Blending the needs of gamers along with portability is the Legion Slim 7 laptop from Lenovo that was recently unleashed upon the Indian market.
Most gaming laptops have common characteristics that define them; top-notch performance, loud fans, RGB lighting, chunky designs and poor battery life. Lenovo aims to eliminate the bulk and bring about a little bit of portability.
The Lenovo Legion Slim 7, with its sleek profile, is a lightweight alternative to traditional laptops. The question is; does it sacrifice performance to get here? Let’s find out.
With a 19mm-thick frame and a weight of 4.1 pounds, the Legion Slim 7 manages to maintain a good build quality in a lightweight chassis. It’s adapting to the new trend of portable gaming laptops, something which I can get on board with.
It looks premium and comes with an all-black finish (Shadow Black) but needs to be cleaned of fingerprints and smudges once every few days. The best part of this design choice is that one can throw it into any backpack and easily carry it from one place to another without any fear of breakage.
This is a gaming laptop through and through. It’s equipped with AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800H processor (one would have hoped for a 6000 series chip instead), 16GB of DDR4 RAM, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 graphics, a 15.-6inch FHD 16:9 display with a 165Hz refresh rate) and a 512 GB SSD.
It may not be top-of-the-line specifications, but going with such a sleek profile means that Lenovo had to compromise somewhere., This gaming laptop is far more than just being ‘Slim’.
There’s a lot to like
The Lenovo Legion Slim 7 stands out with its design and port locations. This laptop may be mainly aimed at gamers but it’s also great for creativity and productivity.
The top is flat and the base sticks out at the back. This is a good move, as it allows for an array of ports (including the all-important charging port) at the back. One needn’t worry about where the plug point is in relation to the laptop.
The laptop, with its aluminium chassis, is built to survive. It’s built like a tank. The lid opens 180-degrees, which is very useful when having to sit in the window seat of a cafe on a busy Monday morning. The Legion logo on the lid has subtle colours and changes depending upon the light hitting it. Even the rear area that juts out has this effect. It makes the laptop just that much more unique.
The 15.6-inch FHD panel (with a 165Hz refresh rate) is fast enough for those long gaming sessions you have with your friends. There’s also G-Sync support. There are narrow bezels on three sides and the display is vibrant with good viewing angles. It’s just limited by a peak brightness of 300 nits. That means that this laptop is basically unusable outside. It’s not that you’d be buying this laptop, to game outside in a park, in any case.
The TrueStrike Gaming Keyboard, with full per-key RGB lighting (using software), is pretty good. It’s more responsive while also being more comfortable than previous iterations. There’s also the Numpad, which is missing on a lot of laptops in recent times. The keys may be shallower than one is used to but the travel is still good and it is comfortable to type on and game on.
The Lenovo Legion Slim 7 has what the company calls a TrueStrike Gaming Keyboard, which has full per-key RGB lighting using Corsair iCUE software. It has a new soft-landing switch that has an improved force curve over a rubber dome keyboard. It’s meant to not only be more responsive, but more comfortable.
The power button includes a fast and reliable fingerprint sensor. There’s also a privacy shutter for the webcam that is good to have.
The 71W battery may not be big enough but with a slim chassis, Lenovo couldn’t have done more. It lasts just under 80 minutes when pushing it through the rigour of Dirt 5, Mortal Kombat and other games. The good part is, that Lenovo has included a hybrid mode. In hybrid mode, the laptop uses the CPU’s integrated graphics. Using that mode, in conjunction with 50 percent brightness and you can get just over six hours while using it for work tasks.
The Lenovo Legion Slim 7 isn’t the best gaming laptop out there. It isn’t aiming to be so. With a less demanding game like FIFA 21, the laptop was easily able to output 150+ fps. The laptop makes the most out of the powerful Ryzen 7 5800H chip.
I played Mortal Kombat, Forza Horizon 5, DiRT 5 and a couple of other games. While plugged in and on max settings, I was more than pleased with the results. I breezed through the tracks and knocked out my opponents in spectacular fashion.
It’s no RTX 3080 but it’s still very competent in its own right. It comes with a 230W charger that you’ll want to be carrying around at all times.
Let’s run down some of the omissions/missteps that Lenovo should rectify in the next iteration of this laptop.
- The resolution is 1920x1080, with a 16:9 aspect ratio. The 16:10 trend is being bucked here, as is the QHD resolution that is available on other gaming laptops.
- The webcam doesn’t support Windows Hello.
- These speakers have a muddled mid-range.
- There’s no HDMI output.
- No Ethernet port.
- A 512 GB SSD instead of 1 TB. A larger SSD would be useful for all the games one installs on this laptop.
- Poor battery life; 80 minutes while gaming and just over three hours while simply zipping through a world day.
Yes, yes, and yes. The Lenovo Legion Slim 7 is one laptop that I liked from day one. It’s by no means the most powerful gaming laptop out there but it still shines as a gaming laptop. It also excels at real-world stuff. All this in a sleek and premium design. While editing photos or typing an article, I was more than pleased with the output from this laptop.
The Lenovo Legion Slim 7 checks almost all the boxes for a hybrid gaming laptop. There are some downsides though; 720p webcam, poor battery life, a dim display (if you choose the 1080p 165Hz model), and poor port selection overall. Still, those downsides aren’t to deter from what is a fantastic laptop.
Just remember that if you do buy the Lenovo Legion Slim 7, then be sure to tug along the massive charger wherever you take it with it.
Right now, the Lenovo Legion Slim 7 with an AMD Ryzen 5800H processor and the 15.6-inch WQHD 165Hz display is available for ₹1,41,990. At that price, it is an attractive purpose for what it delivers. One just wishes it came with the Ryzen 6000 processor instead.
