Lenovo’s Legion 7 is the 1440p 165Hz 16-inch gaming laptop you desperately want
Lenovo is laying claim to the first 1440p or QHD gaming laptop in the 16-inch form factor. Vital stats include 165Hz refresh, punchy 500 nit brightness, G-Sync and HDR support. Yum.
Like an awful lot of 2021’s new gaming portables, the beating heart of the Lenovo Legion 7 is an AMD Ryzen 5000 CPU, up to and including the Ryzen 9 5900H eight-beast, paired with Nvidia’s hot new RTX 30-series graphics.
As if that wasn’t enough, the Legion 7 has multi-zone RGB lighting with Corsair iCUE software support, plus what we believe is per-key keyboard lighting. To that you can add a large glass-surfaced trackpad, as is the norm for premium portables these days.
An 80wWHr battery implies it will have decent longevity off the mains, meanwhile, and wireless connectivity is bang up to date with Wi-Fi 6. As for cooling, Lenovo says both vapour chamber and liquid metal thermal compound are in the mix. That’s good to know given this looks like a fairly slim portable, which is always a challenge in a gaming context.
Circling back on that 16-inch panel, it has super slim bezels on three sides helping the Legion 7 to be pretty compact for a 16-inch rig. It’s also powered by IPS technology and offers VESA DisplayHDR 400 certification. That’s the lowest level of HDR support and really only indicates that the system is capable of rendering colours in HDR content correctly.
Your next upgrade
Best CPU for gaming: the top chips from Intel and AMD
Best graphics card: your perfect pixel-pusher awaits
Best SSD for gaming: get into the game ahead of the rest
That said, the 500 nits of brightness imply a very punchy panel. Likewise, the 165Hz refresh combined with those next-gen Nvidia GPUs should make for buttery-smooth frames. And lest you have forgotten, 1440p or QHD translates in 2,560 by 1,440 pixels.
That’s well short of 4K, to be sure. But it’s also a big step on 1,920 by 1,080 or full HD and a lot of pixels for a 16-inch panel. Expect razor-sharp detail at a pace that a mobile GPU can keep up with.
Prices start at a surprisingly reasonable $1,669, even if it's not totally clear what specs that buys you, with availability a little ways out in June. But then that's 2021 for you. You're gonna have to wait for the good stuff.