The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 9 16 ($2,441.49 as tested) challenges many high-end gaming laptops for hundreds less. It doesn’t have all the frills of Lenovo’s flagship Legion 9 rigs, but it comes close, giving you a premium build and powerful components without hitting the laptop pricing stratosphere. Packing an Intel Core i9-14900HX CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 driving a 2,560-by-1,600-pixel screen with 240Hz refresh rate, it’s ready for the most demanding games. For giving $3,000-plus portables something to worry about, the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 9 16 wins our Editors’ Choice award for deluxe gaming laptops.
Lenovo doesn’t make waves with the Legion Pro 7i Gen 9 design-wise: It looks and feels much like the previous generation, but why mess with a good thing? In fact, you can’t mess with much, period, as the company only sells the system in two hardware configurations (though there is a choice of Windows 11 Home or Pro).
Both versions boast Intel’s Core i9-14900HX processor, 32GB of DDR5-5600 memory, two 1TB NVMe solid-state drives, and the 240Hz, 16:10 aspect ratio display. While our RTX 4080 review unit is $2,441.49 (with Win 11 Home), stepping up to Nvidia’s RTX 4090 brings the price to $2,899.99.
Don’t confuse the Legion Pro 7i Gen 9 with Lenovo’s Legion 7i Gen 9, which has the same CPU and screen but steps down to a GeForce RTX 4070 GPU. Starting at $1,738.49 with 16GB of RAM, it’s thinner and lighter (4.93 pounds versus 6.17) and has a different arrangement of ports, including the Thunderbolt 4 port that this Pro counterpart oddly lacks.
Like the Gen 8, the Pro 7i Gen 9 is tanky but well-built, presenting a sturdy platform made of aluminum and magnesium. It sits on thick rubber feet, has a 180-degree display hinge, and includes extensive ventilation with ports occupying roughly half of each side plus the rear edge. The shroud around the vents has a rougher texture than the rest of the system, lending to the somewhat brutalist design.
By „brutalist,” I don’t mean „over-the-top gamer”; while there’s RGB lighting on board, you can turn it off and let the Legion pass for a productivity or workstation laptop. I could squeeze its 1.01-by-14.3-by-10.3-inch chassis into a carrying sleeve meant for 15.6-inch laptops, but not easily. It’s awfully hefty for a backpack or briefcase, and that’s not even counting its weighty 330-watt power brick.
Per-key RGB lighting on the keyboard is complemented by front-edge lighting around the base. The lighting shines effectively through the keycaps, fully illuminating the legends. Lenovo provides a tight numeric keypad next to the keyboard, and cleverly provides arrow keys to avoid squishing any other keys. Like many new Windows laptops, the Legion Pro 7i also sees the right Control key replaced with a Windows Copilot key, though its processor lacks a neural processing unit (NPU) so most interactions with Windows’ AI will rely on cloud servers.