Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 review

Frame rates

1920×1080, High preset, upscaling off.

Measured on this machine. Source: Notebookcheck, 2025-04-25.

In use

The short version

The Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 is the machine that makes the case against paying for an RTX 5090 laptop. It pairs an RTX 5080 running at a 175W total graphics power with Intel's Core Ultra 9 275HX, 32GB of DDR5-6400 and a 16in 2560x1600 OLED panel at 240Hz, and asks £3,662 for the package. Against five RTX 5090 laptops in our database it is not consistently behind — it is ahead of three of them on shared titles and behind two, and the gaps in either direction are small enough that a buyer choosing on frame rates alone would be choosing between machines that trade blows rather than machines separated by a class.

That is the central fact about this laptop and it deserves to be stated bluntly: on Notebookcheck's measured numbers, the 5080 at a full 175W is not a step down from a 5090 in a chassis that cannot feed it. The GPU tier printed on the box is a much weaker predictor of what you will actually see on screen than the power limit behind it, and the Legion Pro 7i is the clearest demonstration of that in the data we hold. The Medion Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate carries a 5090 and a confirmed UK price of £4,884, and this machine averages nine frames per second faster across the five games they share. That is £1,222 for a deficit.

The performance picture at 1080p High with upscaling off is strong across the board. The benchmark data has it at 481fps in Strange Brigade, 220fps in Baldur's Gate 3, 203fps in Dota 2 and 172fps in Cyberpunk 2077 — comfortably above the panel's 240Hz ceiling in the lightest title and comfortably above 120fps in the mainstream ones. The floor of the measured set is 90fps in Assassin's Creed Shadows and 99fps in Black Myth: Wukong, which are the two heaviest workloads in the list and the two that will fall furthest when you move up to the panel's native 2560x1600.

We cannot publish an overall standing for this machine, and we would rather say why than fudge it. Our scoring suite is five fixed games, and every laptop on the site is averaged over the same five so that the comparison means something. For the Legion Pro 7i we have four of them — Baldur's Gate 3, Dota 2, Cyberpunk 2077 and X-Plane 11 — and no figure for GTA V. A four-game mean cannot be ranked against five-game means without quietly changing what the number represents, so we have left it unranked. The four we do have average 180fps, which tells you the shape of the thing even if it cannot be placed in the table.

Buy it if you want the top of the RTX 5080 tier at full power and you would rather spend the difference on something other than a badge; if you want an OLED panel and are prepared to drive it at high refresh in esports and mainstream titles rather than at 240fps in everything; and if 2.64kg is a weight you are willing to move occasionally rather than daily. Look elsewhere if you need the absolute measured ceiling in the heaviest ray-traced titles at native resolution, if your budget stops well short of £3,662, or if you want a laptop you carry between sites every day.

Performance

Ten games, one settings profile — 1920x1080, High preset, upscaling off — and a spread from 481fps down to 90fps. That range is the interesting part, because it tells you far more about how this laptop will behave in the games you personally play than any single average does. Notebookcheck measured all of these on 2025-04-25; we are reading their numbers, not producing our own.

What 175W actually buys

The specification that matters most here is not "RTX 5080". It is "RTX 5080 at 175W". Nvidia's mobile parts are sold as a tier and configured as a wattage, and the wattage is set by the laptop maker according to what the chassis, the heatsink stack and the fans can dissipate. The same GPU tier can appear in one laptop with a power budget that lets it run near its ceiling and in another with a budget that keeps it permanently short of breath, and the difference between those two implementations is routinely larger than the difference between adjacent tiers.

175W is the upper end of what mobile silicon is given in a 16in chassis. In practice that means the GPU is not the thing being managed down when a scene gets demanding — it means the machine has been built with the intention that the graphics part runs hard for as long as you want it to. You can see the consequence in how this laptop lands against the RTX 5090 machines listed below. Two of those 5090s are also specified at 175W, and against those two the results are a five-frame deficit and a six-frame advantage respectively. A 5090 with the same power budget as this 5080 is, on the shared games we can compare, essentially the same laptop from the player's seat.

The practical reading for a buyer: when you are comparing gaming laptops, find the TGP before you find the tier. A 5080 at 175W is a different product from a 5080 at a materially lower limit, and the frame rates below are the frame rates of the former. If you are cross-shopping this machine against a cheaper Legion, a cheaper anything, with the same GPU name on the sticker, the power limit is the first number to check, and it is frequently the number that is hardest to find on a retail listing.

The top of the range: where the panel is the limit

Strange Brigade at 481fps is the outlier, and it is an outlier by design. It is a well-optimised, Vulkan-era title that has been in benchmark suites for years precisely because it scales cleanly and puts almost no unusual load on any one part of the system. Nobody buys a £3,662 laptop to play Strange Brigade. What the number is good for is establishing the top of the curve: it shows that at 1080p, with a preset that does not stress the memory subsystem, this GPU is running out of work to do long before it runs out of capability. Anything in your library built on similar assumptions — older shooters, competitive titles with deliberately restrained rendering, games from the previous console generation — will be limited by the 240Hz panel, not by the hardware behind it.

Below that, Baldur's Gate 3 at 220fps, Final Fantasy XV at 210fps and Dota 2 at 203fps form a cluster in the 200-220fps band. All three are close enough to the panel's 240Hz refresh that you are effectively getting a full-rate experience with a little headroom lost in the busiest scenes. Baldur's Gate 3 is a genuinely useful data point here because it is a modern, current-generation game that a lot of people actually play for hundreds of hours, and 220fps at High with no upscaling is a comfortable margin. Dota 2 at 203fps is more interesting than it looks — see the CPU section below, because that number is not really about the graphics card.

Final Fantasy XV sits between the two. It is an older port with some notoriously expensive effects options, and 210fps says the machine is chewing through it without difficulty at the preset measured.

The middle: modern games, comfortably above 120

Cyberpunk 2077 at 172fps is the single most informative number in the set. Cyberpunk remains the standard stress test for a modern PC because it is heavy in every direction at once — geometry, shading, streaming, CPU-side simulation in the busier districts — and because almost everyone has a mental model of how it runs. 172fps at 1080p High with upscaling off is a strong result. It means that at this resolution the machine is not merely playable in the game most likely to defeat it, it has enough headroom to absorb a significant increase in settings or resolution and still land somewhere sensible.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle at 146fps follows the same pattern. This is a current, well-optimised engine doing genuinely modern rendering work, and 146fps is a long way clear of any threshold you would call a compromise. Alan Wake 2 at 124fps and X-Plane 11 at 124fps arrive at the same figure by completely different routes: Alan Wake 2 is one of the most graphically expensive games released in recent years and is doing hard work per pixel, while X-Plane 11 is an old-architecture flight simulator that is bottlenecked by how quickly a single thread can issue draw calls. Two identical numbers, two entirely unrelated causes.

124fps in Alan Wake 2 at 1080p High is a good result for a laptop. It also happens to be the point in this list where the panel's 240Hz stops being reachable and starts being aspirational. From here down, you are choosing between settings and frame rate rather than being handed both.

The floor: where the GPU has to work

Black Myth: Wukong at 99fps and Assassin's Creed Shadows at 90fps are the two hardest workloads in the measured set, and both are recent Unreal- and in-house-engine titles with dense foliage, expensive lighting and heavy post-processing. Ninety frames per second at 1080p High with upscaling switched off is a perfectly good result in absolute terms — it is a smooth, responsive experience with room to spare over 60 — but it is a five-fold gap from the top of the range, and that gap is the honest picture of where PC gaming currently sits. The spread between the lightest and heaviest games in a benchmark suite has widened dramatically over the last few years, and it means "how fast is this laptop" is no longer a question with one answer.

The important implication concerns upscaling. All ten of these figures were measured with upscaling off, which is the right way to benchmark because it removes a large, vendor-specific, quality-variable variable from the comparison. It is not, however, how most people play. Both of these games ship with upscalers that are designed to be used, and turning one on at a sensible quality level is the standard route to reclaiming headroom. The 90fps figure is therefore a floor, not a ceiling — it is what the hardware does with everything switched off, and there is a well-trodden path to a higher number if you want one.

The corollary matters just as much: these are 1080p numbers on a 2560x1600 panel. Native resolution is roughly 2.1 times the pixel count of 1920x1080. Games do not scale down linearly with pixels — the CPU-bound ones barely move, the GPU-bound ones fall close to proportionally — but the direction is not in doubt. Assassin's Creed Shadows and Black Myth: Wukong at native panel resolution will land considerably below their 1080p figures. We do not have measured numbers at 2560x1600 and we are not going to invent them. What we can say with confidence is that the two heaviest titles in this list are the ones where you will be reaching for the upscaler or the settings menu if you want to play at the panel's native resolution, and that everything from Alan Wake 2 upwards has enough of a 1080p margin that native-resolution play at high frame rates is a reasonable expectation rather than a hope.

Where the spread comes from

It is worth being precise about why ten games measured on one machine on one day produce numbers between 90 and 481, because understanding the mechanism lets you predict where your games will land.

The first factor is per-pixel cost. A game like Strange Brigade does a relatively small amount of work to determine the colour of each pixel. A game like Alan Wake 2 does an enormous amount — multiple lighting passes, expensive material evaluation, heavy temporal post-processing. At a fixed resolution, that per-pixel cost is the dominant term for anything that is genuinely GPU-limited, and it is why the modern titles cluster at the bottom of the list regardless of how good the hardware is.

The second is engine age and threading. Older engines were written when four cores was ambitious and a single main thread issued most of the draw calls. Those games hit a wall determined by single-thread throughput and simply stop scaling no matter how much GPU you point at them. X-Plane 11 at 124fps and Dota 2 at 203fps are both, to different degrees, in this category. Neither number would improve much on faster graphics hardware, and neither tells you anything about the RTX 5080.

The third is what the preset actually enables. "High" is not a standard across the industry; it is a per-game label attached to a per-game set of options. In some titles High is a modest step above console-equivalent settings; in others it enables effects that were designed for desktop hardware two generations newer. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, for example, is built on an engine with modern lighting baked into its rendering path rather than offered as an optional extra. This is why cross-game comparisons at "the same preset" are only ever approximately like-for-like, and why the sensible way to read a benchmark table is as a set of individual data points about individual games rather than as a smooth curve.

The CPU's contribution

The Core Ultra 9 275HX is Intel's top mobile part for this class of machine, and in a laptop with a 175W GPU it is doing exactly the job it needs to: staying out of the way. In the GPU-limited titles — Cyberpunk, Alan Wake 2, Wukong, Assassin's Creed Shadows — a faster CPU would change essentially nothing, because the graphics card is the constraint and the processor's only responsibility is to keep feeding it.

Where it earns its place is at the other end of the list. Dota 2 at 203fps and X-Plane 11 at 124fps are the two results in this set most likely to be CPU-limited rather than GPU-limited, and they are also the two results most representative of a specific kind of buyer. If you play competitive titles at high refresh, the processor is what determines your frame rate, and a top-tier HX part is the right thing to have. If you fly simulators, the same logic applies with even more force — flight sims are notorious for being limited by single-thread performance and by how fast the system can stream scenery, and the 32GB of DDR5-6400 is doing real work there too.

The memory configuration deserves a note. 32GB is the right amount for a machine at this price in 2025: it is enough that no current game will run short, enough for large simulator scenery loads, and enough that you can leave a browser with forty tabs, a Discord client and a game running simultaneously without thinking about it. The DDR5-6400 speed matters more than people expect on Intel HX platforms, because memory bandwidth and latency feed directly into exactly the CPU-limited scenarios described above.

Storage

The 1TB SSD is the one specification here that feels out of step with the rest of the machine, and it is worth being direct about it. On a £3,662 laptop, 1TB is not generous. Two or three current large-world titles with high-resolution texture packs will consume a meaningful fraction of it, and once Windows, drivers and a normal set of applications are accounted for, the practical working space is smaller than the headline figure suggests. This is not a performance problem — it is a capacity problem, and it is the kind that becomes irritating within months rather than years.

Most machines in this class offer a second M.2 slot, and if this one does, the fix is inexpensive and well understood. We do not have the internal layout confirmed in our fact sheet, so we are not going to state it as fact. What we will say is that if you are budgeting £3,662, you should budget on the assumption that you may want to add or replace storage, and you should check the machine's serviceability before you buy rather than after.

The four scoring-suite results, and the missing fifth

Four of the ten measured games are in our scoring suite: Baldur's Gate 3 at 220fps, Dota 2 at 203fps, Cyberpunk 2077 at 172fps and X-Plane 11 at 124fps. Those four average 180fps. The fifth suite game, GTA V, has not been measured on this configuration, and because every laptop on this site is averaged over the same five titles, a four-game mean is not comparable with the five-game means everywhere else.

We could paper over that. Plenty of sites would. We are not going to, because the entire point of running a fixed suite is that the comparison is like-for-like, and the moment you start substituting partial sets you have a table of numbers that look comparable and are not. So this machine is unranked, and that is an absence of data rather than a judgement.

What the 180fps four-game mean does tell you is the shape. It is a mix of a CPU-limited esports title, a CPU-limited simulator, a modern RPG and the standard heavy-GPU benchmark, and the machine handles all four without any of them looking like a weak point. GTA V, had it been measured, would almost certainly have landed high — it is an old engine on modern hardware — and would have pulled the mean up rather than down. That is an expectation, not a measurement, and we are flagging it as such.

The screen

A 16in 2560x1600 OLED at 240Hz. Three things to unpack: the resolution, the refresh rate and the panel technology, and whether the GPU behind them can actually deliver on all three simultaneously.

Resolution

2560x1600 at 16in in a 16:10 aspect ratio is, for our money, the correct resolution for a gaming laptop of this size. It is sharp enough that individual pixels are not a distraction at normal viewing distance, it gives you meaningfully more vertical space than a 16:9 panel for anything involving documents, timelines or spreadsheets, and it does not carry the enormous GPU cost of a 4K panel that no mobile part can drive at high refresh in demanding games.

It is also roughly 2.1 times the pixel count of the 1920x1080 at which all the benchmark figures above were measured. That is the single most important caveat in this review. Every frame rate quoted here is a 1080p number. At native panel resolution, the GPU-limited titles will be substantially lower, the CPU-limited titles will be barely affected, and we do not have measured figures to tell you exactly where each one lands.

Refresh rate

240Hz is a lot, and the honest question is which of the measured games can actually saturate it. At 1080p: Strange Brigade, unambiguously, at 481fps. Baldur's Gate 3 at 220fps and Final Fantasy XV at 210fps come close enough that you are getting most of the benefit. Dota 2 at 203fps is in the same territory, and Dota 2 is precisely the kind of game where a high refresh rate is doing something you can feel rather than something you can only measure.

Below that, no. Cyberpunk at 172fps, Indiana Jones at 146fps, Alan Wake 2 and X-Plane 11 at 124fps, Wukong at 99fps and Assassin's Creed Shadows at 90fps are all well short of 240, at 1080p, before the resolution step up to native. The panel is not being wasted — running a variable-refresh display at 124fps is still a better experience than running a 60Hz display at 124fps, and a high-refresh panel benefits desktop use, scrolling and general responsiveness even when games do not reach the ceiling. But a buyer who reads "240Hz" and pictures 240fps in modern single-player games is going to be disappointed, and that is true of every laptop currently on sale, not just this one.

The realistic framing: this is a 240Hz panel for competitive and older titles, a 120-to-170Hz panel for modern single-player games at 1080p, and something lower again at native resolution in the heaviest titles unless you enable upscaling. That is not a criticism of the laptop. It is the current state of the relationship between panel specifications and rendering costs.

OLED

OLED is the substantive upgrade over an IPS panel at this price, and it is the reason a lot of people will choose this machine over an otherwise similar one. Per-pixel illumination means true black rather than a dark grey with backlight bleed, which transforms how dark scenes look — and a large fraction of modern games are set in dark scenes. Contrast is not a specification you compare on a chart with OLED; it is a categorical difference in how the image looks.

Response time is the other advantage, and it interacts directly with the 240Hz refresh. A fast panel with slow pixels is a contradiction: if the display can present a new frame every 4.2ms but the pixels take longer than that to change state, you get smearing that undercuts the whole point of the high refresh rate. OLED's response characteristics are fundamentally different from LCD's, and it is the technology that makes a genuinely high refresh rate worth having.

The trade-offs are well known and worth stating rather than glossing over. OLED panels are generally dimmer at full-screen white than a good high-brightness IPS, which matters if you use a laptop outdoors or in a very bright room. Static-element burn-in remains a long-term consideration for anyone who leaves the same HUD or taskbar on screen for thousands of hours — modern panels and modern operating-system mitigations have reduced the risk substantially, but it has not been reduced to zero. And OLED power draw scales with what is being displayed, which has implications for battery life that we cannot quantify because we have no battery figures for this machine.

For a gaming laptop used primarily indoors, primarily for games and media, we think OLED is the right choice and that it is one of the strongest arguments for this specific model over its competition. For a machine that will spend most of its life displaying a static IDE or a spreadsheet at maximum brightness, it is a less obvious call.

Can the GPU drive it?

In the sense that matters, yes — with the caveat repeated once more that we only have 1080p data. A 175W RTX 5080 driving a 2560x1600 panel is a sensible pairing; it is not a case of a high-resolution display bolted to insufficient hardware, and it is not a case of a fast GPU wasted on a low-resolution screen. The 1080p headroom in Cyberpunk (172fps) and Indiana Jones (146fps) suggests native-resolution play at high frame rates in those titles is entirely reasonable. In Assassin's Creed Shadows at 90fps and Black Myth: Wukong at 99fps, the 1080p margin is thinner, and native resolution without upscaling is where you would expect to be making decisions. That is the honest boundary, and it is drawn from the data we have rather than from data we would like to have.

Build, size and portability

We have not handled this machine — we are analysing published measurements and specifications, and the only physical figure in our fact sheet is the weight. So let us be precise about what 2.64kg means and honest about what we cannot tell you.

2.64kg is the bare laptop. A 175W GPU in a 16in chassis requires a power supply that is itself a substantial object, and while we do not have its weight, the practical experience of moving a machine like this is closer to 3.5kg once the brick and cable are in the bag. That is the number that matters when you are deciding whether this fits your life.

For context on where 2.64kg sits: it is heavier than any thin-and-light and heavier than most 14in gaming machines, but it is not at the extreme end for a 16in laptop with this class of cooling. It is a weight that is genuinely fine to move — from desk to sofa, from home to a friend's house, into a car for a weekend, onto a plane for a holiday. It is not a weight you want on your shoulder for a forty-minute commute five days a week. The line between "portable" and "transportable" falls somewhere around here, and this machine is firmly on the transportable side.

The physics are not negotiable, and this is worth understanding rather than resenting. Dissipating 175W of GPU power plus a high-end HX-series CPU under sustained load requires a certain volume of heatsink, a certain area of fin stack and a certain amount of airflow. Every gram of that mass is the reason the frame rates above are what they are. The lighter machines with the same GPU tier achieve their lightness by reducing the power limit, and the results in our comparison section demonstrate exactly what that costs. If you want the numbers, you carry the cooling. A 2.64kg 16in laptop with a 175W GPU is the deal, and it is a reasonable one.

We do not have measured figures for thickness, footprint, chassis materials, keyboard layout, port selection or hinge design, and we are not going to describe any of them as though we do. Nor do we have noise measurements or surface temperature data, which are the two things most likely to shape day-to-day satisfaction with a machine of this power. A 175W GPU under sustained load produces heat that has to leave the chassis somehow, and how loudly it does so varies enormously between designs. If noise matters to you — and for a laptop used in a shared room or an office, it should — that is a specific thing to research before purchase, and it is a gap in what we can tell you.

What the weight and the power figure together do tell you is the intended use. This is a desktop replacement. It is designed to sit on a desk, plugged in, driving its own excellent panel or an external one, and to be moved occasionally rather than continuously. Battery figures are absent from our data, but a 175W GPU cannot be fed from a battery at anything approaching its full capability under any circumstances, so unplugged gaming will involve a significantly reduced performance profile regardless of what the battery specification turns out to be. Treat mains power as a requirement for gaming, not an option.

How it compares

Five machines in our database sit closest to this one, and every single one of them carries an RTX 5090. That is the context for everything that follows: the Legion Pro 7i's nearest measured neighbours are all a GPU tier above it, and it is not consistently losing to them.

Two caveats on methodology before the numbers. First, each comparison is made only on games both machines have been measured in, and the number of shared games varies from five to ten. A comparison over ten shared titles is worth considerably more than one over five, and we have flagged the count in each case. Second, four of these five rivals have no confirmed UK price in our database, which means we cannot tell you whether the frame-rate difference is worth the money difference. That is a real limitation. A five-frame deficit against a machine that costs £500 more is a very different proposition from a five-frame deficit against one that costs the same.

Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 — RTX 5090 at 175W, no confirmed UK price

The closest and best-supported comparison in the set: ten shared games, and the Legion Pro 7i averages five frames per second behind. That is the narrowest margin here and it comes from the largest sample, which makes it the most trustworthy figure of the five.

Five frames per second, averaged across ten titles, against a machine with a full GPU tier's advantage at the same 175W power limit. In practice this is a difference you would not detect without a frame counter on screen. It is a rounding error, and it is the single strongest piece of evidence that at matched power limits, the 5080 and the 5090 in mobile form are far closer than their names suggest.

The Scar 18 is also an 18in laptop, which is a different product category in ways the frame-rate comparison does not capture. It will be heavier, its footprint will be larger, and it will need a bigger bag. If you want the largest possible screen and you have the desk for it, that is a genuine reason to prefer it. If you want a 16in machine, the five-frame difference is not a reason to buy an 18in one. Without a UK price we cannot tell you whether it is better value, and we are not going to guess.

Schenker XMG Neo 16 E25 RTX 5090 — RTX 5090 at 175W, no confirmed UK price

Nine shared games, and the Legion Pro 7i averages six frames per second ahead. Same GPU power limit, same screen size, a higher GPU tier — and it loses.

This is the result that should give pause to anyone assuming the tier hierarchy holds in laptops. Two machines, both at 175W, one with a 5090 and one with a 5080, and the 5080 machine is marginally faster across nine titles. The reasons could be several — driver maturity at the time of measurement, memory configuration, CPU pairing, sustained thermal behaviour, differences in how each vendor implements dynamic power sharing between CPU and GPU — and we do not have the data to isolate which. What we can say is what the measurements show: the badge did not decide the outcome.

Six frames per second is, again, not a difference you would feel. The correct conclusion is not "the Legion is faster than a 5090"; it is "at the same power limit, in these games, these two machines perform the same". That is still a remarkable statement about a laptop that carries the lower-tier part.

Medion Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate — RTX 5090, £4,884

Only five shared games, so treat the figure with appropriate caution — but the Legion Pro 7i averages nine frames per second ahead, and this is the one rival with a confirmed UK price.

£4,884 against £3,662. That is £1,222 more for a machine that, on the five games where we can compare them directly, is behind. We do not have the Medion's GPU power limit in our data, which is the obvious candidate explanation and one we would want before drawing hard conclusions — but from a buyer's perspective the explanation matters less than the outcome. On the evidence available, the more expensive machine does not deliver more frames.

There may be reasons to prefer the Medion that do not appear in a frame-rate table: build quality, screen specification, storage capacity, warranty terms, port selection. Any of those could justify a premium. But £1,222 is a very large premium to justify on attributes other than performance, and if performance is what you are paying for, this comparison says the Legion Pro 7i is the better purchase by a wide margin. Five shared games is a thin basis for a definitive claim, and we would want more data before treating the nine-frame figure as precise, but the direction is clear and the price gap is not marginal.

Schenker XMG Neo 16 A25 — RTX 5090, no confirmed UK price

Eight shared games, and the Legion Pro 7i averages fourteen frames per second behind. This is the largest deficit in the comparison set and the clearest case of a rival being genuinely quicker.

Fourteen frames per second, averaged over eight titles, is a real difference — not one you would notice in a blind test at 200fps, but one that starts to matter at the bottom of the range where the heavy titles sit. If the Legion is at 90fps in Assassin's Creed Shadows, a machine running a consistent fourteen frames ahead is at a meaningfully more comfortable place in the same scene.

Whether that is worth paying for is unanswerable without a UK price, and we do not have one. It is also worth noting the shape of the Schenker line-up in this comparison: the A25 is ahead by fourteen while the E25 is behind by six, both carrying 5090s. That spread between two machines from the same manufacturer with the same GPU tier is larger than the spread between the Legion and either of them, which is another illustration of the central point — implementation decides performance, not nomenclature.

Asus ROG Strix Scar 16 — RTX 5090, no confirmed UK price

Eight shared games, and the Legion Pro 7i averages twenty-one frames per second ahead. The largest margin in the set, in the Legion's favour, against a 5090 laptop of the same screen size.

Twenty-one frames per second is a difference you would notice, particularly in the demanding titles. We do not have the Scar 16's GPU power limit in our database, and it is the most likely explanation: a 16in chassis with a 5090 configured well below 175W would produce exactly this pattern, since the higher-tier GPU has more silicon to feed and suffers more from a constrained power budget, not less.

The practical lesson for a shopper is direct. If you are looking at a Strix Scar 16 with an RTX 5090 and a Legion Pro 7i with an RTX 5080, and you assume the Asus must be faster because of the GPU, the measured data says otherwise by a clear margin. Check the power limit. It is the number that decides this.

What the comparison set says overall

Across five rivals, all carrying a higher GPU tier: ahead of three, behind two, and the largest deficit is fourteen frames while the largest advantage is twenty-one. Averaged loosely across the set, this machine sits right in the middle of a group of RTX 5090 laptops while carrying an RTX 5080.

That is the argument for buying it. Not that it beats 5090 machines — it does not beat all of them, and it loses clearly to one — but that it competes with them, at a confirmed £3,662, in a market where the only rival with a confirmed UK price costs £4,884 and performs worse on the games we can compare. The tier premium, on this evidence, buys very little that shows up in a frame-rate measurement. What it buys is the power limit, and this machine already has that.

The unavoidable weakness in this analysis is the four missing prices. We can tell you where this machine sits on performance with reasonable confidence; we cannot tell you where it sits on value against most of its direct competition, because we do not have the numbers to do so. Anyone cross-shopping should establish those prices before committing, and should weight the ten-shared-game Scar 18 comparison more heavily than the five-shared-game Medion one.

Who it's for

Buy this if

You want top-tier laptop gaming performance and you are price-sensitive at the top end. This is the core case. £3,662 is a great deal of money, but it is £1,222 less than the only comparably-equipped machine in our set with a confirmed UK price, and it is faster than that machine on shared games. If your budget tops out somewhere in the mid-three-thousands and you want performance that competes with the tier above, this is the machine the data points to.

You play modern single-player games at high settings and you value image quality. The OLED panel is the differentiator, and the frame rates support it: 172fps in Cyberpunk, 146fps in Indiana Jones, 124fps in Alan Wake 2 at 1080p High with no upscaling. Those are numbers with enough headroom to push settings, push resolution towards native, or both. Pair that with per-pixel black levels and you have a machine that is genuinely good at the thing most people buy a gaming laptop for.

You play competitive titles and want the 240Hz panel used properly. Dota 2 at 203fps, backed by a Core Ultra 9 275HX and DDR5-6400, is the profile of a machine that does esports well. High-refresh competitive gaming is more CPU- and memory-dependent than most people realise, and the configuration here is right for it.

You run flight simulators or other single-thread-heavy software. X-Plane 11 at 124fps is a specific and useful data point, and the CPU and memory specification are well suited to the workload. 32GB is the right amount for scenery-heavy simulator use.

You want a desk machine that can travel occasionally. 2.64kg plus a substantial power supply is fine for a weekend away, a trip to a LAN, or a holiday. It is a machine you can move when you need to.

Buy something else if

You want the outright fastest laptop available and cost is secondary. The Schenker XMG Neo 16 A25 is fourteen frames per second ahead over eight shared games. If you want the ceiling and you are prepared to pay whatever it costs, this is not the ceiling. Establish that machine's UK price and compare directly.

You need to carry a laptop every day. 2.64kg before the charger is a commuting weight only if you are committed. If your machine goes in a bag on a train five mornings a week, look at a 14in or a lighter 16in with a lower power limit, and accept the frame-rate consequence knowingly. The data in this review makes clear what that consequence is: the power limit is the performance, and lighter machines have lower power limits.

You need real unplugged gaming. We have no battery figures for this machine, but a 175W GPU cannot draw anything close to its full budget from a battery, and no laptop in this class does. If gaming away from mains power is a genuine requirement rather than an occasional convenience, this whole category is the wrong one.

Your budget is meaningfully below £3,662. This is a premium purchase and there is no way to make it otherwise. Below this price point, the sensible strategy is to find the highest power limit you can afford at whatever GPU tier fits the budget — because that comparison set above is a five-machine demonstration that TGP matters more than tier. A well-fed lower-tier GPU beats a starved higher-tier one, repeatedly, in measured results.

You need lots of storage out of the box. 1TB at this price is tight, and modern games are large. Either budget for an upgrade or check whether the chassis supports one before buying.

You need a definitive ranking against every other laptop on this site. We cannot give you one. The scoring suite requires five games and we have four, with no GTA V figure for this configuration. The four we have average 180fps and the ten-game picture is strong, but we will not manufacture a comparable ranking from an incomplete set. If a like-for-like table position is the thing you need to make the decision, this machine cannot currently give it to you, and we would rather tell you that than fill the gap with something that looks like data and is not.

The bottom line

The Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 is a well-judged machine whose value case rests on a specific insight: at 175W, an RTX 5080 does what an RTX 5090 does, and the measured data across five rival laptops supports that rather than contradicting it. Ahead of three 5090 machines, behind two, all margins small, at a confirmed price that undercuts the only priced rival by more than a thousand pounds while outperforming it on shared games. Add an OLED panel that is a genuine step up rather than a specification-sheet upgrade, a CPU and memory configuration that does not bottleneck anything measured, and a weight that is reasonable for the cooling required, and the remaining objections are a 1TB SSD that is smaller than it should be at this price, and the frame rates in the two heaviest games — 99fps and 90fps at 1080p — that flag where the compromises will start once you move to the panel's native resolution. Neither is a reason not to buy it. Both are things to know before you do.