Lenovo Legion 7i (Gen 6) review: New displays, better performance, same high-end design - Windows Central

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The Legion 7i, now in its sixth generation, is Lenovo's most premium offering when it comes to gaming laptops.

It was updated around the same time as the Legion 5 Pro, which turned out to be one of my favorite gaming laptops of the year.

Bottom line: The Legion 7i is Lenovo's high-end gaming laptop, and it's priced to match.

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Lenovo supplied Windows Central with a review unit of the Legion 7i (Gen 6).

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The Legion 7i (Gen 6) follows the same design trend that we've seen from Lenovo's gaming laptops for a few years now.

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The Legion 7i (Gen 6) comes with Tobii Horizon software that enables head tracking for camera movement in more than 45 games.

Source: Windows Central.

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The Legion 7i (Gen 6) is one of the fastest gaming laptops we've tested.

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When I reviewed the Legion 5 Pro with AMD Ryzen processor, I suspected that it was falling into the AMD performance for battery tradeoff that we'd seen in the Razer Blade 14 and the Surface Laptop 4 15.

These laptops saw everything from CPU to SSD speeds being compromised when on battery power, something that wasn't as common with Intel systems.

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Running Balanced mode without AC — Performance mode isn't an option on battery — Time Spy scored 2,869 (compared to 12,401 on AC) while Fire Strike scored 6,020 (compared to 24,025 on AC).

And if you run the system on Balance mode while plugged in, you'll lose about a tenth of performance.

I went with in-game settings maxed out and with the laptop running on AC power with Performance mode enabled, with DLSS and RTX off unless specified.

This is one of the most powerful laptops we've ever tested, and gamers will undoubtedly be happy with the level of performance on offer.

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The Legion 7i (Gen 6) is a gaming laptop first, but that doesn't mean it can't also crush fairly intensive productivity, design, or development work.

I ran PCMark 10's Gaming battery rundown next, with the same 50% screen brightness but using the Best Performance Windows profile.

Running some CPU-intensive benchmarks in hybrid mode (where the discrete GPU isn't employed unless absolutely necessary), AC and battery performance differences aren't as pronounced as they are when gaming.

Source: Windows Central.

Source: Windows Central.

Source: Windows Central.

The Legion 7i (Gen 6), now with its taller 16-inch display, improved audio, RTX 30-series laptop GPUs, and 11th Gen Intel Core CPUs, is a significant step forward compared to the Legion 7i 15 (Gen 5).

It's one of the most powerful gaming laptops we've tested, and Lenovo's power balancing keeps it from overheating and throttling

Switching to battery power saps CPU and GPU gaming performance considerably, to the point where most intensive games become unplayable

If it's a bit too expensive but you like what Legion has to offer, be sure to have a look at Lenovo's other gaming laptops before venturing into the broader market