In a nutshell: Lenovo's latest addition to the Legion family is a slim gaming laptop packing powerful internals such as AMD's Ryzen 4900H APU, Nvidia RTX 2060 Max-Q graphics, and ample RAM and SSD in a relatively thin case that weighs less than 4 pounds.
When Lenovo refreshed its Legion gaming laptop line this year, one of the notable changes was the addition of Ryzen 4000 mobile processors as an alternative to Intel's 10th-gen Comet Lake-H CPUs. The company is now introducing a new member into the family in the form of the Legion Slim 7 gaming laptop.
This is a 15-inch device that Lenovo touts as the "world's lightest gaming laptop" that is equipped with Nvidia RTX graphics. But most notably, it can be configured with anywhere from a Ryzen 5 4600H up to a Ryzen 9 4900H processor, the flagship of AMD's Ryzen 4000 series.
This is important because as we saw in our review of the Ryzen 9 4900HS – a 35W 8-core, 16-thread chip that runs at a base clock of 3 GHz and boost speeds of up to 4.3 GHz – it offers impressive performance per watt in gaming and productivity tasks when compared to Intel's Core i9-9980H CPU, with very few exceptions. Now consider that the Ryzen 9 4900H is essentially a version of the same chip at 45W, managing a 300 MHz bump on the base clock speed and boost speeds of up to 4.4 GHz.
We also saw similar results when we compared the Ryzen 7 4800H with Intel's tenth generation Core i7-10750H. It even held its own in multicore tests against the Core i9-10980HK, and so does the Ryzen 9 4900HS.
The Legion Slim 7 pairs these powerful CPUs with up to 32 GB of DDR4-3200 RAM and up to 2 TB of NVMe SSD storage. Ideally, you'd want to go with an RTX 2060 Max-Q GPU in your configuration, but you can also opt for a GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q or a GTX 1650 Ti.
Lenovo offers several options for the 15.6-inch screen, such as a 1080p IPS panel at 60 Hz, another at 144 Hz, and a 4K 60 Hz panel with 100 percent Adobe RGB color coverage and VESA DisplayHDR 400 certification. In terms of connectivity, the Legion Slim 7 comes with two USB Type C (Thunderbolt 3) ports, two USB 3.2 Gen 2 USB-A ports, and an SD card reader. You can opt for a Killer AX1650 module that has Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1 support.
All of this is encased in a body made of aluminum that's just under 18 mm (0.71 inches) thick and weighs 1.86 kg (3.96 lbs). Lenovo says it figured out a way to keep this relatively thin gaming laptop cool with a new system called Legion Coldfront 2.0 – essentially a vapor chamber cooling setup and dual fans with liquid crystal polymer blades.
This won't likely be a battery life champion, but Lenovo claims that the 71 Wh battery should last over 9 hours with light use. If that fails, the Legion Slim 7 features fast charging from 0 to 50 percent in less than 30 minutes.
The Legion Slim 7 is expected to go on sale later this month with a $1370 starting price. Seeing as we're inching closer to Black Friday, other vendors are releasing deals on similar laptops – for instance, you can currently grab Asus' ROG Zephyrus G14 (R9 4900HS, 16 GB of RAM, 1 TB SSD, RTX 2060 Max-Q) for just $1,199.99, which is $300 off from the original price when we reviewed it.