as much as i'd love to show you guys the packaging for the lenovo legion 7i which
i am unboxing under the table here this is a
pre-release unit that was sent over in
non-finalized packing materials so i'm unfortunately unable to do that lenovo
sponsored this video and we are going to be checking out their state-of-the-art
legion 7i Windows 10 gaming notebook a slim
fully featured machine that has as much gaming horsepower as you might expect
from a machine twice the thickness but apparently it's
got a cooling system on it that can more than tame the beast within
wow first impressions of this are really
professional and that's not a word that i would normally use to describe
something with like a core i9 hk processor and 2080 super max q graphics
card but this looks like you know it's like business but
like gaming business look at this thing would you guys know
this is a gaming machine i mean that's a hint the entire bottom of the thing has
got perforations all across here and
then for cooling we've got 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 in a modern
machine is io that's really nice to see so we've got a type a over on the right
hand side which personally i'm not a huge 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 the i o here on the back so HDMI out two more type a's
Ethernet thank you as well as a power plug and kensington
log 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
most people are going to need now the main things lenovo asked me to draw
attention to here are the screen the graphics horsepower their true strike
keyboard which has 1.3 millimeters of travel in spite of the fact that this is
a relatively slim gaming notebook and of course
their cooling system naturally i want to know how you keep a core i9 hk processor
and a 2080 super cool in a machine like this we were told lenovo submitted it to
ul for verification and it ran for as long as nine hours without throttling
that's impressive
look at those fans now there has been a
trend towards much much thinner fan
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 leds
on the rear exhaust right there and right there
i love it oh look at that wow
look at that cooler the whole thing is one
gigantic piece here now why would they do it that way let's run through what
we're looking at here this is our CPU and the legion seven can be equipped
with up to a core i9 hk that's Intel's top of the line mobile
chip right here is our GPU surrounded by
our graphics memory so here we're looking at anything from a gtx 1660 ti
all the way up to an rtx 2080 super max q i actually don't know exactly what's
in here but what i can tell you guys for sure is that it is not a 1660 ti because
that is a gigantic die 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 gobs and gobs of
thermal paste and it's kind of glopping all over the place but this is this is
really tidy right over here is our motherboard chipset
and over here we've got our dual m.2
drives so these are both oem versions of
samsung drives i'm expecting very solid performance out of these and if i had to
guess i'd say they're running in a raid zero configuration out of the box
storage should be extremely snappy on this machine curiously whatever is under this here
seems to be is it soldered down i can't tell oh that makes sense here i am all
used to seeing soldered memory in laptops these days but no 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 soda memory
and one of the remarkable things about this machine is that it can be equipped
with up to 34 66 megahertz RAM that would be in a 2 by 8 gig configuration
although i'm not 100 sure what we've got on here
no it turns out we're running 32 gigs at 3200 megahertz something to note guys is
that while they're using all samsung parts for the RAM and ssds in these it
is very typical for these types of notebooks to multi-source so you
wouldn't expect necessarily the exact same make or model especially when you
choose a different memory configuration not all suppliers have the 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
was a 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 and sits right next to the CPU and they've got a second heat
pipe coming over near the GPU that runs over to this exhaust radiator right here
but heat is actually carried 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 them save on some space and
they're very high performance and it allows both of these to contribute to
cooling for both the CPU and GPU depending on which one you're loading up
more heavily because not every workload is going to stress both of them equally
one thing you guys might have noticed is that on the inside there's no cooling
for the m.2 modules that's because we've
actually got 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 giant aluminum heat spreader this is of course
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 that you'd want to upgrade after the fact
oh there's even more RGB than i expected
the keyboard is very RGB
the good news is that i'm sure that 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 like an RGB like
underglow effect on the back where i showed 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
the bottom of the unit i didn't even see that one
immediately upon using this machine the high refresh rate display absolutely
stands out it's about as light as you could possibly expect it to be i think
they saved quite a bit of weight by going with a vapor chamber rather 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 apparently Corsair iq compatible which is pretty cool so they've got that
RGB lighting they've got that long travel 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 see the high performance stuff loaded towards
the back so it's less likely that when you've got your palms down on the top of
the machine you're going to get all sweaty and all that it occurs to me i
never actually pulled out the power adapter so it's
definitely a big boy
this thing's rated at 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 planning to slide your laptop
into the power brick should fit in just nicely alongside it video editing might
not have been lenovo's main goal when they were designing this laptop but
given how many gamers put together montage clips or stream or whatever the
case may be light to medium or even pretty heavy
video production has become an expectation even if it's just like a
gaming centric machine so the first thing i'm going to do is load up a
timeline in premiere pro and we're going to encode a video and see just how well
our CPU manages to turbo with that cooling solution we just looked at
actually while i wait for that let's go ahead and see if there's any way for us
to control the RGB on our keyboard and system here network boost prioritizes
games all right what else we got in here what is auto
close okay so it'll close apps you don't need
when you launch a game suppress keyboard noise that's a handy feature not that
the keyboard is particularly loud actually it stands out as not being
particularly loud at all
can you guys hear how quiet that is if you press it lightly you can't even
hear the thing you definitely have to type with more
intent than you might have to on a laptop keyboard that doesn't have such a
long travel but it's closer to what you'd expect
from a desktop like membrane keyboard curiously i don't see anything in the
main app here for RGB control but what does draw my attention over here is an x
right color assistant cog down in the
system tray that is pretty cool so we're
running the 144 hertz model but there are actually three different displays
that this notebook could be equipped with from an
hertz to an adobe RGB 144 hertz all the way up to the 240 hertz model all of
which are up to 500 nits peak brightness and our vasa display HDR 400 certified
with dolby vision awareness so you'll be able to interpret dolby vision content
another standout feature of the display is g-sync compatibility now if we're
running on the integrated GPU which you can see we are right now obviously we're
not going to 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 turbo's 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 heavily
multi-threaded workload but that's what gives you that snappiness this will
give us a better idea of what to expect when this thing is being stressed this
is eight to one red code raw footage that we're playing back in premiere you
can hear the fans ramping up a little bit now hey but even at about 40 CPU
load we're still turboed up to around 4.35 4.45 gigahertz that is not too
shabby actually we don't even need to do a video export
all i need to do is flick playback to full
on 8k 8 to 1 red footage and that'll
give us a full CPU load won't it yep
so let's see what we turbo to when we're absolutely slamming this thing even the
GPU is getting hit for about 20 high 30
low percent load here dang that is a surprisingly low hum
let's flick it into the performance thermal mode and see how
loud it gets now it's going
holy shnikeys 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 turbos several hundred megahertz higher
across all eight cores and it's louder
but it's not whiny it's more whooshy you
can actually see the playback is visibly smoother than it was when we were in the
balanced mode four gigahertz four plus gigahertz all core boost on mobile was a
pipe dream not that long ago and yet here we are averaging 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 with other
people's games this is so smooth apex is
running at about 130 to 140 FPS at 1080p
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 in these cars that's what a high powered GPU and a mobile device
will do for you this is running really smooth thanks to the high refresh rate
display and we're not seeing any tearing and as for the most important thing in
car games the sound
sounds good these speakers are real solid 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 a pretty darn
compelling machine starting at 50 99.99 us dollars
oh i almost forgot what's pre-installed you've got the usual bloat that comes
with Windows for whatever reason like from king.com you've got iq ah that
explains why the RGB controls were not
in lenovo software because you would use Corsair software for that that's pretty
cool Corsair moving up in the world
there we go okay
everything is controlled from within iq we've got mcafee
lenovo utility and other than that
nothing that i would really consider to be egregious bloat everything else here is
either stuff that we installed or stuff that i think is pretty cool like the x-ray 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
things plugged into the back than i remembered you're going to find a link to it in the
video description if you want to check it out it's a lot of gaming laptop in a
very slim form factor and with great thermals considering how thin it is