An all-AMD gaming laptop with surprising battery life

Computers are my lifelong obsession. I wrote my first laptop review in 2005 for NotebookReview.com, continued with a consistent PC-reviewing gig at Computer Shopper in 2014, and moved to PCMag in 2018. Here, I test and review the latest high-performance laptops and desktops, and sometimes a key core PC component or two. I also review enterprise computing solutions for StorageReview.

Lenovo’s all-AMD Legion 7 Gen 7 gaming laptop combines excellent performance, helpful features, and long battery life.

The Lenovo Legion 7 Gen 7 (starts at $1,839; $2,859 as tested) is without doubt a high-end gaming laptop. Its all-AMD hardware proved highly competent in our gaming benchmarks, yet it still lasted an amazing nine hours in our battery test. The new Legion 7 is complemented by a bright AMD FreeSync screen, an aluminum chassis, a first-rate keyboard, and well-behaved cooling fans.

Portability isn’t a strong suit, but this mobile gaming PC is otherwise hard to fault. The Lenovo Legion 7 Gen 7 earns a well-deserved Editors' Choice award among high-end, 16-inch gaming laptops as the Gen 6 model did before it. We’ve boosted our rating by half a star for now including a fingerprint reader, USB 4 ports, and a sharper 1080p webcam.

MSI’s Alpha 15 was the only gaming laptop using an AMD processor and graphics card back in early 2020. Fast forward to late 2022, and there’s a lot more to choose from, like the Editors' Choice-winning Alienware m17 R5 and the streaming-centric Corsair Voyager a1600.

The Legion 7 Gen 7 promises to be one of the fastest (if not the fastest) among all-AMD gaming laptops. The $1,839 base model starts with a Ryzen 7 6700H processor (eight cores, up to 4.7GHz) and a 10GB Radeon RX 6700M graphics card, while our topped-out review model jumps to a Ryzen 9 6900HX (eight cores, up to 4.9GHz) and AMD’s flagship 12GB Radeon RX 6850M XT.

Before we go further, know there is an Intel version of this laptop called the Legion 7i Gen 7. Our full review of it is forthcoming, but you’ll see how it performs versus the Legion 7 Gen 7 in the benchmarks section of this review.

The Legion 7 Gen 7 has the same outsides as the Gen 6 model. Its storm gray aluminum chassis is exceptionally solid—no surfaces give under pressure. The design dazzles mainly because of its extensive RGB lighting, which goes around all four frame edges and backlights the keyboard and the Legion logo on the lid.

The lighting is deeply configurable in the included Corsair iCUE app, which lets you set patterns, add layered effects, and save profiles. With the lighting turned off, however, the Legion looks almost pedestrian.

The only real clue it’s a gaming laptop is the formidable rear protrusion that houses much of its cooling system. I almost wish the design were more exotic, but the upside is this laptop doesn’t always have to attract attention, a sleeper gaming laptop, if you will.

At 0.76 by 14.1 by 10.37 inches (HWD) and 5.51 pounds, the Legion is about a pound heavier and bigger in every way than the Razer Blade 15 Advanced Model (2022) (0.67 by 13.98 by 9.25 inches, 4.41 pounds). However, the latter uses a 15.6-inch, 16:9 screen as opposed to the Legion’s more expansive 16-inch 16:10 panel. The proportions of the Gigabyte Aero 16 (0.88 by 14.02 by 9.78 inches, 5.07 pounds) are much closer.

The screen is one of the Legion’s best features. Its 2,560-by-1,600-pixel resolution is within the capabilities of its Radeon graphics card and has a healthy 165Hz refresh rate. It also features FreeSync (AMD’s alternative to Nvidia’s G-Sync) to prevent tearing. See our benchmarks later on for brightness and color measurements, but it’ll suffice here to say the picture is vivid and lifelike.

The Legion offers broad connectivity. Most ports are on the rear edge, which keeps cables out of the way. There you’ll find two USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports (one of which charges handheld devices when the laptop is powered off), USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 with DisplayPort, HDMI 2.1 video output, Ethernet, and a USB-like power adapter connector.

On the left is a pair of USB-C ports, but they’re not the same. One is version 3.2 Gen 2 while the other is USB 4 offering 40Gbps of bandwidth and backwards compatibility with Thunderbolt devices.

Last, the right edge has a USB-C 3.2 Gen 1 port, an audio combo jack, and an e-shutter switch to disable the webcam. The latter is more effective than a physical shutter (which the Legion doesn’t have) since it physically disconnects the webcam from the computer.

The Legion 7 Gen 7 improves on the Gen 6 model with a sharper 1080p webcam, though you’ll still need an external webcam to look your best. It also adds a fingerprint reader built into the power button. Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth are included standard. Meanwhile, its speakers fire loud and full sound—which you can tune with the Nahimic app—from under the palm rest.

Input devices are unchanged from the Gen 6 model. The keyboard has an enjoyable tactile feel and a desktop-like layout, with a separated arrow cluster. The two-thirds-size number pad requires extra precision but has a standard layout.

Dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys sit above the number pad. The bright per-key RGB lighting is configurable in Corsair iCUE. The buttonless touchpad also satisfies, with a large matte surface and tactile clicks.

The top-of-the-line, $2,859 Legion 7 Gen 7 tested here has an eight-core, 3.3GHz (4.9GHz boost) Ryzen 9 6900HX processor, a 12GB Radeon RX 6850M XT graphics card, 32GB of DDR5-4800 memory (as two 16GB modules), a 2TB PCI Express 4.0 solid-state drive (SSD), and Windows 11 Home. A one-year warranty is standard.

The “Rembrandt” Ryzen 6000 series is AMD’s first mobile CPU to support DDR5 RAM. The Legion 7 Gen 7 uses the most powerful H- or HX-class versions with a 45-watt (W) thermal design power (TDP) rating. On the graphics front, the Radeon RX 6850M XT is the flagship AMD mobile graphics card and goes head-to-head with Nvidia’s flagship GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. 

We compared the Legion 7 Gen 7 to 15- and- 16-inch machines for our benchmarks. The only all-AMD competitor is the Corsair Voyager a1600, which uses a Ryzen 9 HS-class CPU (35W TDP) and a Radeon RX 6800M. Next is the Gigabyte Aero 16 with its Intel Core i9 HK-class CPU and an RTX 3080 Ti. We also included the mentioned Razer Blade 15 Advanced (2022) to show how one of the most portable gaming laptops measures up. But the most exciting competition will come from the Intel-based Legion 7i Gen 7; it’s the same laptop as the Legion 7 Gen 7 but with Intel and Nvidia hardware inside. Its Core i9 HX-class CPU should be the most potent in this group. (Learn more about how we test laptops.)

We ran a 3DMark Time Spy stress test to show how the Legion 7 Gen 7 handles heat. Our Flir One Pro showed a hotspot of 108 degrees F above the keyboard, relatively low for a metal gaming laptop, and the areas where you’d put your fingers were below 100 degrees F.

The fans are also well behaved. Though audible while gaming, the noise is ultimately just a lot of air passing through the vents. There is little to no fan noise during general use.

Our first test is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive. The Legion 7 Gen 7 finished in the upper end of the graph in the main test, though it didn’t catch the Legion 7i Gen 7.

Our other three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop(Opens in a new window) , which uses the Creative Cloud Version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The Legion 7 Gen 7 produced middling scores with its AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX CPU, not really competing with the Legion 7i Gen 7 but matching up with the Gigabyte Aero 16 and easily surpassing the underperforming Razer. It did, however, generally outperform the Corsair’s HS-class chip.

For Windows PCs, we run both synthetic and real-world gaming tests. The former includes two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for systems with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Also looped into that group is the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which we use to gauge OpenGL performance.

Moving on, our real-world gaming testing comes from the in-game benchmarks of F1 2021, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege representing simulation, open-world action-adventure, and competitive/esports shooter games, respectively. On laptops, Valhalla and Siege are run twice (Valhalla at Medium and Ultra quality, Siege at Low and Ultra quality), while F1 2021 is run once at Ultra quality settings and, for Nvidia GeForce RTX laptops, a second time with Nvidia’s performance-boosting DLSS anti-aliasing turned on.

The 3DMark Time Spy results hint that the Legion 7 Gen 7 is off to a strong start. In F1 2021, it came close to the Legion 7i Gen 7 and substantially bested it in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. (Strangely, both Legion models refused to run Rainbow Six Siege; the benchmark test, not the game proper.) It’s no doubt a strong performer.

We also informally tested the Legion 7 Gen 7 at its native 2,560 by 1,600-pixel native screen resolution, where it produced 87 frames per second (fps) in F1 2021 (Ultra settings, AMD FSR enabled) and 78fps in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (Ultra settings), respective drops of 16% and 32% from the 1080p averages of 104fps and 115fps.

PCMag tests laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with screen brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100% until the system quits. Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting are turned off during the test.

We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its brightness in nits (candelas per square meter) at the screen's 50% and peak settings.

The Legion 7 Gen 7 seamlessly switches to the Radeon graphics on its Ryzen CPU in power-saving scenarios, and it pays off: over nine hours of battery life for a hulking gaming laptop like this is noteworthy. The next-best time from the Gigabyte Aero 16 was 6 hours and 34 minutes. The Legion 7 Gen 7 also impressed with its peak screen brightness of 512.2 nits. It doesn’t have the most colorful display in this group, covering 75% of the popular DCI-P3 gamut versus the Razer’s 100%, but it still looks quite colorful.

The Legion 7 Gen 7 rocks expectations for a high-end gaming laptop, backing excellent gaming performance with practicality. The laptop's screen has all the technology to make gaming enjoyable, and there are enough RGB lights built into the chassis to remake Saturday Night Fever. Long battery life makes it more well-rounded than the Intel version of this laptop, the Legion 7i Gen 7.

Provided portability isn't at the top of your list—the Razer Blade 15 Advanced Model (2022) is hard to beat for that, though you’ll take a performance hit—the Legion 7 Gen 7 is a home run for Lenovo and AMD, and it earns our Editors' Choice award among high-end 16-inch gaming laptops.

Lenovo’s all-AMD Legion 7 Gen 7 gaming laptop combines excellent performance, helpful features, and long battery life.

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Computers are my lifelong obsession. I wrote my first laptop review in 2005 for NotebookReview.com, continued with a consistent PC-reviewing gig at Computer Shopper in 2014, and moved to PCMag in 2018. Here, I test and review the latest high-performance laptops and desktops, and sometimes a key core PC component or two. I also review enterprise computing solutions for StorageReview.

I work full-time as a technical analyst for a business software and services company. My hobbies are digital photography, fitness, two-stroke engines, and reading. I’m a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology.

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