This Lenovo laptop is a pure gaming beast. Believe me, I checked

More than most kinds of tech, laptops tend to come in a lot of different shapes and sizes. There’s the true souls, examples that are lightweight and small which place masses of importance on being portable, and there’s those which simply aren’t. These can weigh as much as a small elephant, suck down power like there’s no tomorrow and stretch the term ‘laptop’ to unreasonable extremes, but they exist for a reason.

These are of course the power users, and that most well-known subset, gamers. People who need the ‘most laptop’ for their daily workflows, or play time, and who are often willing to pay hand over fist for the privilege. If there’s one thing we know, it’s that power doesn’t come cheap, financially or otherwise.

But with modern innovations have come reductions in size, and an attempt on the part of some manufacturers to market these machines to more than their core audience. Enter the Legion Pro 7, a very big, ‘gamer’ laptop which might appeal to creatives, perhaps even claiming a spot among the best laptops for graphic design on the market.

It has a 16-inch display, an RTX 4090 card and an optimised keyboard, music to the ears of purists; however, it also doesn’t weigh the earth and keeps its RGB stylings to a relative minimum. Is this the rare premium gaming PC that has crossover appeal?

Read on for our full review.

Lenovo Legion 7 Pro review: Key specifications

Design, build and display

• Great display
• Weighs 2.6kg

When it comes to designing laptops, as has been hinted, the key to success is often in specialisation - finding the needs of your chosen demographics then prioritising those above all else.

With that logic, the Legion 7 Pro should be an absolute unit of a machine, and it certainly is; however, it simultaneously isn’t as well. Which is a slightly twisty way of explaining things, instead, we could say that though it is big, it’s not quite as big as it could be. Or indeed as it would have a reasonable right to be.

At 363mm by 262mm, it’s large, but still fits in a reasonably sized backpack, and at 2.6kg, though it is heavy, it isn’t too much of a chore to carry around all day. Students will nonetheless want to opt for something lighter, but for a gaming laptop, its lack of chunk is a big draw.

And sometimes, heft is a positive in itself. The Legion 7 Pro feels substantial, well-built, and there’s no hint of toy-like compromise; this feels like a machine made for serious people to carry out serious business. That’s only cemented by its sober black colourway; the only hint of ‘play’ in the design is the RGB keyboard, a throwaway inclusion for the gamer crowd, for whom nothing is of interest unless it is rainbow-hued.

The Legion 7 Pro, as hinted, doesn’t do much in the way of compromise, and that’s equally true of the display. At 16 inches, it’s big, but that isn’t the end of its qualities. At over 2K in resolution, it has enough extra pixels to make a meaningful difference in quality over a standard 1080p display, but without pushing things so far as to affect framerates.

Though 4K panels look nicer, they also take more horsepower to run, which can be anathema to e-sports fans chasing the highest framerates possible.

Colours are nicely saturated, and at 100% of the DCI-P3 spectrum, the display is accurate enough for some photo work, though for absolute accuracy, you’ll want to run a calibrated external display. There’s HDR too, which makes a noticeable difference, especially on supported games, such as Baldur’s Gate 3. In all, a very pleasant panel that makes for a great impression.

Design score: 4/5

Features

• Nice keyboard
• Decent port selection

The Legion 7 Pro has a laser focus on its core user base, and that’s a positive; however, it can also entail that some things are unfortunately a little outside of that vision. Certain nice-to-haves that didn’t make the cut because they didn’t appeal to a certain kind of user, at least in theory.

In this case, it’s biometrics, any kind. There’s no Windows Hello, no fingerprint scanner, nothing to seamlessly log in, which then leaves a PIN or password as the only option for security. Which, in 2025, does feel a little lacklustre.

Thankfully, there are plenty of ports. You get access to two USB-C Gen 2 ports capable of outputting through DisplayPort 1.4, and three USB-A ports, along with a fabled Ethernet jack (RJ45) on the rear. And there’s an HDMI port, though noticeably lacking is any kind of SD support, whether micro or otherwise, which will be a disappointment to photographers and videographers.

If you want to include this in your workflow, you’ll very likely need to carry at least a few dongles around.

Lastly, there’s a fully optimised keyboard, by which I mean that it comes with all of the usual Lenovo quality of life improvements. Nicely spaced and sized keys, 1.5mm of key travel and support for 100% anti-ghosting, it’s truly a pleasure to type on.

Features score: 4/5

Benchmark scores

We test every one of our laptops using the same benchmarking software suite to give you a thorough overview of its suitability for creatives of all disciplines and levels. This includes:

• Geekbench: Tests the CPU for single-core and multi-core power, and the GPU for the system's potential for gaming, image processing, or video editing. Geekbench AI tests the CPU and GPU on a variety of AI-powered and AI-boosted tasks.
• Cinebench: Tests the CPU and GPU's ability to run 3D software such as Cinema 4D and Redshift.
• UL Procyon: Uses UL Solutions' Procyon software suite to test the system's ability for AI image generation in Stable Diffusion, its Microsoft Office performance and its battery life in a looping video test.
• Topaz Video AI: We use Topaz Video AI to test the system's ability to upscale video and convert video to slow-motion.
• PugetBench for Creators: We use the PugetBench for Creators benchmarking suite to test the system's ability to run several key tasks in Photoshop and Adobe Premiere Pro, as well as its performance when encoding/transcoding video.
• ON1 Resize AI: Tests the system's ability to resize 5 photos to 200% in a batch process. We take the total time taken to resize the images and divide by 5.

Performance

• Power to spare
• Poor battery life

As has been hinted, performance is where the Legion Pro 7 really needs to shine, and luckily, that’s exactly what it does. This is a machine that eats hard work for breakfast, makes short work of the most demanding games, then comes back for more every time.

Our review unit came stuffed to the eyeballs, with an Intel Core i9-13900HX inside, 32GB of RAM, 1TB of storage and a RTX 4090 GPU. The processor is 13th gen; however the differences in real-world performance proved to be mostly academic.

To begin, in general use, the machine flies through every task, with the proviso that you’re plugged in. Though it has a large battery inside, it isn’t really meant to be used away from the wall. To get the best performance, you’ll need to use the correct power profiles, and they aren’t kind to the thought of conservation.

Moving to synthetic benchmarks, in the likes of PugetBench, pitted against a machine running an RTX 5090, the results were very interesting. On average, the newer machine achieved around a 10-15% improvement over the Legion, which may or may not be worth the price difference to you.

Where the gap was biggest was in Geekbench 6, where the 5090 sailed to a 25% lead over the 4090, but again, in general usage, and certainly for many workflows, you’ll be talking about a difference of minutes or seconds in most instances. Moving to gaming, the machine chewed through everything I could throw at it.

With 32GB of RAM, there might not be quite enough for those who have the craziest workloads, but everyone else will very likely not have an issue. The only slight bugbear was the 1TB SSD, which was fast however, given the size of many modern games and the price of the machine, we’d have liked to have seen 2TB as standard.

In all, however, the Legion 7 Pro is made to keep up with the best, and it absolutely can. Though it doesn’t have quite the most cutting-edge components, it can achieve 90% of what the competition can and at a reduced price point.

Performance score: 5/5

Price

There’s lots of configurations of the Legion Pro line available. Our started at £2,700, with cheaper options available from £2,200.

Who is it for?

The Legion Pro 7 is a machine made for gamers, which will also appeal to creative professionals who like to game in their downtime. It has a great display, power to spare and a pleasant design. The caveats are true for all in this subset, it’s big, power hungry and relatively heavy. If you can look past those quirks, you’ll have a machine that’s among the best in the market today.

Buy it if...

• You want something that can handle any game confidently
• You want a machine that can handle creative workloads
• You want a machine with a good keyboard

Don't buy it if...

• You need good battery life
• You want the latest components
• You need something portable

Also consider

Apple MacBook Pro 16 (M4 Pro, 2024)

For some people MacOS alone is a powerful sales pitch. But beyond that, the MacBook Pro 16 has it all, a great design, powerful speakers, performance to spare and brilliant battery life to boot. Beyond the perennial issues that MacOS has with gaming, it has it all. If you are used to an Apple workflow and don’t game a great deal, it’s an obvious choice.

MSI Stealth 18 HX AI

Do you like to game? Or do you like to game? If there’s a distinction in those statements for you, then maybe the MSI might be up your street. It is everything the Lenovo is, but more still. It has a bigger screen, larger footprint, a more modern graphics chipset and more. That all might be just a bit too much for you, but if largesse is a motivator in itself, the MSI might be a better choice for you.

Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024)

It’s all well and good to want gaming power, but tastes vary when it comes to the size of a laptop. For many, the size of the Legion Pro 7 will make it a no go, and should you find yourself in that camp, you might want to consider the Asus G14. There you’ll find power, all in a shell that, by gaming laptop standards, barely weighs anything at all.

Full verdict

There’s a lot of choice in the premium gaming market, with a lot of manufacturers looking to outdo themselves on exactly how much laptop they can stuff into one chassis. The Legion line is long, and storied, and with the 7 Pro we have another classy entry. It looks good, by heavy laptop standards isn’t too much so, has power to spare and a great keyboard. That means almost by definition that it’s also good for work. The price? Well that’s the rub. This isn’t a cheap laptop, but for your money you get something eminently capable.