Advertisement
Technology
LifestyleGadgets

Lenovo Legion 7 gaming laptop: first impressions – super fast graphics, new cooling system and enhanced keyboard

  • Latest Lenovo gaming machine has a sophisticated look, adaptable graphics processors and a blisteringly fast refresh rate
  • The laptop also has a new vapour cooling system and an enhanced, gamer-friendly, anti-ghosting keyboard

Reading Time:2 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
Lenovo’s Legion 7 gaming laptop, running on Intel’s Core i9 processor, and Nvidia’s GeForce RTX, with a 15.6-inch LCD screen. Photo: Lenovo
Ben Sin

You can usually spot a gaming laptop from a mile away – they’re big, bulky, with glowing light strips usually dead centre on the clam shell lid – but Lenovo’s design team didn’t want to go down that route.

“We wanted to make something that’s a bit more sophisticated; a laptop that can be a gaming machine, but also one you can take into office boardrooms,” says Ian Tan, Lenovo’s gaming lead in Asia-Pacific, at this week’s media preview of the company’s new line of Legion gaming laptops. The latest releases are expected to hit the market in May.

All Legion models are well equipped, but the top of the line – the Legion 7 – obviously grabbed the most attention, since it is the first laptop to use Nvidia’s “Advanced Optimus” technology, a new graphics engine that can intelligently switch on the fly between a dedicated graphics processing unit (dGPU) and the basic integrated GPU (iGPU).

Advertisement

What that means is that the laptop will use iGPU in less graphic intensive situations and jump to dGPU when the action heats up – this should result in more battery endurance.

We played the graphically intensive Gears of War 5 on the Legion 7 and the game ran at an incredibly fast 100fps without issues. Photo: Ben Sin
We played the graphically intensive Gears of War 5 on the Legion 7 and the game ran at an incredibly fast 100fps without issues. Photo: Ben Sin
Advertisement

The new Legion 7 also has a redesigned vapour cooling system the company is calling “Coldfront 2.0”, which uses a combination of hardware and software to ease into cooling situations.

Although the Legion 7’s 15.6-inch IPS screen has a resolution of only 1,080p, it refreshes at either 144Hz or 240Hz (at extra cost). From my short time testing Gears of War 5 on the machine, graphics ran just about flawlessly, at 100fps without hiccups.

Advertisement
Select Voice
Choose your listening speed
Get through articles 2x faster
1.25x
250 WPM
Slow
Average
Fast
1.25x