It’s our favorite gaming laptop and another price cut has made it Black Friday’s best deal a week early_INSIGHT
Look, I just wanted to go to bed okay. But then I see Lenovo’s outstanding Legion Pro 7i is down to $1,999 at B&H Photo and once more I find myself compelled to tell you all about how much I rate this machine. Hell, I can barely write ‘Lenovo’ at this point, it keeps coming out as ‘Lenvoo’ or ‘Lenoov’ (much better brand names in my tired mind), but I’ve still got enough about me to tell you just what a great gaming laptop this RTX 4080-toting beast is.
In fact, it’s the best gaming laptop we recommend on PC Gamer.
Even at it’s full $2,750 sticker price I was taken with the latest Legion Pro 7i. It was a great price compared to the rest of the high-end brigade from Asus, MSI, and Razer, and comes with a comparable specs list and gaming performance.
On that note, it actually out performed RTX 4090-powered gaming laptops that now cost twice as much as this discounted machine. It was a great system at it’s MSRP, now it’s an outstanding laptop for a compelling price.
It’s not the cheapest RTX 4080 gaming laptop that you will find this Black Friday—the MSI Vector at $1,600 has that honor. But it is a far better machine, with a modern Raptor Lake, 13th Gen Core i9 CPU that has a grand total of ten more CPU cores than the Core i9 12900H of the MSI. It’s also rocking 32GB of DDR5 and a higher resolution, brighter, higher refresh rate screen, too.
They both sport the same 175W RTX 4080, which will deliver comparable performance to many RTX 4090 gaming laptops, but everything else is improved on the Lenovo. Is it $400 better? That’s maybe a tough call, as that’s a big price disparity when you’re just looking at the potential frame rate difference in games, but the overall package of the Legion Pro 7i is far more compelling for me.
The chassis is sturdy, good-looking, and not too over-the-top gamer-y. While the Vector is proper chonky RGB bling boi. It’s possibly a little thing, but I also love the Legion laptop keyboards—they arguably offer the best typing experience of any gaming notebook; the keys are solid, responsive, and well spaced out.
I’m a huge fan of the Legion, as you can probably tell. Lenovo has been doing great work to push to the top of the gaming laptop tree, and it’s been cutting prices as it climbs up there, too. At some point they’re just going to be giving them away, if the prices keep dropping like this, but until then, this might just be as cheap as it gets.
