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as much as i'd love to show you guys the packaging for the lenovo legion 7i which

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i am unboxing under the table here this is a

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pre-release unit that was sent over in

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non-finalized packing materials so i'm unfortunately unable to do that lenovo

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sponsored this video and we are going to be checking out their state-of-the-art

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legion 7i Windows 10 gaming notebook a slim

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fully featured machine that has as much gaming horsepower as you might expect

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from a machine twice the thickness but apparently it's

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got a cooling system on it that can more than tame the beast within

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wow first impressions of this are really

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professional and that's not a word that i would normally use to describe

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something with like a core i9 hk processor and 2080 super max q graphics

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card but this looks like you know it's like business but

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like gaming business look at this thing would you guys know

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this is a gaming machine i mean that's a hint the entire bottom of the thing has

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got perforations all across here and

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then for cooling we've got a vent on this side

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two vents on the back and then another vent over on the other

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side another thing we've got more of than you might expect in a modern

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machine is io that's really nice to see so we've got a type a over on the right

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hand side which personally i'm not a huge fan of on gaming machines

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especially when that's where all of the type a ports are lined up but

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fortunately this this i'm a big fan of

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we've got most of the i o here on the back so HDMI out two more type a's

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Ethernet thank you as well as a power plug and kensington

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log then over on the left hand side that is not one but two usb type cs one of

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which is Thunderbolt and we've got a headset jack that's about as much as

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most people are going to need now the main things lenovo asked me to draw

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attention to here are the screen the graphics horsepower their true strike

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keyboard which has 1.3 millimeters of travel in spite of the fact that this is

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a relatively slim gaming notebook and of course

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their cooling system naturally i want to know how you keep a core i9 hk processor

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and a 2080 super cool in a machine like this we were told lenovo submitted it to

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ul for verification and it ran for as long as nine hours without throttling

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that's impressive

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look at those fans now there has been a

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trend towards much much thinner fan

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blades over the years but those are tiny oh no way

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before even turning it on we know there's RGB lighting

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look at that tiny strips of RGB leds

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on the rear exhaust right there and right there

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i love it oh look at that wow

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look at that cooler the whole thing is one

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gigantic piece here now why would they do it that way let's run through what

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we're looking at here this is our CPU and the legion seven can be equipped

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with up to a core i9 hk that's Intel's top of the line mobile

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chip right here is our GPU surrounded by

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our graphics memory so here we're looking at anything from a gtx 1660 ti

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all the way up to an rtx 2080 super max q i actually don't know exactly what's

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in here but what i can tell you guys for sure is that it is not a 1660 ti because

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that is a gigantic die i will say though

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actually they did a fantastic job of their thermal paste application a lot of

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the time on these like pre-done machines you'll see just like gobs and gobs of

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thermal paste and it's kind of glopping all over the place but this is this is

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really tidy right over here is our motherboard chipset

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and over here we've got our dual m.2

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drives so these are both oem versions of

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samsung drives i'm expecting very solid performance out of these and if i had to

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guess i'd say they're running in a raid zero configuration out of the box

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storage should be extremely snappy on this machine curiously whatever is under this here

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seems to be is it soldered down i can't tell oh that makes sense here i am all

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used to seeing soldered memory in laptops these days but no they have in

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fact not gone that route there we go so under this little shield right here

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we've got two slots for ddr4 soda memory

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and one of the remarkable things about this machine is that it can be equipped

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with up to 34 66 megahertz RAM that would be in a 2 by 8 gig configuration

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although i'm not 100 sure what we've got on here

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no it turns out we're running 32 gigs at 3200 megahertz something to note guys is

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that while they're using all samsung parts for the RAM and ssds in these it

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is very typical for these types of notebooks to multi-source so you

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wouldn't expect necessarily the exact same make or model especially when you

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choose a different memory configuration not all suppliers have the same

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availability of different speeds and capacities now to take a closer look at

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the cooler this is really neat i did notice that there

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was a surprisingly small number of heat pipes

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in the system and i guess this is to save on bulk because if you look at this

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they've actually got a heat pipe running over to this radiator right here and

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then this one goes and sits right next to the CPU and they've got a second heat

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pipe coming over near the GPU that runs over to this exhaust radiator right here

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but heat is actually carried from the CPU and GPU to these two the larger of

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the radiators by a vapor chamber vapor chambers are like a heat pipe except

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they are flat instead of tubes so that helps them save on some space and

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they're very high performance and it allows both of these to contribute to

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cooling for both the CPU and GPU depending on which one you're loading up

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more heavily because not every workload is going to stress both of them equally

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one thing you guys might have noticed is that on the inside there's no cooling

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for the m.2 modules that's because we've

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actually got these thick thermal pads on the bottom of the unit that are going to

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allow the m.2s to use the bottom of the laptop so the entire bottom plate as

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kind of like a giant aluminum heat spreader this is of course

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metal not plastic i'm impressed at how accessible this is it's only what like

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10 screws and you can get at RAM

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storage pretty much anything that you'd want to upgrade after the fact

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oh there's even more RGB than i expected

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the keyboard is very RGB

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the good news is that i'm sure that there's a software way that you can

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tame that a little bit if you're not quite as into it this

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is pretty cool though check that out so you've got kind of like an RGB like

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underglow effect on the back where i showed you those strips that were coming

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out of the exhaust and oh oh there's more than i thought around

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the sides too look at this RGB all the way around

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the bottom of the unit i didn't even see that one

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immediately upon using this machine the high refresh rate display absolutely

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stands out it's about as light as you could possibly expect it to be i think

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they saved quite a bit of weight by going with a vapor chamber rather than

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heat pipes and that also seems to be a big factor for how they were able to

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keep it so thin so you can actually see from the outside what the internal

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layout is here under the touchpad which is relatively thin they've got the

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battery pretty much all the way across the front and then under the keyboard

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which they needed a lot of space for because they've got RGB lighting which

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is apparently Corsair iq compatible which is pretty cool so they've got that

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RGB lighting they've got that long travel on these keys and then of course

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they had to keep the rest of the machine all the performance guts as thin as

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possible it's pretty common to see the high performance stuff loaded towards

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the back so it's less likely that when you've got your palms down on the top of

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the machine you're going to get all sweaty and all that it occurs to me i

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never actually pulled out the power adapter so it's

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definitely a big boy

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this thing's rated at watts but they've done a pretty good job

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of keeping it relatively slim in fact it's not that different from the

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thickness of the laptop so whatever you're planning to slide your laptop

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into the power brick should fit in just nicely alongside it video editing might

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not have been lenovo's main goal when they were designing this laptop but

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given how many gamers put together montage clips or stream or whatever the

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case may be light to medium or even pretty heavy

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video production has become an expectation even if it's just like a

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gaming centric machine so the first thing i'm going to do is load up a

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timeline in premiere pro and we're going to encode a video and see just how well

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our CPU manages to turbo with that cooling solution we just looked at

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actually while i wait for that let's go ahead and see if there's any way for us

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to control the RGB on our keyboard and system here network boost prioritizes

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games all right what else we got in here what is auto

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close okay so it'll close apps you don't need

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when you launch a game suppress keyboard noise that's a handy feature not that

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the keyboard is particularly loud actually it stands out as not being

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particularly loud at all

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can you guys hear how quiet that is if you press it lightly you can't even

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hear the thing you definitely have to type with more

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intent than you might have to on a laptop keyboard that doesn't have such a

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long travel but it's closer to what you'd expect

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from a desktop like membrane keyboard curiously i don't see anything in the

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main app here for RGB control but what does draw my attention over here is an x

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right color assistant cog down in the

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system tray that is pretty cool so we're

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running the 144 hertz model but there are actually three different displays

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that this notebook could be equipped with from an

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hertz to an adobe RGB 144 hertz all the way up to the 240 hertz model all of

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which are up to 500 nits peak brightness and our vasa display HDR 400 certified

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with dolby vision awareness so you'll be able to interpret dolby vision content

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another standout feature of the display is g-sync compatibility now if we're

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running on the integrated GPU which you can see we are right now obviously we're

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not going to be able to do that but once we switch over to the NVIDIA GPU we

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should see that g-sync menu show up right here in the NVIDIA control panel

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man this CPU turbo's like mad so we're just generating peak files for the

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project right now and you can see we are regularly turboing up in the 4.5 plus

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gigahertz range now this is a light workload this is not a heavily

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multi-threaded workload but that's what gives you that snappiness this will

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give us a better idea of what to expect when this thing is being stressed this

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is eight to one red code raw footage that we're playing back in premiere you

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can hear the fans ramping up a little bit now hey but even at about 40 CPU

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load we're still turboed up to around 4.35 4.45 gigahertz that is not too

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shabby actually we don't even need to do a video export

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all i need to do is flick playback to full

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on 8k 8 to 1 red footage and that'll

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give us a full CPU load won't it yep

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so let's see what we turbo to when we're absolutely slamming this thing even the

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GPU is getting hit for about 20 high 30

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low percent load here dang that is a surprisingly low hum

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let's flick it into the performance thermal mode and see how

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loud it gets now it's going

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holy shnikeys okay just a second we need to go back to

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that same segment and play this back again here

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wow in the performance mode it actually turbos several hundred megahertz higher

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across all eight cores and it's louder

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but it's not whiny it's more whooshy you

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can actually see the playback is visibly smoother than it was when we were in the

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balanced mode four gigahertz four plus gigahertz all core boost on mobile was a

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pipe dream not that long ago and yet here we are averaging over four

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gigahertz across all eight cores

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under heavy load all right enough thermal testing let's go ahead and jump

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into a game we're gonna start with apex legends all the settings are high with

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vsync off and we're just in training mode so we don't mess with other

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people's games this is so smooth apex is

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running at about 130 to 140 FPS at 1080p

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wow those guns sound good speakers are surprisingly boomy

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now on to forza horizon 4. all high settings again vsync off there is a ton

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of detail in these cars that's what a high powered GPU and a mobile device

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will do for you this is running really smooth thanks to the high refresh rate

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display and we're not seeing any tearing and as for the most important thing in

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car games the sound

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sounds good these speakers are real solid for a laptop with a surprisingly good cooling

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setup for the included core i9 and 2080 super a solid high refresh rate display

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and a quiet long travel keyboard lenovo has put together a pretty darn

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compelling machine starting at 50 99.99 us dollars

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oh i almost forgot what's pre-installed you've got the usual bloat that comes

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with Windows for whatever reason like from king.com you've got iq ah that

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explains why the RGB controls were not

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in lenovo software because you would use Corsair software for that that's pretty

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cool Corsair moving up in the world

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there we go okay

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everything is controlled from within iq we've got mcafee

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lenovo utility and other than that

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nothing that i would really consider to be egregious bloat everything else here is

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either stuff that we installed or stuff that i think is pretty cool like the x-ray color assistant that allows you to

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quickly change your display color settings so that's it that's a look at

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the lenovo legion 7i thanks to lenovo

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for sponsoring this video and to you guys for watching it oh i have more

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things plugged into the back than i remembered you're going to find a link to it in the

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video description if you want to check it out it's a lot of gaming laptop in a

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very slim form factor and with great thermals considering how thin it is