What happens if Intel Core i9-14900HX asks NVIDIA RTX 4090 to dance? Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IRX9H says it will be the most powerful laptop of our time. It is not only about the hardware, but also about how the engineers managed to implement the cooling system. Looking ahead, the hero of the review has performed well and is exemplary in its class, although there are a few nuances that we will discuss in detail in the review.
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| Technical characteristics | |
| Screen | 16″ IPS 2560×1600 240 Hz |
| Processor | Intel Core i9-14900HX |
| RAM | 32 GB DDR5 5600 MHz |
| Drive | 1 TB PCI-E 4.0 x4 + 1 slot |
| Video card | NVIDIA RTX 4090 16 GB 175 W |
| Wireless interfaces | Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3 |
| USB connectors | 4 x Type A 3.2 gen1 |
| 1 x Type C 3.2 gen2 | |
| 1 x Thunderbolt 4 | |
| Video connector | HDMI 2.1 |
| Audio jack | 3.5 mm jack |
| Network connector | RJ-45 1 Gbit/s |
| Card reader | – |
| Camera | Full HD 1080p |
| Audio | Harman 2 speakers |
| Power supply | 330 W |
| Battery | 100 W*h |
| Additionally | USB Power Delivery |
| RGB for each button | |
| Housing material | Aluminum |
| Weight | 2.62 kg |
| Dimensions | 364×262×26 mm |
| Operating system | Windows 11 Pro |
Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IRX9H isn’t concerned about the environment in the same way as other Lenovo products, so inside we find classic foam seals. Everything is packaged as modestly as possible, without unnecessary pathos, as other manufacturers often allow themselves.
In addition to the laptop, the set includes a 330W branded power supply. Although it is huge, it has a flat design. There is also paper documentation inside, and the laptop itself is wrapped in a white napkin case. The laptop comes with Windows 11 Pro.
Although the laptop is made mostly of aluminum, you can hear a creaking noise when you carry it, as if it were an inexpensive plastic model. The manufacturer has placed a lot of advertising stickers on the front panel, and the top lid has brand logos.
The lid can be opened with one hand, like a typical high-end gaming laptop. The mechanism works smoothly, but you can hear the aforementioned creaks. The surface of the case easily collects fingerprints.
Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IRX9H looks neat, a little aggressive, with direct hints of a gaming character. Cooling grilles are visible on all sides, and there is a high rubber pad on the bottom to increase the gap between the table and the laptop.
In addition to the heatsink holes, the right panel has one USB Type A, a 3.5 mm headphone jack, and a physical webcam switch. The left side is similar, but instead of an audio jack, there is a USB Type C. On the back are gigabit RJ-45, HDMI 2.1, Thunderbolt 4 and two more USB Type A. The Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IRX9H has everything except a card reader. Wireless modules Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3.
The keyboard ergonomics are up to par: the buttons are large, comfortable, well-shaped, the arrows are not paired, Shift is not shortened, and there is a number pad. Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IRX9H has individual RGB backlighting for each key, which allowed us to add several modes.
For example, you can set the keyboard to work as a «graphic equalizer» when playing music. When you press the FN key, the possible combinations are highlighted, which can be used to adjust the sound, screen brightness, keyboard backlight, power mode, and more.
If you don’t find fault with the keyboard, the touchpad is far from perfect. The manufacturer could have put a larger touchpad in such a large laptop. Obviously, the developers of the Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IRX9H expect the owner to carry a mouse, which is necessary for video games.
The 16-inch IPS screen has a resolution of 2560×1600 pixels and a refresh rate of 240 Hz. The image is soft, realistic, viewing angles are good, and the brightness range is sufficient (up to 500 nits).
The colorimeter shows good results and full coverage of the sRGB color space. The only problem will be the graying of blacks and backlighting, which are clearly visible in the dark. You can immediately see that the backlighting of the matrix is uneven, and the black color turns gray with a high level of brightness.
The camera is Full HD, has a physical switch, and the image quality is average. Although there are only two speakers, they sound good. Subjectively, the sound quality is not up to the top models with six speakers, but among most gaming laptops, the sound is perfect.
| Benchmark / Mode | BATTERY | PSU |
| Geekbench Single | 2954 | 3069 |
| Geekbench Multi | 12059 | 18297 |
| CPU-Z Single | 804 | 880 |
| CPU-Z Multi | 7184 | 13504 |
| Cinebench 2024 Single | 124 | 129 |
| Cinebench 2024 Multi | 966 | 1610 |
| Cinebench 2024 GPU | 13278 | 23490 |
| Blender Benchmark CPU | 208 | 398 |
| Blender Benchmark GPU | 4662 | 7592 |
| Corona 1.3 sec. | 85 | 49 |
| Speedometer 3 | 22,6 | 30,4 |
| Google Octane 2.0 | 83822 | 110647 |
| WebXPRT | 322 | 400 |
| Geekbench Open CL | 161044 | 193689 |
| Geekbench Vulkan | 126100 | 178257 |
| SSD Read MB/s | 6527 | 6535 |
| SSD Write MB/s | 4876 | 4923 |
| RAM Read MB/s | 80427 | 85744 |
| RAM Write MB/s | 72271 | 72779 |
It’s worth noting that Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IRX9H has high-power consumption limits for the processor and video card. TDP can be changed on the fly with the FN + Q hotkeys. Tests in work programs were carried out in maximum performance mode with and without a power supply. The difference was not too great in most benchmarks.
In Geekbench 6, the laptop easily outperforms most desktop PCs. The Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IRX9H almost reaches the level of the Intel Core i7-14700K with a TDP of 300W, and sometimes goes ahead in the Single Core test.
Although the system takes a long time to boot up (up to 30 seconds), everything works lightning fast. The laptop does not hesitate in the browser, quickly opens any web applications, office programs, etc.
It is important that in the CPU-Z, Cinebench 2024, Geekbench 6 benchmarks it almost does not lose power to the core, and in the browser tests Speedometer 3.0, Google Octane 2.0, WebXPRT 4 the drops are insignificant. In some scenarios, it loses to Apple laptops, in others it outperforms them, and leaves other laptops far behind.
The NVIDIA RTX 4090 Laptop graphics card has 16 GB of memory and a TDP of up to 175 watts. It also surprised with a slight drop in performance in Geekbench synthetic tests, although Cinebench and Blender renderings show a noticeable advantage of the power supply over the battery.
In working scenarios, this graphics accelerator is equal to the desktop NVIDIA RTX 4080, although it consumes almost half the power. AMD does not have a worthy alternative (RX 7900M is not a competitor), and neither does Apple, so it is currently the uncompromising graphics card in laptops.
ASUS ROG Strix Scar 17 2023 with AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX and RTX 4090 tested last year. The processor is slightly weaker in some benchmarks, but more economical than the i9-14900HX. At the cost of higher power consumption in certain scenarios, the i9-14900HX is faster than last year’s flagships from AMD and Apple Silicon.
Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IRX9H renders video quickly. In DaVinci Resolve, the hero of the review managed to handle a 10 GB file in five minutes offline and less than four minutes from the power supply. The iPad Pro M4 took twice as long to do the same job.
Exporting 100 photos (RAW>JPG 100%) to Adobe Lightroom takes just over 30 seconds. Overlaying a huge number of effects changes this figure within the margin of error.
There are no problems with local neural ones. Images in Easy Diffusion fly out every five to six seconds. A four-fold upscaling of five 24 MP images in Gigapixel AI takes two minutes, and almost four minutes from the battery.
The 1TB PCI-E 4.0 drive does not overheat and shows consistently high speeds, although there was one moment during the test when Crystal Disk Mark showed 300 MB/s per write. Probably, the system was busy with something serious at the time. Repeated tests did not have this behavior. Note that the laptop has one more additional connector, also PCI-E 4.0.
The RAM has a bandwidth of up to 85 GB/s (read) with adequate latency. This is an excellent result for a gaming laptop, although it is still several times slower than the unified memory in Apple Pro chips (up to 400 GB/s).
The Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IRX9H handles video games perfectly, so we tested the most demanding projects. Given the high pixel density per inch, we did not neglect DLSS technology, and in some games we turned on Frame Generation. We also did not forget about esports projects, as the laptop has a screen with a high refresh rate.
Alan Wake 2 With Path Tracing, it is better to play with the frame generator turned on in parallel. Without Path Tracing, the frame rate triples, and the visuals hardly change.
Battlefield 2024 runs surprisingly smoothly on battery power. In all power modes, we rely on the capabilities of the processor. You won’t get 240 FPS, but you can count on 120-150 FPS.
Lightweight esports projects such as Valorant They give up to 500-700 FPS. The battery is limited to 120 FPS, which we could not remove.
Cyberpunk 2077 We tested only Path Tracing, so the frame rate is not spacey. Without path tracing, we get about 100 FPS. In offline mode, it is best to limit the FPS to 30.
У F1 2022 you can set ray tracing to ultra and get almost 200 FPS with the frame generator, or 240+ FPS on normal ultra settings with DLSS Quality.
Forza Horizon 5 with the EXTREME preset does not disappoint. Perfect game optimization allows you to get high FPS in both modes, and Frame Generation further improves the smoothness of the video.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 was disappointing because the game does not allow you to go into the settings and constantly «flies out». That is why we tested MFS 2020 without a frame generator.
Starfield works stably in both cases, but for some reason the AMD FSR 3 frame generator did not work. In other games, NVIDIA Frame Generation «draws» FPS without any problems, which is noticeable on a screen with a high refresh rate.
The laptop has several power modes, so we evaluated the dependence of gaming performance on TDP. We tested the RTX 4090 Mobile with the following heat dissipation levels: 50 W (battery), 55 W, 65 W (battery), 100 W, 175 W in games Alan Wake 2 and Starfield. That is, the video card receives a maximum of 65 watts in standalone mode, and up to 175 watts with a power supply.
The dependence on power consumption is serious and can be two or three times higher. As a rule of thumb, for most 60 FPS video games, a balanced mains power mode (100W GPU) will be enough, but with a 240Hz screen, you always want more.
These games are a great example of how not all projects load the GPU equally. Where Starfield uses 80 watts with a 100% loaded graphics card, Alan Wake 2 uses 100 watts under identical conditions.
In general, the performance is enough for ultra settings in any video game. Moreover, the Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IRX9H allows you to play with the heaviest Path Tracing, which is well implemented in Alan Wake 2, albeit at the cost of a significant drop in FPS. With the frame generator, we have excellent performance.
Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IRX9H lives on battery power for 5 hours and 30 minutes if you don’t load it with anything at all. Complete idle time with a minimum level of backlighting (which is very low here) of the screen is not an indicator, but you can count on 3-4 hours of office work on the Internet and with 50-60% brightness.
When watching a YouTube video in 4K quality, the laptop dies in 2 hours and 20 minutes. You can play games for only 1 hour, sometimes «more than» in the form of 5-15 minutes. It is also interesting that the Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IRX9H crashes quickly (just over an hour) when downloading video games on Steam.
In 22 minutes, the laptop charged from 0 to 50%, and it took 37 minutes to top up to 80%, and 45 minutes to reach 90%. To see the desired 100%, you’ll have to wait 1 hour and 20 minutes.
The PSU consumes up to 180W while charging if the battery is «empty», and then drops to 120W and below. In the Aida 64 stress test, the power supply operates at 100% of its capabilities, showing a consumption of 331 W from the outlet.
It seems like a lot for a laptop, but let’s take into account its performance. The Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IRX9H is on par with desktop flagships such as Intel Core i7-14700K or AMD Ryzen 9 7900X, but it’s much more economical.
This laptop is faster than the well-known combination of AMD Ryzen 9 7900 + AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX in work tasks, while consuming almost half the power.
During a stress test, the pyrometer can easily catch 70 °C on the radiator, and more at special points (near the charging connector). The temperature on the keyboard is 45-55 °C. The rest of the case heats up to a maximum of 50 °C.
The noise level is average, by laptop standards, of course. Under load, the hero of the review emits 56 dB, which is a lot, but if you sit a meter away from the laptop, you can put up with it. When idle, Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IRX9H often turns on the fans, although the system load is low. In such conditions, we get 33 dB. Not a quiet, not noisy, productive laptop with adequate cooling.
The laptop comes with Windows 11 out of the box. For this version, you’ll have to pay as much as 11,000 hryvnias more than the model without the OS. Despite this, Windows 11 works well, except for a slight freeze of the interface at rare moments (from the battery).
In some scenarios, you can see poor smoothness of animations, which is especially noticeable on a 240 Hz screen. For example, we scroll through the feed in the browser with perfect 240 FPS, and minimizing windows with gestures on the touchpad looks jagged, not smooth. Lenovo’s proprietary software was not installed on the test sample.
After a computer with AMD Ryzen 9 7900 + Radeon RX 7900 XTX, this laptop seems no less productive. On the contrary, in many scenarios it outperforms a stationary system unit and consumes half the power. The hero of the review would also need a good charging station, and you can work or play around the clock.
The thing I liked most about Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IRX9H was the minimal performance drops in battery mode, which is incredibly rare for x86 machines, especially flagship ones. It has no competitors from Apple (who dominate everywhere except the gaming segment), so it should sell well, despite the analogs from other manufacturers.
Would I buy such a machine? The Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IRX9H is suitable for those who never sit still, but it doesn’t offer any serious advantages for homebodies. This is a portable workstation for active people that allows you to take your computer with you and have uncompromising performance on par with the most powerful desktop systems.
Laptop Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IRX9H in the 32 GB RAM + 1 TB ROM version is officially sold for 166,000 UAH without OS. The version with Windows 11 Pro will cost 176,000 UAH. There are also 20,000 UAH cheaper («gray» even more profitable) modifications with RTX 4080. Among the competitors, let’s consider flagships with similar hardware (i9+4090).
Asus ROG Strix SCAR 18 2024 G834JYR is heavier than the hero of the review, has a 720p camera, but a much brighter 18-inch high-end display with a miniLED matrix.
Gigabyte AORUS 17X AZG 2024 has the Windows 11 operating system bundled, is equipped with a 17.3-inch screen, and offers similar hardware, including a 175W RTX 4090 graphics card.
MSI Raider GE78 HX 14VIG cannot be found officially in Ukraine, but the price is high and amounts to 180,000 UAH. It differs from the hero of the review by having a slightly larger screen, a Wi-Fi 7 module, and a six-speaker system.
Asus again? The thing is Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 2023 G733PY is one of the few competitors based on the AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX processor. This CPU is energy efficient, although it loses to the Intel Core i9-14900HX in terms of performance in most cases. A compromise, but still a decent option.
