvements, they’re still lacking in this area. With the display set between 250 and 260 nits and the system on airplane mode, the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 managed a little under six hours of runtime in our local video playback test. 

Bear in mind, video playback can offer some favorable results where the battery is concerned, especially when an OLED display gets to show letterboxes (black pixels don’t use power, after all). In actual use, the battery life is shorter. Even with the dGPU disabled and performance set to balanced profiles in Windows and Lenovo’s LegionSpace, the system lasts closer to 3 hours in normal use, browsing the web and watching the occasional video. On the bright side, the 400W charger can juice the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 back up quickly.

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10: Conclusion

The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 is an extreme-performance laptop. Its combination of potent CPU and GPU readies it for intense gaming and heavy computing workloads alike. That comes with some extra bulk, weight, and noisy cooling, but the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 is still relatively strong next to competing laptops. Lenovo has fit all of that power into a great frame, offering an above-average keyboard, an excellent display, and a healthy selection of ports for most uses. 

With all its packing, it’s not surprising to see the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 costs a tidy sum. But at $3,499, it’s still a fair price. It’s cheaper than the prior-generation Legion 9i — a higher-tier system — and yet it outperforms that system in most respects. It’s also quite a bit cheaper than the $4,499 MSI Raider 18 HX A2XW, which it squares off against, trading blows and landing quite a few victories over. The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 sets the stage nicely for high-end gaming laptops running on the latest GPUs.