Lenovo Legion Slim 7 Review: Does what it promises

As more and more people take interest in gaming, it is up to laptop manufacturers to offer more interesting choices. Lenovo’s Legion lineup of gaming laptops is among the best we have seen in years, satisfying those who are in pursuit of uncompromised raw performance across any price range. Now though, Lenovo has one option for those who want that gaming power but minus all the bulk usually associated with a gaming laptop. Meet the Lenovo Legion Slim 7.

Costing Rs. 1,44,990, the Lenovo Legion Slim 7 goes on to show that you can have good enough performance for casual gaming while being able to carry it in your backpack. The Slim 7 has been around for a while in India and I decided to see whether it still makes good sense for someone looking to buy a portable and a reasonably affordable gaming laptop at the moment.

Lenovo Legion Slim 7 Design

Unlike the vast majority of Legion branded devices, the Legion Slim 7 goes for a fresh new design theme. The whole body of the laptop is sleek and is decorated with chiseled lines and surfaces to make it seem that bulk is gone. But while it seems so, the aluminium chassis with all its vents and stuff is a lot thicker than a MacBook Air or a 13-inch MacBook Pro. But it is slim enough to easily slip into backpacks and that is where the Legion Slim 7 serves its purpose.

Other than the form factor, the Legion Slim 7 is a handsome looking laptop that aims to keep low-profile. Hence, if you are in the class or a coffee shop, this laptop won’t look out of place. There is no RGB lighting of any sort on the outside but the keyboard gets one, and it looks beautiful, especially at night. The power key also gets a LED ring light to act as the attention seeker for the fingerprint sensor. The vents and ducts are cleverly placed all around along with the I/O ports.

Speaking of the ports, the Legion Slim 7 gets two USB-3.2 Type-C Gen 2 ports, two USB-3.2 Type-A ports, a 3.5mm audio port and an SD card reader. Sadly, you miss out on an HDMI port, an Ethernet port, and anything else you could seek. But most of you will know the sacrifices with a slim laptop and for what’s worth, there’re all the ports that one may need these days.

Lenovo Legion Slim 7 Display

With the Slim 7, you are getting a good display for a laptop meant for casual gaming. The 15.6-inch IPS display features 2560 x 1440p resolution with 165Hz refresh rate and peak brightness of up to 300 nits. With the 100 percent sRGB colour gamut, the Slim 7’s display is among the best I have seen on a gaming laptop at this price. Be it the Windows 11 interface or the blasting down the beautiful vistas of Forza Horizon 5, it all looks good. Unless you are a content creator seeking accurate colours, casual gamers will be more than happy with this one.

Lenovo Legion Slim 7 Performance

In India, you get the Legion Slim 7 with the AMD Ryzen 5000 series processors. The unit that I have here has the Ryzen 7 5800H processor paired to 16GB DDR4 3200MHz RAM, a 1TB M.2 SSD storage, and the NVIDIA RTX 3060 GPU with 6GB of GDDR6 VRAM. As usual, it runs on Windows 11 out of the box along with the Lenovo Vantage software and lots of Windows bloatware.

A setup like this means the Legion Slim 7 is good for gaming with above 60 fps frame rates easily at High-Ultra graphics, provided you keep the resolution down to 1080p, or even lower. In F1 2021, I was able to get 60-70 fps frame rates at the Ultra graphics on 1080p resolution. Long Grand Prix sessions ran fine without heating up the machine much, but there were occasional frame drops after a while. Forza Horizon 5 defaulted to the Ultra settings on its won but at 1080p resolution and was happy to keep the game at 85 fps even in the busy street sections. I did not observe frame drops here even after an hour of gameplay. Such large gaming sessions obviously kicked up the fans but it never became too uncomfortable.

And when you aren’t gaming, the Legion Slim 7 is happy to chug along with your regular workflow or entertainment needs. The audio setup isn’t the best here but the speakers are loud enough to keep you company in the case of a casual gaming session. The webcam quality is as bad as most gaming laptops at this price range.

As with most Lenovo laptops, the keyboard is good to work on and the trackpad is comfy with all the Windows Precision gestures exercised at their utmost potential. The keyboard backlighting is gorgeous and gels in well with the overall theme of the laptop.

Lenovo Legion Slim 7 Battery

While gaming laptops are mostly found plugged into the wall socket while they do their deed, you might be needing it occasionally off the socket for basic work or tasks. With its 71Wh battery, the Slim 7 had mostly managed to last up to 5 hours at the most with light to medium office workloads. The Rapid charge fast charging system helps to quickly top-up the battery when in need, although you will need to carry the heavy 230W adapter to do that.

Verdict

Slim gaming laptops are still a new category with fewer models available, and the Lenovo Legion Slim 7 is currently among the best ones you can buy. Despite shaving off its bulk, the Slim has got great midrange performance for a laptop having a combo of the Ryzen 7 5800H processor and an NVIDIA RTX 3060 GPU. The presence of a 1440P 165Hz display is a nice extra, and the battery life is decent for a laptop of this standard.

At Rs. 1,44,990, the Lenovo Legion Slim 7 goes up against some of the last-gen Asus ROG laptops as well as the Dell Alienware models. While performance on all of them is equally good, the advantage of having a slim-n-trim body makes it easy to carry around. We recommend you should check it out before making a decision.