Thick and Hefty Never Looked So Good

The first thing that surprised me about Lenovo’s 2025 16-inch Legion Pro 7i was the size of the box. I dig through a lot of laptops here at Gizmodo, and Lenovo’s 16-inch laptop seemed like an 18-incher judging by the packaging. By its heft, it felt like it too. Then I opened it up and learned what it was.

The 16-inch Legion Pro 7i itself isn’t overly large, though good luck slipping it into your backpack’s laptop pouch. The overt weight was intensified by the 400W power brick used to give this beast of a laptop enough juice to play all your favorite games. I’m not about to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The brick and the laptop are inextricably linked, making a big thick device bigger and thicker.

The power brick is the size of my two fists put together. You could stick it in a wall and hold up a structure that may imminently collapse. It’s heavy enough that anybody who drops it on their foot runs the risk of flattened toes, as if a Looney Tunes character dropped an anvil on their southern digits. I could go on about the weighty power brick because it’s indicative of what kind of device the 16-inch Legion Pro 7i is. This gaming laptop will stay at home, where its loud fans have enough runway to blast the back wall with warm air. In exchange, it offers a truly delectable OLED display that helps set it apart from some other expensive laptops at its roughly $3,600 price (though you’ll find the device going for between $2,700 and $3,000 depending on storage options) with these top-end specs.

The last Legion Pro 7i I reviewed back in 2024 was one of my favorites of the year. It had everything I wanted, and it felt comfortable to boot. In 2025, Lenovo redesigned the chassis and added even more RGB lighting facing the desk and on the rear thermal shelf. The company also inexplicably replaced the “O” key with the Legion logo, and I’m not sure I need any more branding to remind me this is a Legion device than with that pretty screen. With a new Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 mobile GPU, benchmarks prove the 16-inch Legion Pro 7i is a step above its last iteration. That’s necessary, considering the gaming laptop costs a little over $300 more than its predecessor.

Is it still my everything laptop? Yes, though only for a very specific use case. Lugging this beast to and from my office was a chore. The laptop lid became a mess of scuffs and thumbprints as I manhandled it. The thought of carrying a 400W power brick with me is enough to make me wish I could live a hermetic lifestyle and never leave the house again.

See Legion Pro 7i (2025) at Amazon

See Legion Pro 7i (2025) at Lenovo

Lenovo’s display is beautiful… in the right conditions

Lenovo’s penchant for pretty OLED displays on its gaming devices enchanted me enough with the ultra-expensive Legion Go 2. Having it here, again, makes suffering through any small pain points of a big, thick laptop worth the hassle. Organic light-emitting diode display (OLED) technology allows for deeper black levels—often described as “inky”—and excellent contrast. Like the $3,300 HP Omen Max 16’s OLED display, the 16-inch Legion Pro 7i goes up to 2,560 x 1600 resolution and tops out at 240Hz refresh rate with Nvidia GSync support.

Lenovo’s screen is extra glossy, which enhances the OLED’s pretty features at the cost of reflections from a sunny room. The Legion Pro 7i is already not travel-friendly, and taking it outside won’t offer anywhere close to a premium experience when you’re struggling to see anything between the glare. In the right environment, like my room with the shades pulled down, the 16-inch Legion Pro 7i is bright enough to offer enough glow during daytime, though you need to be careful positioning the screen facing windows.

The dual 2W speakers have very clear, balanced sound thanks to dual subwoofers. There’s a small hint of spatial audio as well, though you’ll need to turn up the volume to get a sense of the directional sound. It’s barely loud enough to eclipse the noise of the fan blowing, which seems to kick in even if the gaming laptop is plugged in. The 16-inch Legion Pro 7i can be your all-in-one suite for making your games look and sound good, as they should for this price.

Hefy, hefty, hefty

Though the new 16-inch Legion Pro 7i appears very different from the 2024 version, they feel very similar once you start clacking on its keys. That’s not a bad thing. The laptop’s keys and their 1.5mm of travel have a nice bounce to them that makes it easy to type on. Even though the keyboard features a full numpad, there is enough separation between the keys that I never got my fingers twisted when flexing my WASD instincts.

The off-center trackpad is nothing to write home about, but since you’ll likely be keeping this laptop at home, you’ll end up using a mouse most of the time anyway. Though I don’t hate the feel of the palm rests, I wish Lenovo paid a little more attention to the overall structure of the laptop. There’s a slight keyboard flex toward the center of the device you’ll feel if you start to lean your weight down during an intense match.

It’s not enough to make me concerned about breaking the laptop, though, for the price I expect more. The 16-inch Legion Pro 7i weighs in at 5.67 pounds, which is less than last year’s model but will still feel heavy if you hold it aloft in one hand. It’s thicker than other gaming laptops with an RTX 5080 GPU from 2025, such as the Razer Blade 16, but if you plan to make this laptop your main creative suite, you won’t be too disappointed considering that bright, beautiful screen. There are two USB-A ports and a headphone jack on the right-hand side, plus one more on the left alongside two USB-C and an HDMI port on the left. There’s one additional electronic switch to turn the 5-megapixel webcam on and off. The only thing missing is a dedicated SD card port to help creators avoid a dongle.

The proprietary power cable port also hangs out on the left, and with my home setup, it meant wrapping the power brick down and around the back of my desk. The two USB-C ports are Thunderbolt 4, meaning they can supply up to 100W of power to the PC. That’s not nearly enough to top off the PC when running games, even if that’s overkill for what’s necessary on a mobile RTX 5080 GPU. The 400W power brick would be more necessary for an RTX 5090 GPU variant. There are some versions of the laptop with an RTX 5090 and 64GB of RAM that I saw floating around on Amazon for the same MSRP.

Always expect a few compromises

The real kicker for all this is just how strong a performance I got from the 16-inch Legion Pro 7i compared to other 16-inch laptops. My review unit came with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage to go along with the Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU and RTX 5080 GPU. In multiple synthetic benchmark tests, the 16-inch Legion Pro 7i slightly outperformed other gaming laptops like the HP Omen Max 16 and Alienware 16 Area-51. In Geekbench 6 CPU tests, the laptop managed to squeak out a few hundred points more in multi-core tests compared to other laptops.

For gaming, you just need to remember this laptop may still not do everything you want it to do, even with its RTX 5080 GPU strapped in with that obtuse power brick. In a game like Cyberpunk 2077, when pushing tracing to ultra settings, you’ll need DLSS on “balanced” settings to achieve 60 fps when playing at the full 2,560 x 1,600 resolution. In games like Black Myth: Wukongwhere the expectation is you’re using Nvidia’s AI upscaling, you’ll easily attain more than 76 fps with all the ray tracing options enabled.

Alan Wake 2, which tanks performance once you start enabling ray tracing options, ran at around 40 to 45 fps on the highest settings with some path tracing. That was with DLSS on “balanced settings.” Other games that can hurt performance, like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2manage to equalize around a stable 60 fps when you stop yourself from maximizing path tracing. As much as you may hope an RTX 5080 will hit the peak performance, you’ll inevitably have to accept some trade-offs for a steady frame rate. With the excellent display, games look crisp and detailed in a way that few machines can match, though only in just the right conditions.

This big baby needs its 400W sippy cup

Big gaming laptops don’t have good battery life. It’s a fact of the necessary power used for the GPU, but when you start stacking on RGB lights, bright OLED screens, and all the other fixings, you can’t expect anything more than three hours of battery life on a good day. The 16-inch Legion Pro 7i is no exception. When doing my basically daily grind, with several Chrome windows open plus Slack, I can barely make it past 2.5 hours before the PC is throwing a tantrum and won’t be satisfied until I plug in its massive 400W sippy cup.

The 16-inch Legion Pro 7i is not the kind of laptop to run around town with, even if you intend to use a smaller 100W charger plugged into one of its Thunderbolt 4 ports. That may be enough for some light gaming, but you’ll then have to accept you’ll mar your big, beautiful laptop with whatever junk you have swimming in your bag.

After enough time with the 16-inch Legion Pro 7i, I started to admire its qualities and ignore its deficiencies. Its bright OLED screen has enough to help smooth over lingering wrinkles. If I truly wanted something more portable, I’d have to look at devices like the Razer Blade (and spend the extra premium on a Razer product, not to mention deal with their less-than-stellar support) or opt for a 14-inch gaming laptop. An 18-incher like the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 may be better as a true desktop replacement. Still, I never felt like I was missing anything from Lenovo’s all-in-one laptop, except for a baby carrier to lug this laptop and its power brick around with me.

See Legion Pro 7i (2025) at Amazon

See Legion Pro 7i (2025) at Lenovo