Lenovo’s been making waves with their Legion gaming line in the past few years, delivering excellent performance-per-peso that has started to make their rivals sit up and notice. The brand’s latest top-end offering, the Legion 7i, is probably their best gaming notebook yet, coming with all the goodies that you’d expect from a top-end performer including a beefy GPU, 10th generation Intel processor as well as a revamped cooling system and insane freebies for people who pre-order.

Elegantly designed beast

Gaming laptops are usually chunky beasts because of cooling concerns: it’s harder to keep the insides of a laptop cool the thinner it is since there will be less air to circulate around. Lenovo settled for an overall thickness of 19.9mm, squeezing under the 21mm thickness requirement for it to be considered an ultrabook.

The overall design is minimalist but brutal, with the laptop featuring sharp corners and angles, with a primarily aluminum chassis with slight touches of plastic here and there. While the laptop is pretty thin for what’s inside of it, it’s pretty hefty, coming in at 2.25 kilos – you’re definitely going to be feeling the weight of this thing if you travel around with it (when the plague’s over).

Like most gaming laptops today, there’s plenty of RGB elements scattered in the chassis, the most prominent of them being in the rear vents and the front of the chassis. As with most RGB lights, these are totally configurable depending on your mood.

The variant heading to the Philippines packs a 15.6-inch full HD display, with a bright 500 nit maximum brightness. The refresh rate is pretty insane, at 240Hz, and if that wasn’t enough the panel is also incredibly color accurate, with a 100% sRGB color coverage.

The bezels are very skinny on the sides and top, and despite that still has an HD webcam on the top bezel.

Moving on to the main body, the Legion 7i has a great port selection: there are 2 USB Type-C ports (one of which is a Thunderbolt port), 3 USB 3.1 ports, an HDMI port, and an Ethernet port.

The keyboard is nice and big, and the chassis is big enough that there’s also a number pad thrown in for added convenience, as well as large-ish arrow keys.

As far as the typing experience is concerned, it’s pretty good – there’s generous feedback when you press a key, and while the travel is short, it’s not that bad. The keys are backlit with RGB, and like the other lights on the notebook, can be configured and customized depending on your mood.

Lenovo’s Legion 7i comes in different configurations depending on what country you live, and in the Philippines, it’ll be offered with Intel’s 10th generation Core i7-10750H processor, paired with 16GB of DDR4-2933 RAM, 1TB of NVMe SSD storage, and of course, NVIDIA’s RTX 2070 Super Max-Q.

We’re still finalizing benchmarks for our full review, but considering the beefy hardware inside the notebook, the Legion 7i is more than capable of playing most modern games at the highest graphical settings.

Beefy hardware means plenty of heat generated, and to that end, Lenovo utilizes a vapor chamber design as well as a ventilated grill at the bottom for better heat dissipation.

As much as we’d like to fawn over the notebook, there’s plenty to like about Lenovo’s pre-order details for it. The Stylish bundle that’s priced at Php 139,995 nets you a bunch of awesome freebies including a gaming keyboard and headphones. The Savage bundle is even better since you’re getting a better keyboard, mouse, and headphones as well as a 27-inch Legion Y27gq monitor for just Php 10K more, at Php 149,995. That’s a crazy amount of value on top of getting a pretty powerful laptop.