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Lenovo Legion 7 Gen 6 Review – What a sight to behold

One of the easier and slightly more affordable ways of getting your hands on the latest PC hardware is by purchasing a new notebook.

Make no mistake, notebooks fitted with the latest and greatest aren’t the cheapest option around, but if you shop around you can find something that excels well enough in its price range that it makes a convincing argument for itself.

One such notebook is the subject of today’s review, the Lenovo Legion 7, specifically the 16ACH6.

This notebook comes in a variety of hardware configurations, but ours was fitted with the following:

  • AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX running at 3.3GHz
  • NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU with 16GB of GDDR6
  • 32GB DDR4 at 3200
  • 2TB M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD
  • 16inch QHD (2560×1600) display with NVIDIA G-sync.

That looks awfully good on paper and not to jump the shark, but it’s great in reality as well.

Outward appearance

The Legion 7 looks rather understated until you hit the power button. The bottom of the notebook is beset with an RGB lighting strip and the keyboard has sufficient unicorn vomit as well. The lighting for the strip and keyboard can be configured via the Corsair iCue software.

We’re not fans of this specific RGB lighting software, but until there is a unified RGB solution, we suppose there aren’t really viable alternatives that are also easy to use.

Many of the ports in the Legion 7 are located at the back of the notebook.

The keyboard here is interesting. It isn’t a mechanical keyboard but the TrueStrike switches present here give a nice tactile feel and have a rather nice travel distance before termination. We do recommend an external keyboard for gaming but the keyboard here is fine for typing.

The notebook’s shell is made of “aerospace-grade aluminium” which looks great and isn’t prone to holding on to fingerprints. The build quality is really stellar and it’s tough not to just stare at this machine.

In terms of ports the Legion 7 sports three USB Type-C ports, a headphone/microphone combo port, three USB-A ports, and HDMI 2.1 port, power and an RJ45 port.

Performance

The Legion 7 doesn’t fit into one specific box which makes reviewing it a bit of a tricky matter.

As you can see from the specifications above, the CPU, GPU and RAM make this notebook a very well appointed machine for content creation. The amount of memory means that very little will slow the Legion 7 down, but the display is the real star here. More on that later.

As a content creation machine the Legion 7 works well managing to hit a multi-core score of 11576 points in Cinebench R23. In terms of single-core, the CPU scored 1412 points over two passes of the render.

Under this specific synthetic load the CPU hits 84.4 degrees Celsius and the keyboard becomes very warm to the touch. At idle the CPU sits at around 47 degrees Celsius with an ambient temperature of 26 degrees Celsius.

However, when you need to play some games, things become rather hot.

The Lenovo Legion 7 could use some help when it comes to cooling

In Time Spy running at the highest preset at a 1440p resolution we achieved a score of 10 782 with the average there being 11 430. Frame rates flitted between 75fps and 62fps during the TimeSpy graphics tests.

Scores jumped up in Battlefield V at the Ultra preset with fps averaging 105. In God of War with the Ultra preset we averaged 66fps at 2560 x 1600p. Performance in gaming can be improved by lowering settings but if you’re interested in high fidelity gaming, the performance is great, especially for a notebook.

Something else that’s quite high are the temperatures but that’s not a good thing. Our GPU sat at a balmy 76 degrees Celsius and the CPU at 96 degrees Celsius. While the CPU can stand temperatures up to 103 degrees Celsius, your hands will give up before the CPU does and it’s not a comfortable experience.

A notebook stand and external peripherals are definitely required here.

Nevertheless, even taking the extreme temperatures the components reach into consideration, the performance on offer here is great and impressed us.

So much more room for activities

Coming from a 16:9 display to a 16:10 as the Legion 7 sports can be a bit strange. We mean this in a good way as the extra screen real estate is welcome.

However, the aspect ratio and 2560 x 1600 resolution really are the tip of the iceberg here.

The display covers 100 percent of the sRGB colour gamut and is VESA DisplayHDR 400 certified. What’s more is that using the X-rite Color Assistant you can configure the display to make use of four different colour profiles namely:

  • Uncalibrated
  • sRGB
  • Rec. 709
  • Default.

The default option uses RGB gamma correction, but with brightness set to full.

The 16:10 QHD display really is a sight to behold.

While it would be nice to have the option to load different profiles via the X-rite Color Assistant, we can understand why this isn’t done as it may lead to less than stellar experiences, something Pantone likely doesn’t want happening.

The display features a maximum refresh rate of 165Hz and while we never reached that peak while gaming at Ultra settings, it’s nice to have the headroom, especially if you don’t have an external monitor.

With its hardware configuration and the drop-dead gorgeous display, the Legion 7 is perfect for content creation while keeping its gaming hat on as well.

Battery

We don’t really expect much from gaming notebooks when it comes to battery life, especially as components have become more power hungry.

That having been said, we managed to do word document editing, web browsing and image resizing on the Legion 7 for four hours before the battery started kicking out warnings about low power. When it comes to gaming the battery life is slightly worse at three hours.

Your mileage may vary but we expect that in most use cases you can get four hours of life from a single charge.

About bloatware

Aside from the useful apps that were pre-installed on our review notebook such as the aforementioned X-rite Color Assistant and the iCue software to control the RGB lighting, the Legion 7 comes with McAfee anti-virus.

Please can we make 2022 the year we don’t include a security solution users don’t want on their notebook.

We agree that having some sort of security solution is good but pre-loading the software only serves to annoy users. Either include a year’s subscription with your notebook and let the user install the software independently or stop installing the free version altogether.

Conclusion

The Lenovo Legion 7 went above and beyond our expectations.

The CPU, RAM and GPU configuration in this notebook leaves very little on the table as regards performance and it’s more than capable of handling the latest AAA game developers have to offer.

We would’ve liked cooling to be more effective especially during these summer months and we hope that Lenovo addresses its cooling in future Legion notebooks.

With that having been said, the performance and build quality are superb and we can easily recommend this notebook for anybody looking for a portable high-end gaming machine.

The Lenovo Legion 7 retails for R49 999 (RRP) which is rather expensive, but considering that many gaming notebooks at this price point only sport an NVIDIA RTX 3070, this is a tempting offer.

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