So much GAMING HORSEPOWER in a laptop! – Lenovo Legion 7i
So I’m unfortunately unable to do that. Lenovo sponsored this video and we are gonna be checking out their state of the art Legion7i Windows 10 gaming notebook, a slim, fully-featured machine that has as much gaming horsepower as you might expect from amachine twice the thickness. But apparently, it’s gota cooling system on it that can more than tame the beast within. Wow, first impressions ofthis are really professional.
And that’s not a wordthat I would normally use to describe something withlike a core i9 HK processor and 2080 Super Max-Q graphics card. But this looks like, youknow, it’s like business, but like gaming business. Look at this thing. Would you guys know thisis a gaming machine? I mean, that’s a hint. (laughs) The entire bottom of the thing has got perforations all across here. And then for cooling, we’vegot a vent on this side, two vents on the back,and then another vent over on the other side. Another thing we’ve got more of than you might expect ina modern machine is I/O. That’s really nice to see. So we’ve got a type A overon the right-hand side, which personally,
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I’m not ahuge fan of on gaming machines, especially when that’s where all of the Type A ports are lined up. But fortunately, this,this I’m a big fan of. We’ve got most of theI/O here on the back. So HDMI out, two more Type As; God, gigabit ethernet, thank you, as well as a power plugand Kensington lock. Then, over on the left-hand side, that is not one but two USB type Cs, one of which is Thunderbolt. And we’ve got a headset jack. That’s about as much as mostpeople are going to need. Now, the main things Lenovo asked me to draw attention to here are the screen; the graphics horsepower; their TrueStrike keyboard, which has 1.3 millimeters oftravel, in spite of the fact that this is a relativelyslim gaming notebook; and, of course, their cooling system. Naturally, I wanna know howyou keep a core i9 HK processor and a 2080 super-coolin a machine like this. We were told Lenovo submittedit to UL for verification, and it ran for as long asnine hours without throttling. That’s impressive.(imitates bird warbling) Look at those fans.
Now there has been a trend towards much, much thinnerfan blades over the years, but those are tiny. Oh, no way. Before even turning it on,we know there’s RGB lighting. Look at that. Tiny strips of RGB LEDson the rear exhaust right there and right there. I love it. Oh, look at that, wow! Look at that cooler. The whole thing is onegigantic piece here. Now, why would they do it that way? Let’s run through whatwe’re lookin’ at here. This is our CPU. And the Legion 7 can be equipped with up to a core i9 10980 HK. That’s Intel’stop-of-the-line mobile chip. Right here is our GPU surroundedby our graphics memory. So here we’re looking atanything from a GTX 1660 Ti all the way up to an RTX 2080 Super Max-Q. I actually don’t knowexactly what’s in here, but what I can tell you guys for sure is that it is not a 1660 Tibecause that is a gigantic dye. I will say, though, actually,they did a fantastic job of their thermal paste application. A lot of the time on these,like, pre-done machines, you’ll see just like gobsand gobs of thermal paste, and it’s kind of gloppin’all over the place. But this is really tiny. Right over here is ourmotherboard chipset.
And over here, we’vegot our dual M.2 drives. So these are both OEMversions of Samsung drives. I’m expecting very solidperformance out of these. And if I had to guess,I’d say they’re running in a Raid 0 configuration out of the box. Storage should be extremelysnappy on this machine. Curiously, whatever isunder this here seems to be, is that soldered down? Can’t tell. Oh, that makes sense. Here I am all used toseeing soldered memory in laptops these days, butno, they have, in fact, not gone that route. There we go. So, under this little shield right here, we’ve got two slots for DDR4 SDM memory. And one of the remarkablethings about this machine is that it can be equippedwith up to 3,466 megahertz RAM. That would be in a two byeight gig configuration, although I’m not 100% surewhat we’ve got on here. No, it turns out we’re running32 gigs at 3,200 megahertz. Something to note, guys,is that while they’re using all Samsung parts for theRAM and SSDs in these, it is very typical for these types ofnotebooks to multi-source.
So you wouldn’t expect necessarily the exact same make or model, especially when you choose adifferent memory configuration. Not all suppliers havethe same availability of different speeds and capacities. Now to take a closer look at the cooler. This is really neat. I did notice that there wasa surprisingly small number of heat pipes in the system. And I guess this is to save on bulk. Because if you look at this, they’ve actually got a heat pipe running over to this radiator right here. And then this one goes andsits right next to the CPU. And they’ve got a second heatpipe coming over near the GPU that runs over to thisexhaust radiator right here. But heat is actuallycarried from the CPU and GPU to these two, the larger of the radiators, by a vapor chamber. Vapor chambers are like a heat pipe, except they are flat instead of tubes. So that helps ’em save on some space and they’re very high-performance. And it allows both of theseto contribute to cooling for both the CPU and GPU, depending on which one you’reloading up more heavily.
Because not every workload is gonna stress both of them equally. One thing you guys might havenoticed is that on the inside, there’s no cooling for the M.2 modules. That’s because we’ve actuallygot these thick thermal pads on the bottom of the unit that are going to allow the M.2s to use the bottom of the laptop,so the entire bottom plate, as kind of like a giantaluminum heat spreader. This is, of course, (metaltapping) metal, not plastic. I’m impressed at how accessible this is. It’s only, what, like 10 screws and you can get at RAM storage. Pretty much anything thatyou’d want to upgrade after the fact. Oh, there’s even more RGBthan I expected. (laughs) The keyboard is very RGB. The good news is that I’m surethat there’s a software way that you can tame that a little bit if you’re not quite as into it. This is pretty cool, though. Check that out. So you’ve got kind of likean RGB like underglow effect on the back where Ishowed you those strips that were coming out of the exhaust. And, oh, oh, there’s more than I thought around the sides too. Look at this. RGB all the way around thebottom of the unit. (laughs) I didn’t even see that one. Immediately upon using this machine, the high refresh rate displayabsolutely stands out.
It’s about as light as youcould possibly expect it to be. I think they saved quite a bit of weight by going with a vapor chamberrather than heat pipes. And that also seems to be a big factor for how they were able to keep it so thin. So you can actually see from the outside what the internal layout is here. Under the touchpad,which is relatively thin, they’ve got the battery pretty much all the way across the front. And then under the keyboard, which they needed a lot of space for, because they’ve got RGB lighting, which is apparentlyCorsair iCUE-compatible, which is pretty cool. So they’ve got that RGB lighting. They’ve got that longtravel on these keys. And then, of course, they had to keep the rest of the machine,all the performance guts, as thin as possible. It’s pretty common to seethe high-performance stuff loaded towards the back. So it’s less likely that, when you’ve got your palmsdown on the top of the machine, you’re gonna get all sweaty and all that. It occurs to me, I never actually pulledout the power adapter. So, it’s definitely a bigboy. (plastic rustling) This thing’s rated at 230 watts. But they’ve done a pretty good job of keeping it relatively slim. In fact, it’s not that different from the thickness of the laptop. So, whatever you’re planningto slide your laptop into, the power brick should fitin just nicely alongside it. Video editing might nothave been Lenovo’s main goal when they were designing this laptop, but given how many gamersput together montage clips or stream or whatever the case may be, light to medium or evenpretty heavy video production has become an expectation, even if it’s just like agaming-centric machine.
So, the first thing I’m gonnado is load up a timeline in Premiere Pro, andwe’re gonna encode a video and see just how wellour CPU manages to turbo with that cooling solutionwe just looked at. Actually, while I wait for that, let’s go ahead and seeif there’s any way for us to control the RGB on ourkeyboard and system here. Network boost prioritizes games. All right, what else we got in here? What is auto close? Oh, okay, so it’ll closeapps you don’t need when you launch a game. Suppress keyboard noise,that’s a handy feature. Not that the keyboard isparticularly loud, actually. It stands out as not beingparticularly loud at all. Can you guys hear how quiet that is? – [Man] It’s pretty quiet. If you press it lightly, youcan’t even hear the thing. You definitely have totype with more intent than you might have toon a laptop keyboard that doesn’t have such a long travel. But it’s closer to whatyou’d expect from a desktop like numbering keyboard. Curiously, I don’t seeanything in the main app here for RGB control. But what does draw my attention over here is an X-Rite Color Assistantcog down in the system tray. That is pretty cool. So we’re running the 144 hertz model, but there are actuallythree different displays that this notebook could be equipped with. From an SRGB 144 hertz toan Adobe RGB 144 hertz, all the way up to the 240 hertz model, all of which are up to500 nits peak brightness, and our VESA display HDR 400 certified with Dolby Vision Awareness,
so you’ll be able to interpretDolby Vision content. Another standout feature of the display is G-SYNC compatibility. Now, if we’re runningon the integrated GPU, which you can see we are right now, obviously we’re notgonna be able to do that. But once we switch over to the Nvidia GPU, we should see that G-SYNC menu show up right here in the Nvidia control panel. Man, this CPU turbos like mad. So we’re just generating peak files for the project right now. And you can see we are regularly turboing up in the 4.5-plus gigahertz range. Now this is a light workload. This is not a heavilymulti-threaded workload, but that’s (finger snaps) whatgives you that snappiness. This’ll give us a betteridea of what to expect when this thing is being stressed. This is 8:1 REDCODE RAW footage that we’re playing back in Premiere. You can hear the fans rampin’up a little bit now, hey? But, even at about 40% CPU load, we’re still turboed up toaround 4.35, 4.45 gigahertz. That is not too shabby. Actually, we don’t evenneed to do a video export. All I need to do is flick playback to full on 8K 8:1 RED footage, and that’ll give us afull CPU load, won’t it? Yep. (laughs) So let’s see what we turbo to when we’re absolutely slamming this thing. Even the GPU’s gettinghit for about 20 high, 30 low percent load here. Dang, that is a surprisingly low hum. Let’s flick it into theperformance thermal mode and see how loud it gets. Now it’s goin’. Holy Schnikes. Okay, just a second. We need to go back to that same segment and play this back again here. Wow, in the performance mode, it actually turbosseveral-hundred megahertz higher across all eight cores.
And it’s louder, but it’s not whiny. It’s more whooshy. You can actually see theplayback is visibly smoother than it was when we werein the balanced mode. Four gigahertz, four-plusgigahertz, all core boost on mobile was a pipedream not that long ago. And yet here we areaveraging over four gigahertz across all eight cores under heavy load. All right, enough thermal testing. Let’s go ahead and jump into a game. We’re gonna start with Apex Legends. All the settings are high with VSync off. And we’re just in training mode, so we don’t mess withother people’s games. This is so smooth. Apex is running at about130 to 140 FPS at 10 ADP. Wow, those guns sound good. Speakers are surprisingly boomy. Now on to Forza Horizon 4. All high settings again, VSync off. There is a ton of detail on these cars. That’s what a high-poweredGPU and a mobile device will do for ya. This is running really smooth, thanks to the high refresh rate display, and we’re not seeing any tarry. And as for the most importantthing in car games, the sound. Sounds good. These speakers are realsolid for a laptop. With a surprisingly good cooling setup for the included core i9 and 2080 Super, a solid high refresh rate display, and a quiet long-travel keyboard,
Lenovo has put together apretty darn compelling machine starting at $1,599.99 U.S. dollars. Oh, I almost forgot what’s preinstalled. You’ve got the usual bloatthat comes with Windows for whatever reason. Like from king.com, you’ve got iCUE. Oh, that explains why the RGB controls were not in Lenovo’s software, because you would useCorsair’s software for that. That’s pretty cool, Corsairmovin’ up in the world. There we go, (laughs) okay. Everything is controlled from within iCUE. They’ve got McAfee andtheir Lenovo utility. And other than that, nothing that I would reallyconsider to be egregious bloat. Everything else here iseither stuff that we installed or stuff that I think is pretty cool, like the X-Rite Color Assistant that allows you to quickly change your display color settings. So, that’s it. That’s a look at the Lenovo Legion 7i. Thanks to Lenovo for sponsoring this video and to you guys for watching it. Oh, I have more thingsplugged into the back than I remembered. (laughs) You’re gonna find a link toit in the video description if you wanna check it out. It’s a lotta gaming laptopin a very Slim Form Factor and with great thermals,considering how thin it is.
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