Lenovo Legion Slim 7i (2022)

One minute review

The Lenovo Legion Slim 7i builds on the 2021 version which was already a great laptop; This laptop with a gorgeous 16” screen packs the power to play the best triple-A games on the go with its enhanced internal specs of the RTX 30 series and Intel’s 12th gen CPUs.

The laptop comes with a nice and subtle design to go with the powerful specs inside, a clicky keyboard and a fingerprint scanner… the Legion Slim 7i looks good without turning heads or standing out too much as an obvious gaming laptop. This is useful if you’re looking to use the laptop in business and productivity tasks as well. The Laptop is also coming with a full keyboard with Numpad while maintaining a nice body that doesn’t take up much space.

With great specs and portability comes the certainty that you’ll pay a price for that, and the price here is hefty with AED 8,399 for the configuration with Intel Core i7 12700K paired with RTX 3060. And that’s not even the top-of-the-line configuration.

In terms of battery life, the Legion Slim 7i comes with a 99.99 WHr battery which isn’t as great in real life as it sounds on paper. Don’t expect to last a whole day without the charger when you’re using this laptop outdoor.

If you need the best gaming experience on the go, this laptop will be one of the best options you can get your hands on with the formula of specs and portability that Lenovo introduced in the Legion Slim 7i.

Lenovo Legion Slim 7i (2022) Price and availability 

The Lenovo Legion Slim 7i will be available in the coming weeks in the UAE. The version we got for the review will be available for AED 8,399 and the price will vary per configuration.

This laptop is aggressively priced and it will have a run for its money from tough competition from the likes of Asus Rog Zephyrus M16 which comes with better specs except for the CPU that’s from the 11th gen… you can also get your hands on MSI Pulse GL66 laptop with the same CPU and better graphics card for AED 6,000 only which buts Lenovo’s laptop in an awkward position in terms of pricing.

Lenovo is taking advantage of being one of the first Gaming laptops in the market to come equipped with Intel’s 12th gen processors in addition to its light form factor to price it aggressively and we’re not sure if that price will appeal to all the gamers out there.

Lenovo Legion Slim 7i Design 

The standards of how gaming laptops should look and weigh have changed a lot over the years to bring the weight and dimensions of these laptops down to be slimmer and much lighter… Lenovo has done a great job with this laptop by getting the weight down to 2.3 KGs without compromising on the specs.

The laptop looks and feels premium with the materials Lenovo has used in the laptop with the CNC metal trim and the brushed aluminium look on the side.

The Lenovo Legion Slim 7i comes in 2 colours Onyx Grey, and Storm Grey… both colours look really similar and they have a subtle, low- profile not particularly standing out as a gaming laptop. This is useful for the office by day, gaming by night type of people who like to have more versatility with their laptop.

Unlike its bigger sibling, this laptop doesn’t have RGB lights on the logo side or the keyboard and fans. Lenovo has opted to go with a less pronounced white light on the keyboard of this laptop. The keyboard has 2 levels of brightness that are suitable to use in bright and dark environments alike.

Lenovo has been generous with the ports here with 3 Type-A ports and 2 Type-C ports with support for Thunderbolt on one of them in addition to the card reader and a combo 3.5mm port and an HDMI.

The full list of ports is here:

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• 1x USB 3.2 Gen 1
• 1x USB 3.2 Gen 1
• 1x USB 3.2 Gen 2
• 1x USB-C 3.2 Gen 2
• 1x Thunderbolt 4 / USB-C
• 1x HDMI 2.1, up to 8K/60Hz
• 1x Card reader
• 1x Headphone/microphone combo jack (3.5mm)
• 1x Power connector

Lenovo has maintained its design decision to put most ports on the backside of the laptop to keep the cables out of the way while gaming. You’ll only find the two USB-C ports on the left side, and the card reader next to the 3.5mm port on the right. The rest of the ports are on the backside and won’t bother you when gaming. This design is very good for gamers since it removes all the clutter from the disk while gaming.

Lenovo has included a large glass tracking pad on the laptop which is leaning towards the left side of the laptop. Not the usual place you’d find tracking pads on with most laptops which are typically leaning towards the right side and it certainly takes some time to get used to.

The Legion Slim 7i comes with one of the most stunning displays we’ve got our hands on in a gaming laptop. The laptop has a resolution of 2560x1600 and an aspect ratio of 16:10 which makes the screen look taller than the standard 16:9 displays of the world. The display is also better for handling word documents and productivity tasks because of the more elevated aspect ratio.

Despite having a large display, this laptop doesn't have a big footprint thanks to the slim bezels that Lenovo has included here. The battery life here is great for casual usage scenarios (more on that later) the problem you’ll run into if you are gaming on the go is that you’ll have to carry a big and heavy charger if you want to get the full power of 230 Watts that can power up the CPU and graphics card to their best, luckily you won’t have to carry it around all the time as you can charge through the USB-C port with a speed of up to 135 watts which would be just fine for topping off the battery on the go provided you won’t use it for gaming in that case.

Design score: 4.5/5

Legion Slim 7i Hardware and performance

Our review unit of the Legion Slim 7i comes equipped with the latest Intel Core i7-12700H Processor and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 GPU with 16GBs of RAM and in a portable 16.9mm chassis weighing 2.36 kg.

Lenovo has done a great job fitting these powerful specs in such a lightweight and slim body. The laptop is very suitable for productivity tasks as well with these powerful specs and the usage of a full keyboard that contains a Numpad.

We’ve tried the laptop in a handful of different games to test the gaming performance, as well as running through some synthetic benchmarks to test the productivity performance of the laptop in different scenarios.

The Legion Slim 7i takes advantage of intel’s new 12th gen architecture with performance and efficiency cores. The laptop gave a solid performance in productivity tasks utilizing the 20 threads it got to slice through CPU-dependent tasks. The laptop scored stunning scores in PC Mark and Cinebench.

As for gaming, you can comfortably achieve more than 60 frames per second using maximum quality settings on triple-A games. But to reach over 100 frames per second to take advantage of the high refresh rate monitor, you’ll have to reduce the quality of the graphics to pump more frames to the screen. As for Esports games and other non-demanding games you can easily break the 165 frames barrier to get the best out of the screen.

Lenovo’s decision to go with 2560*1600 screen resolution came with a hefty price on performance as it has twice the pixels in a standard 1920*1080 resolution, which shows with the frame rates you’ll be getting with graphically demanding games. But you’ll be able to get more frames per second if you turn the graphics settings a little bit down. You can also get the better configuration version that comes with RTX 3070 that’ll be better at handling graphically demanding games.

The temperature of the laptop averaged 82 while gaming on ultra settings on the performance mode. Lenovo has done a great job with the cooling of this laptop using Cold Front technology with large ventilation openings on both sides of the laptop as well as the back. Lenovo’s design decision of building ventilation cutouts on the corners of the side and the back had a great impact on keeping the keyboard and the touch areas cool and comfortable to use over prolonged usage periods. Sure, it gets warm but not annoyingly hot and definitely usable while gaming.

The laptop isn’t audible when used in normal tasks in quiet mode. The story isn’t the same while gaming or under heavy tasks. The fans kick up to their highest to keep the temperature in check, and it’s loud when it’s under heavy pressure from the games

Performance score: 4/5

Legion Slim 7i Battery life 

With 99.99 Wh battery capacity, this laptop packs the largest possible battery that can board a plane. That sounds impressive on paper. But sadly not as impressive in real-life usage scenarios. Surely the battery is performing good and held up when used in medium usage scenarios with the screen’s brightness dialled down. Lenovo’s decision to include such a high refresh rate monitor was a double-edged sword, for gaming it was perfect in shooter and competitive games, but it also impacted the battery heavily.

We managed to get between 5 to 7 hours of screen time while using the battery with medium usage like web surfing and handling word documents. You should be able to squeeze more battery life if you lower your brightness or use the battery-saving mode.

The battery life here is decent, but it’s not the best even though Lenovo has gone all out in terms of battery capacity.

Battery life score: 4/5

Legion Slim 7i Software 

The Legion Slim 7i comes preloaded with a trial version of McAfee Livesafe antivirus that will nag you to upgrade. Lenovo has also included its software for controlling the performance and quick settings of the laptop.

The Lenovo Vantage app works as a hub for controlling all the aspects of the laptop the options found in this application ranges from controlling the power settings, setting-up macro keys and checking for updates to even overclocking the GPU and controlling the thermal mode of the laptop.

Controls of the thermal mode are simple and automatic. You can’t control the fan curve and you only have 3 modes which are: Quiet mode, Automatic mode, and Performance mode which can only be turned on if you plug the AC adapter on.

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Lenovo Vantage also has shortcuts to Nahimic sound engine and X-rite colour assistant. The first helps you to adjust the sound of the embedded speakers and you can cycle between preset profiles for Gaming, Music, Movie and other modes. Another neat feature with this laptop is that you can connect multiple headphones and the Nahimic software will enable you to use both headphones to listen to the same output coming from the Laptop, this can be handy if you’re gaming with a friend in an outdoor environment and both of you want to listen to the game without creating noise around you.

Lenovo bundled this laptop with clean and useful software support if you don’t count McAfee.

Software score: 4/5

Should you buy the Lenovo Legion Slim 7i (2022)

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