Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 Review: Powerful, Polished, and Loud

Lenovo has given its Legion Pro 7i a substantial makeover for its tenth generation, and it’s more than just the usual CPU and GPU upgrade. Compared to the previous model, the new Legion features a redesigned chassis, an improved cooling system, more RGB lighting, and perhaps the most welcome change of all, a gorgeous OLED display replacing the IPS panel of its predecessor.

The internals have also received a significant upgrade. Our review unit comes with an Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus processor, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU with 24GB of GDDR7 memory, 64GB of DDR5 RAM, and 2TB of SSD storage across two 1TB drives. It’s a mighty powerful configuration on paper, and at around AED 23,133, it better be.

Unlike some gaming laptops that have gone on a diet to appear thinner and more portable, Lenovo hasn’t shied away from making the Legion Pro 7i a sizable machine. It’s still very much a desktop replacement that prioritises performance and cooling over portability, with enough bells and whistles to satisfy anyone looking to spend this kind of money on a gaming laptop.

And after spending some time with it, I have to say that Lenovo has put together a rather solid machine. There’s nothing particularly revolutionary about it, but the design is great, the build quality is sturdy, and most of its features are well thought out. There are a few annoyances, of course, but nothing that has particularly soured my experience with it.

How Does the Legion Pro 7i Look, Feel and Type?

The Legion Pro 7i is a handsome-looking gaming laptop. Lenovo has gone for a sleek, all-black design with relatively sharp edges, a slightly extended rear section to accommodate the cooling system, and plenty of RGB lighting to give it the necessary gamer flair if you choose to lean that way. It’s certainly more aggressive-looking than the previous generation, but I think Lenovo has done a good job of keeping it from looking too gaudy.

The chassis uses aluminium for its construction, although, to be honest, it feels more like high-quality plastic to the touch. Not that I particularly care whether a laptop is made from aluminium or plastic, as long as it feels sturdy and doesn’t creak or flex when handled. And the Legion does well on that front. There’s no noticeable flex on the keyboard deck or the lid, and the hinges are smooth and firm enough that you can open the laptop with one finger without lifting the entire base (also helps that this one is a chunky boy).

Our review unit comes in black, which looks great until you touch it. The entire chassis, especially the lid, catches fingerprints like nobody’s business, and you will probably spend a fair amount of time wiping it down if you want to keep it looking pristine. Lenovo also offers a white variant, although I suspect that one will have its own problems with dirt and discolouration over time. So, pick your poison, I guess.

One thing I particularly like about the redesign is the RGB lighting. Yes, there’s a lot of it, and yes, it’s entirely unnecessary, but you know what? I like it. This 40-year-old millennial likes RGB on laptops; sue me. There’s a lightbar running across the front of the chassis, additional strips illuminating the rear exhaust vents, and per-key RGB lighting on the keyboard. The lighting is bright, nicely diffused, and gives the Legion a fantastic look, especially in a dimly lit room.

Of course, you can customise the lighting through Lenovo’s software or turn it off entirely if you prefer a more subdued appearance. There’s also a handy FN + Space shortcut that cycles through the lighting presets, including turning them off, so you don’t have to open an app every time you want to make a change. 

The cooling system has received a redesign as well. Lenovo has implemented its new Legion Coldfront Vapor cooling system, which combines a larger vapor chamber with an integrated HyperChamber design and three fans to dissipate heat more efficiently. Lenovo claims the system can handle up to 250W of combined thermal load, with an additional 15W of headroom.

The redesigned cooling also moves all the exhausts to the back of the laptop, unlike the previous generation, which expelled hot air from the sides as well. I much prefer this arrangement because it keeps the heat away from your mouse hand, something that has annoyed me on several gaming laptops I have reviewed. Of course, we’ll see how well the new cooling system performs during our performance test. 

At around 2.6kg, the Legion isn’t particularly light, and that’s before accounting for the enormous 400W power adapter. You can certainly carry it around in a backpack, but you will need plenty of space and some strong shoulders to haul this big boy around regularly. Personally, I think it’s better suited to spending most of its time planted on a desk, but hey, you do you.

The keyboard, thankfully, is excellent. It’s a standard chiclet-style keyboard with well-spaced, reasonably large keycaps and a decent amount of travel. The keys have a nice, slightly poppy feedback to them, but they are soft and quiet enough that typing doesn’t become a noisy affair. I found it comfortable for both everyday work and gaming. Even though there’s a full numpad on the right, the layout didn’t bother me as much as I expected it to.

The trackpad, however, could have been better. It’s rather small considering the size of the laptop, and at this price, I would have liked a glass surface instead of the Mylar one Lenovo has used. A fully haptic trackpad with an even click across the entire surface would have been nice, too. Still, it’s reasonably accurate and gets the job done without being frustrating to use. I would much rather use a mouse, even for basic tasks, but I am not actively hating the trackpad every time I touch it, which is more than I can say about some gaming laptops.

Is the Legion Pro 7i’s OLED Display Worth It?

Perhaps the biggest upgrade over the previous generation is the display. Lenovo has swapped the 16” IPS panel for a 2560×1600 OLED screen while retaining the 240Hz refresh rate and it’s a substantial improvement in picture quality.

The OLED panel looks excellent, with vibrant colours, deep blacks, superb contrast and good HDR performance. Games look gorgeous on it, particularly those with plenty of dark scenes and bright lighting effects, and the 240Hz refresh rate makes everything feel wonderfully smooth. It also supports NVIDIA G-Sync and variable refresh rate, both of which worked without any problems during my testing.

The display is VESA DisplayHDR True Black 1000 certified, with Lenovo quoting 500 nits of typical brightness. HDR content looks great, with bright highlights and plenty of detail in darker areas, although the glossy coating means you will have to be a little mindful of the lighting in your room. Reflections can be quite distracting if you have a window or a bright light behind you, but that’s the trade-off with a glossy OLED panel. 

I am quite happy with Lenovo sticking to a 1600p resolution, too. At 16”, the screen is sharp enough for practically everything, and the resolution is a sensible match for the RTX 5090 without demanding the additional horsepower of a 4K panel. It’s a laptop GPU after all.

Connectivity is another area where Lenovo has done a good job. All the ports are now located on the sides, leaving the rear entirely dedicated to cooling. On the left, you get an HDMI 2.1 output, two USB-C ports (including Thunderbolt 4), and a USB-A port. The right side houses two additional USB-A ports, a 2.5Gb Ethernet jack, and a 3.5mm headphone/microphone combo jack.

I do wish the ports were spaced out a little more. They are rather closely clustered together, which can become annoying if you are using cables or dongles with large housings that might block an adjacent port. It has the space, use it!

For audio, the Legion comes with a four-speaker setup comprising two 2W woofers and two 2W tweeters, with Nahimic audio processing. They are decent enough, delivering ample volume for watching YouTube videos or listening to casual music. The sound is somewhat hollow and thin, without much bass to speak of, but it’s not particularly unpleasant either. For gaming, though, I would still recommend a good pair of headphones. 

Lenovo provides plenty of software to manage the laptop’s various features, perhaps a little too much. Between Legion Space, Legion Vantage, and Lenovo AI, there are three separate applications to deal with, and I really wish Lenovo would consolidate everything into one app or two at the most. Otherwise, the software itself works well enough, with straightforward controls for performance profiles, lighting customisation and other system settings.

The Windows installation also comes with the usual assortment of unwanted applications, including McAfee antivirus, which I promptly uninstalled. It’s hardly unusual for a Windows gaming laptop, however. 

How Fast Is the Legion Pro 7i Gen 10?

Our review unit of the Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 is equipped with the latest Intel’s Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus processor, NVIDIA’s RTX 5090 Laptop GPU with 24GB of GDDR7 VRAM, 64GB of DDR5 memory, and two 1TB NVMe SSDs. The RTX 5090 has a max TDP of 175W, giving it plenty of power to stretch its legs, provided the cooling system can keep up.

And as expected, the Legion delivers some excellent performance across both synthetic benchmarks and games. However, having recently reviewed the MSI Raider 16 MAX HX with the same RTX 5090 GPU but an older Core Ultra 9 275HX processor, I was curious to see how much of a difference Lenovo’s updated hardware and cooling system would actually make.

All games were tested at laptop’s native 2560×1600 resolution and Ultra/max settings where available in-game, using the laptop’s Extreme Performance mode.

The Legion takes the lead in all four 3DMark tests, although the differences are rather small, ranging from around 1% to 4%. Port Royal sees the largest improvement, suggesting slightly better ray-tracing performance, but there’s nothing here that would translate into a noticeably different gaming experience.

The new Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus also performs well in Geekbench 7, scoring 2883 in single-core and 26,023 in multi-core. For GPU compute performance, the RTX 5090 achieved 246,640 in OpenCL and 348,996 in CUDA, while Geekbench AI returned scores of 11,915 on the CPU, 16,045 on Intel’s NPU, and 25,871 using the RTX 5090 through DirectML.

Cyberpunk 2077 continues the same trend, with the Legion consistently edging ahead of the MSI across every graphics setting. At Ultra without RT, it manages a healthy 108fps, dropping to 49fps with RT Ultra enabled. Turning on full PT brings the game down to just 27fps, which is expected for something so demanding.

Thankfully, DLSS Performance and MFG make a substantial difference. With PT enabled, the frame rate jumps to 139fps, making the game considerably smoother to play.

Forza Horizon 6 paints a similar picture. The Legion manages 113fps at Ultra with DLAA enabled, dropping to 82fps when RT is introduced. Switching to DLSS Balanced brings the performance back up to 116fps, which is more than enough to take advantage of the laptop’s high refresh rate display.

For our latest round of benchmarks, I have also added Gears of War: E-Day, which makes extensive use of modern rendering technology, including NVIDIA’s RTX Mega Geometry and Hair Strand features.

At Ultra settings, the Legion delivers 61fps natively, dropping to 55fps with RTX Mega Geometry and Hair Strand enabled. That’s still a respectable result considering the graphical demands, and enabling DLSS Balanced raises performance to a much more comfortable 88fps. Throw in MFG 2x, and the frame rate climbs to 152fps. 

Are the Legion Pro 7i’s Fans Too Loud?

Keeping all this hardware cool is Lenovo’s redesigned Legion Coldfront Vapor cooling system, which combines a vapor chamber, a HyperChamber design and three fans. And judging by my testing, it does a reasonably good job of keeping temps under control, although there’s a price to pay in fan noise.

During gaming, the RTX 5090 mostly hovered between 73-77C, with power consumption averaging around 150-155W and occasionally boosting to 170W in Gears of War: E-Day. The CPU generally remained between 80-85C, with occasional spikes to 90C, but it rarely stayed there for long.

What impressed me more was how cool the keyboard deck remained throughout testing. Even under demanding gaming loads, the WASD and the palm rest area stayed comfortably cool, with only the upper-left portion of the chassis getting slightly warm due to its proximity to the cooling system. It’s a welcome change from some gaming laptops where the keyboard deck becomes rather uncomfortable after extended gameplay.

The fans, however, are another story. They are loud. Very loud. At full performance, the Legion can sound like just about any high-powered gaming laptop running its fans at max speed, and it’s certainly not something you will want running at full tilt in a quiet room with other people around. If you are gaming alone with a headset, it’s tolerable enough, but I wouldn’t call the experience particularly pleasant otherwise.

How Long Does the Legion Pro 7i’s Battery Last?

The Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 offers fairly typical battery life for a high-end gaming laptop. With the front and rear RGB lighting turned off and the display running at its full 240Hz refresh rate, I was able to get around 4-5 hours of use before reaching for the charger. 

You can squeeze out a little more battery life by dropping the refresh rate to 60Hz and making a few other power-saving adjustments, but don’t expect any miracles. With such powerful hardware under the hood, the Legion is better suited to spending most of its time plugged in, especially if you intend to play games.

Still, 4-5 hours isn’t particularly disappointing for a laptop of this calibre, and it’s about what I expected. It should be enough for a few hours of work away from a power outlet, but you will definitely want to keep that enormous 400W power brick nearby for anything more demanding. 

Should You Buy the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10?

The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 is an excellent gaming laptop that gets most things right. The redesigned chassis looks great, the build quality is solid, the OLED display is fantastic, and there’s plenty of performance on offer to run even the most demanding games at high settings. The keyboard is also a pleasure to use, although the rather small trackpad, extremely loud fans and mediocre battery life do take some shine off the overall experience.

At around AED 23,100, it’s also reasonably priced (heh) compared to several other RTX 5090 gaming laptops I have reviewed. However, the MSI Raider 16 MAX HX remains a difficult competitor to ignore. At AED 17,599, it delivers nearly identical gaming performance for substantially less money, albeit with its own compromises, including an IPS display, no G-Sync and an arguably less refined design.

Personally, if I were buying a gaming laptop primarily to keep it on a desk and connect it to an external monitor, I would have a hard time justifying the additional AED 5,500 for the Legion. The MSI would do just fine, and I would have quite a bit of money left over. But if you intend to use the laptop’s own display and keyboard regularly, the Legion makes a stronger case with its excellent OLED screen and more polished overall package. Whether those improvements are worth the extra money really depends on how deep your pockets are.

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 FAQs

How much does the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 cost in the UAE?

The configuration we reviewed, with a Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus, RTX 5090 Laptop GPU, 64GB of RAM and 2TB of storage, costs around AED 23,133.

Does the Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 have an OLED display?

Yes. It has a 16-inch 2560×1600 OLED panel with a 240Hz refresh rate, NVIDIA G-Sync support and VESA DisplayHDR True Black 1000 certification.

Is the Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 loud?

Yes. The fans are very loud at full performance, which makes them tolerable if you are gaming alone with a headset but unpleasant in a quiet room with other people around.

How long does the Legion Pro 7i Gen 10’s battery last?

Around 4-5 hours with the RGB lighting off and the display at 240Hz. You can get a little more by dropping the refresh rate to 60Hz, but the laptop is better suited to staying plugged in.

Is the Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 better than the MSI Raider 16 MAX HX?

The Legion is slightly faster, by around 1% to 4% in 3DMark, and has a better OLED display with G-Sync. The MSI costs AED 17,599, roughly AED 5,500 less, so it makes more sense if you will mostly use an external monitor.