Legion Pro 7i vs Legion 9i - Cost vs Features!

since releasing our Legion 9 First Impressions video and our full review one of the biggest requests we have received is can we please compare the legion 9 with the legion 7 well we aim to please so let's go so these are both 16-in gaming laptops with similar components and upgrades but the legion 9 has all the premium features that they Stripped Away from the legion 7 this year and then some but to do this they added a crazy £4,000 price tag on that Legion 9 the legion 7 this year comes in cheaper than most other 4,000 series gaming laptops and has become the No Frills value Champion if you want that 480 GPU so let's put them head-to-head to help you decide if you want to save some money for that Legion 7 or sell a kidney to get that Legion 9 so firstly we have to talk about the chassis of these laptops there are many similarities between these two machines they both have 16in 16 X10 displays they both have the same keyboards and upgrade potential and the ability to house an I9 CPU and a 4090 GPU but this new Legion 9 comes with a beautiful carbon fiber cover a magnesium chassis that makes the laptop feel incredibly solid yet really like to hold now unfortunately the legion 7 this year has had a lot of its features Stripped Away and the first of which has to be the build quality there's a lot of Plastics in this Legion 7 and it certainly doesn't feel like a high-end laptop despite it 2,000 plus price tag it's also fatter than the legion 9 but surprisingly the legion 9 is actually longer in its depth than the legion 7 ports are very similar between the two with the legion 7 getting an extra two usba ports but the legion 9 gets a full-size SD card slot which is going to please the creators out there and it also has illuminated symbols making it much easier to plug in the cables in low light compared to that Legion 7 now the 2022 Legion 7 did have this feature but that's another one of the features Stripped Away this year to make this Legion 9 look like better value when it comes to the looks it's hard to deny that the legion 9 is a much better looking laptop even if you're not a fan of this carbon fiber lid which I personally think looks amazing in person you're also getting better RGB lighting that wraps right around the laptop and even a lit Legion logo on the top and the lit Port symbols plus the vents look much more refine than they do on that Legion 7 the legion 7 looks quite cheap in comparison opening up the laptop is another disappointment for the legion 7 with a plastic palmrest and cheaper feeling touchpad although it is much better size than the legion 9 and works well it has a cheap rattle which makes it feel much less premium Now the legion 9 isn't perfect although the touchpad does feel very solid and a much more premium than the legion 7 they've had to really squash it down as they' brought the keyboard also down to make the extra venting at the top of this Legion 9 leading to a very squashed touchpad experience on this premium laptop fortunately the keyboards are almost identical and both are amazing to type on and game on they both got great back lighting now above the keyboard we get the power buttons which both light up and show the power profile the laptop is in but the legion 99's lighting looks much nicer than the legion sevens again this is another downgrade on the legion 7 this year and also the legion 9 includes Lo a fingerprint sensor in that power button making it very easy to log onto this laptop now the 2022 Legion 7 also had that fingerprint sensor another feature they've Stripped Away this year to make this Legion 7 look less premium than the legion 9 you can kind of see a trend going on here the speakers is a pretty disappointing affair on both these laptops they both have down far and speakers that sound like this okay so the audio test of the Legion 7 versus the legion 9 Legion s on the left nine on the right both speakers are set to 50% with the same EQ settings here we go Legion [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] 7 now the legion [Music] n now 80% [Applause] so there we go Legion 7 versus Legion 9 speakers they're both okay neither are absolutely amazing and I'm struggling here tell the difference between the two of these both Gary and I have been listening to these and we can hardly tell any difference between the two and moving up to the screen this is another area where the legion 9 pulls ahead of that Legion 7 this Legion 9 has a beautiful mini LED panel that's incredibly bright 3000x 2000 resolution and 165 htz which although isn't the fastest panel available is definitely the fastest mini LED I've used and is great for gaming on but to be honest you're not going to be disappointed with the legion 7s 2560 x6600 IPS panel that's 240 HZ and Incredibly fluid and responsive probably one of the fastest panels and most responsive panels I've used on a gaming laptop it's also 500 nits of brightness which although isn't as bright as the mini LED it's still incredibly bright enough to even use it in outdoor environment plus it's still got great colors and it's a great screen overall and I think here if you're buying a laptop purely for gaming the IPS screen makes more sense it's easier to drive 16 100 P this panel is slightly faster and it's still a great panel but if you're buying a laptop for a mix of content creation content consumption and gaming then that's where this mini LED pulls ahead this higher resolution beautiful display HDR colors incredibly bright this is the laptop for most creators out there it's absolutely fantastic then as we move above the screens we' both got 10 HP webcams which look and sound like this so this is the test of the webcam and the microphones on the new Lenovo Legion 9 gaming laptop and this is the webcam of the Legion 7 2023 gaming laptop and before we do look at the performance on these laptops I do want to talk about the internals inside these machines now both of these are not the easiest machines to get into it's just a few screws but popping the cover us on both these laptops is a bit of a pain but once you are inside you get full access to the two m.2 SSD slots in both of these machines and they've both got upgradeable Wi-Fi cards now although both of these machines have two Ram slots that are user upgradable the legion 7 has the ram slots facing the user making it very easy to upgrade in future whereas the legion 9 has an inverted motherboard meaning that if you want to upgrade the RAM or repaste this laptop you're going to need to dismantle it and get the motherboard out of the machine which is not for the faint-hearted so with regards to upgradeability the win easily has to go to the legion 7 which is very easy to upgrade and repaste so then and on to the performance of these laptops we've tried our best to get the specifications on both both these laptops the same so they both got an I9 Intel 13th gen CPU now unfortunately we cannot get exactly the same CPU on both these machines the7 Maxs out at the 13,900 HX CPU whereas the 9 comes with a 13,980 HX CPU both the same number of cores and threads but the I 93980 HX comes with an extra 200 MHz boost they at all honesty the chance of being a to boost that high with the amount of power they draw is pretty unlikely anyway so these are pretty close they've both also got the 408 GPU and they both came with 32 GB of ddr5 memory now the legion 9 gets the added benefit of having overclocked memory at 6,400 MHz which only takes a couple of steps in the Bios and well worth doing whereas the legion 7 comes stock with 5,600 MHz memory so running our synthetic benchmarks on both these machines for the CPUs and you can clearly see that although it has a more powerful I9 CPU in this Legion 9 and allegedly better cooling than the legion 7 which already had stellar cooling there's really very little difference between these two CPUs and they're both fantastic performing CPUs especially in these compact 16in chassis and again you can be happy with whichever one you buy for CPU performance not only that they're both HX CPUs which can be overclocked or undervolted giving you extra performance for free and as mentioned the ram is slightly faster in the I9 and though that may look great in Ram synthetic benchmarks in everyday performance I notice very little difference with that extra slightly high speed of RAM on the 9 over the legion 7 now moving on to the GPU and this is an area where the legion 9 should pull ahead in theory cuz this Legion 9 has a water cooling Loop which allegedly allows a little bit more Waters to flow through this GPU because apparently the water cooling Loop kicks in at 74c apparently on the vam which helps keep those temperatures in check as as we know they're quite power hungry on these gpus but the vapor chamber in the legion 7 already did a very good job now in synthetic benchmarks there's not a lot of difference in minutes so let's run some long-term gaming benchmarks head-to-head to see whether this Legion 9 can pull away so in order to test this fairly we made sure that both these laptops were set up exactly the same now they've got different resolution screens to get around this we've plugged in an external monitor so the benchmarks run exactly the same on both systems now We've ran Shadow the Tomb Raider and the cyberpunk benchmarks after saturating both the heating systems to make sure these laptops were fully warmed up now we were hoping that once these systems were fully saturated that the actual water cooling unit would actually pull ahead on that Legion 9 but I have to be honest it was very disappointing and in fact the legion 7 with it standard Vapor chamber and liquid metal pulled slightly ahead of this Slimmer Legion 99 laptop with a alleged water cooling Loop which leads me to believe that either the fact that it's so much thinner means it's got slightly less thermal output than the legion 7 or this water cooling Loop is doing pretty much nothing to help this laptop now the benchmarks on both of these were very close together the legion 7 beat them both out by just a few frames on the shadow T Raider and the Cyber Punk it isn't enough to worry about but it is disappointing to pay this much money for a water cooling Loop that does pretty much nothing for this system and when we come to the actual fan noise of both these laptops they were incredibly similar again the actual Legion 7 was slightly louder on the quiet and the balance profile but they both capped out of 54 DB when on their maximum performance mode and lastly testing the temperatures on the these laptops again nothing to write home about here both these laptops run incredibly cool on the decks so that you can do some long-term gaming without scorching your hands and that is great news and the legion 7 was very slightly cooler on the palm rest but neither of them were hot so no problems at all here so with the performance out the way we want to also talk about some of the other features of these laptops first I want to talk about power delivery now both these laptops are capable of up to 140 wat power delivery but it is often very difficult to get that PD 140 watt working now the good news is the legion 9 it is incredibly expensive but a slight sweetener they provide a 140 W USBC charger now this is really handy and I have used it on both of these laptops it does provide much better performance than the 100 Watts that you can usually buy off the shelf now with a 100 wat PD performance both these laptops were performing very well and pretty much as well as a lot of last year's 2022 gaming laptops so this is a great way that you can take your laptops out and about with a smaller charger and keep them going so great news for Lenovo to actually provide that 140 watt I'm glad it's free with a legion 9 but obviously paying a lot for this laptop not sure how easy it's going to be to get hold of for that Legion 7 now with regards to the battery life These are 13th gen gaming laptops we know that Intel doesn't have great battery life I'm going to put the battery life results on screen for both these laptops right here neither are going to last you through a day neither are going to be particularly good but you know they're like mobile UPS's let's be honest they're okay in a pinch but thank goodness you've got that power delivery and power banks that you can keep them going when you need to so then on to the conclusion and this is quite a tricky one clearly the legion 9 is the more premium laptop that was always going to be the case this is a £4,000 or $4,000 laptop probably one of the most expensive laptops that Lenovo Legions have ever made whereas the legion 7 I picked this one up in the UK for £22,000 with a coupon obviously that makes it half the price of this Legion 9 now they're will be some sales or coupons for that Legion 9 in the future and when it does this might make the decision more difficult so that begs a question which laptop should you buy now for a lot of people if you're looking for a gaming laptop and you're looking for bang for buck you want a great performing laptop with good all around specifications you cannot go wrong with this Legion 7 this is going to be one of the performance champions for this year for the value of the money that you get with it and I would recommend that if you're buying this for purely gaming the legion 7 every time this will do everything you want it to do for half the price of this Legion 9 but maybe you're a content creator or you're somebody with Deep Pockets and you want the best of the best you can't deny that this Legion 9 has a lot of great features which could make it worth the extra cost you're getting that amazing mini LED display which is truly phenomenal especially if you're a Creator you're getting a fullsize SD card slot again if you're a Creator or someone that uses that SD card slot regularly that could be a real time saer you're getting an added 140 W USBC charger that you can chuck in your bag when you're taking this laptop out making it a much more portable package the build quality is night and day better along with the RGB and the fingerprint sensor so they have added a lot of extra features in here and that is great if you're like obviously buying this year you haven't seen the previous Legion sevens from Years Gone by which brings me to the unusual sort of question is why did Legion feel that they needed to strip down the legion 7 so much this year it feels quite underhand they've taken a lot of those features that we love from the legion 7 and put them on the legion 9 remove them from the seven to make this Legion 9 look better now if you bought a 2022 Legion 7 and then you went to this year's Legion 7 you're going to be very disappointed well that's my thoughts on these laptops I'd love to know what you guys think do you think Lenova are trying to pull a fast one by dumbing down that Legion 7 to make this Legion 9 look like a better option do you think this Legion 9 is ever worth the cost or do you think most people will be better off getting that Legion 7 and as always put your comments down below and I will get back to you and lastly thank you for watching

Channel: Mash IT

Views: 57,964

Keywords: mash it, legion, lenovo, legion 9, watercooler, watercooled laptop, gaming laptop, water cooled, water cooling, laptop comparison, gaming laptops 2023, best gaming laptop 2023

Id: CEfo79W8ISU

Length: 14min 25sec (865 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 13 2023