Lenovo Legion 7i Gaming PC review

Introduction and pricing

Pre-built gaming consoles are an almost turnkey option for consumers looking to transition from consoles or start gaming for the first time. There are endless vendors offering pre-built options, most offering multiple SKUs for each generation. Today’s system comes from Lenovo’s Legion portfolio, and it’s safe to say one of the more popular options when it comes to pre-built gaming PCs.

SEE GALLERY – 40 PICTURES

The build for this machine is a retail offering with the SKU “90V60000US”. This machine is based on the Intel Z790 chipset and is equipped with Core i9-13900KF; The KF is a 24-core/32-thread CPU and the top offering within Intel’s desktop CPU offering outside of the KS.

Memory for this machine is two sticks of DDR5, 5600MHz, with room to upgrade. Storage is a single drive, 1TB NVMe, with a Samsung drive included. Further down the specs, this SKU of the Legion 7i is set up with the GeForce RTX 4080 from NVIDIA and offers 16GB of dedicated GDDR6X. To power this system, Lenovo has installed an 850W PSU.

At the time of writing, the Lenovo Legion 7i, as described above, is listed at $3,349.99, including a one-year warranty.

Legion 7i, BIOS and software

Packaging and BIOS

The Legion 7i uses a simple design with all standardized parts. This includes the chassis, a standard windowed mid-tower with a similar design to the Corsair 4000D.

The front of the chassis includes Legion branding and an overall mesh design to allow cool air into the chassis.

Chassis I/O connections can be found on the top; these include two USB 2.0 and two USB 3.2.

The rear I/O includes two USB 2.0 on top followed by four 10Gb/s USB 3.2 and a 20GBps port using Type-C. The LAN port sits next to the two bottom USBs, and the system is rounded off with seven-channel sound.

By removing the side panel we can get to the hardware. I first noted the motherboard as a standard ATX solution. If I had to guess, I’d say made by ASRock. It has four memory slots and three M.2 next to the LGA1700 socket for the CPU.

Cooling is provided by a 250w AIO solution branded Legion.

Our sample had an included keyboard and mouse. Not ideal for gaming, but a decent starting setup.

The Legion 7i offers a good amount of RGB, which can be controlled via software.

BIOS

The BIOS includes an EZ mode with options for performance presets, boot devices and others. You can go more advanced at the bottom right.

In the advanced menus we first get a look at model identification info.

Devices gives us access to USB, storage and audio options. Further down you can set the lighting in the system.

The advanced menu offers options for the CPU, including the ability to configure Speed ​​Shift, HT and active cores.

The advanced menu gives the choice between enabling Resize-BAR and enabling or disabling overclocking.

Software

One piece of software that comes with Legion is Arena, similar to GeForce Experience, which catalogs your games in one area.

Lenovo Vantage includes a hardware screen and the ability to configure the machine and update Windows.

Overclocking is available on the Vantage’s right panel, which provides similar tools to the Intel XTU.

Cinebench, PCMark and AIDA64

Cinebench R23

Cinebench is a long-standing rendering benchmark that both Intel and AMD have relied on to highlight their latest platforms during unveilings. The benchmark has two tests, a single core workload that will use one thread or 1T. There is also a multi-threaded test that uses all threads or nT from a tested CPU.

Starting with R23, as we always do, Legion 7i gave us a single thread of 2193 and nT of 37915.

Cross mark

Crossmark showed an overall score of 2234, our best numbers coming in creativity.

AIDA64

AIDA65 memory gave us a throughput of 69K for reading, 64K for writing and 65K for copying. Latency was a bit high at 89.2ns.

PCMark

PCMark gave us a total score of 9360 points.

UL benchmarks

3DMark

CPU profile started with 1158 single threads, and at sixteen threads we see 12066.

Timespy scored 25818 with the RTX 4080.

Speed ​​Way scored 7290, average for GPU.

Through the DLSS feature test, the RTX 4890 achieved a base of 39.9 FPS and increased to 153 FPS with DLSS turned on.

3DMark storage gave us a score of 2551, and bandwidth was 434 MB/s.

Comparisons

Our charts

In R23, the Legion 7i did well, taking our best nT score of 37913 and single thread of 2193.

Crossmark showed the Legion 7i about 100 points behind the Trident and right with the Aurora.

The CPU profile had the best sixteen-thread score for the Legion 7i at 12066.

Timespy came in at 25818 for Legion 7i.

Speed ​​Way was good, with the 4080 scoring 7290.

Storage was the second best of the three machines we’ve seen.

The UL Procyon was very close between the machines, with the Legion scoring 11233 in Photo and 10279 for Office.

Looking at games, we launched Cyberpunk 2077, which showed the Legion 7i at 171 FPS at 1440p and 132 FPS at 4K.

Value, watch variation and final thoughts

Value

The value between machines gave the top spot to the Lenovo 7io, as the price premium for having an RTX 4090 outweighs the performance increase seen.

Finally, we have Clock Variation, which can sometimes show how good the CPU cooling is. I noticed the length of time this CPU reached towards 6GHz, with many of the P cores increasing to 5.8GHz during the test.

Final thoughts

The Legion 7i is one of the best pre-built gaming PCs to come through the lab this year. I liked that this system was a standard form factor, including chassis and motherboard, as it allows the consumer to upgrade as they grow.

The build quality was quite good, the chassis is a steel frame with a tempered glass side panel and some extra aesthetics come through on the front panel. The lighting is very well laid out on this machine, giving a soft glow from the chassis. Wire management was also pretty good, although I wasn’t a fan of the RTX 4080 using the 12VHPR adapter as it’s pretty ugly to look at through the side panel.

In testing the Legion 7i, the Intel Core i9-13900KF processor is a fantastic choice for overall performance. The 7i had no trouble keeping up with our two previous pre-built systems. It took the top spot in both R23 multi-thread and CPU Profile in 3DMark; this gives me the idea that this machine’s cooling system is quite capable. Gaming performance was very good with the RTX 4080 – we saw FPS upwards of 170 at 1440p and even hit 140 FPS at 4K.

Connectivity is very good for the 7i. Internally, we have plenty of expansion with three m.2 slots and several SATA pre-routed to the drive cages. We have both 2.5 Gbe LAN and AX211 for Wi-Fi. We’d like to see an AX411 or AX1690 for wireless VR support. USB is plenty for most of us. We counted two USB 3.2 on the top panel and five Gen 2 on the back, the USB-C setup with Gen2x2.

Prices are pretty good at its current MSRP of $3349, and the Legion 7i comes in at $1000 cheaper than our two systems that had RTX 4090s with identical motherboard, CPU, and RAM hardware. Additionally, the performance difference between the 4080 and 4090 in real-world gaming was 10 FPS across the board in our Cyberpunk testing. And application performance was in most cases better on the Legion – we suspect because it has better overall CPU cooling.