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Video made in partnership with Lenovo Legion and AMD. Most gaming laptops are a compromise because companies will usually build one chassis and one thermal solution and they'll try to put as many CPU and GPU combinations into that system. Like that it makes sense for business, right? You want to have just one chassis design and ideally you would sell that same chassis as a 5060, a 5080, a 5090 laptop, as many devices as you can because that just saves money. But different GPUs have very different energy outputs. So you would expect them to have very different design needs and it's strange when you think about it that we'll have one laptop chassis that is shared between like a 5060 all the way up to a 5090.
But that's just the way the industry's always been. But this thing's different. So this is the new Lenovo Legion 7i and they did something I wish more companies would do. They built this with one GPU in mind. This is strictly a 5060 laptop. There is no 5070, there is no 5080. It comes in two colors. Like there's this white color for that classic clean look and then there's this dark purple color that they call nebula purple. Uh there's actually more color options than there are GPU choices, but that's the point. Because they weren't trying to support a bunch of different power levels, they were able to take this device and shrink the footprint and the
weight down. This is now 1.8 kilos. It's thinner, lighter and smaller than the previous generation. It's actually the lightest gaming laptop on the market with a 5060 and it's not like some watered down 5060. It's the full wattage 115 watt RTX 5060. It's really well built. Now part of the reason why this laptop is able to do this is because the chip in it. It's running the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX470. It's not like a massive architectural overhaul, but it's a faster CPU clock, faster GPU clock and it has faster memory than the previous gen. But because it's not a massive chip overhaul, I think you'll find that most of these devices are a little bit more budget-friendly. Now this system with
its energy-efficient CPU allows that 5060 to run at 115 watts and in this space that is the sweet spot. Giving more watts to the GPU gives you very little performance gain. It just generates more heat and more fan noise and the performance of the 5060 on this device is really good. Now technically a 5060 and 5070 share the same thermal requirement. They both cap out at 100 watts plus boost. So Lenovo could put the 5070 in here without any kind of thermal impact, but I'm glad they didn't. I feel like that 8 gigs of VRAM on the 5070 just that card shouldn't exist and for it just allows Lenovo to focus on this particular GPU and also prevents people who would accidentally buy the 5070 without doing any research from being disappointed
because that card is a disappointment. Now the integrated GPU from AMD, the Radeon 890M, is really capable for lighter games and GPU workflows and it's also really useful for maxing out battery life. I'm on pre-production drivers, so I can't test these things properly, but Lenovo's claiming 12 plus hours of actual use on these systems. Now the most interesting thing about these laptops to me is not like the smaller size or the frame rates, it is the fan noise. So because this system was purpose-built around that 5060, the thermal solution is tuned very well. It uses their coldfront hypertech and the fans are very quiet. So even in balanced mode when it's under load, it's a comfortable kind of low frequency sound
and in quiet mode even when you're playing games, this thing's putting out like 32, 33 decibels. You can play games in a library and people wouldn't even notice. As long as you have like a really silent mouse and you can click quietly, you wouldn't be able to tell that this thing was playing games. Everything else is what you'd expect from the Legion brand. The keyboard is the same 1.6 mm travel with RGB lights. Uh the screen is like the 240 Hz OLED. It's punchy, really vibrant colors while being fast and responsive. I do think that with the 5060 it'll struggle to get most games up to 240 Hz, but some games like Valorant could do it. Uh the port
selection is decent. It's got two USBC, two USBA and a full-size SD reader and the back has the power and HDMI. I like that they kept uh those two in particular on the backside of the device. Now inside if you take a look at it, there is a short NVMe as the stock drive, but there is a full-length slot as the second drive option. So there you have it. As a purpose-built machine, I think the Legion 7i is the best tuned 5060 laptop I've used. It's super quiet and the engineering here speaks for itself.
