In American football parlance, the Legion of Boom refers to a former Seattle Seahawks team that at one point in time won the Super Bowl with a stout squad. Likewise, Lenovo's new Legion Slim 7 will attempt to bring the boom with a formidable front line of its own, pairing AMD's Ryzen 4000 series mobile CPUs with up to a GeForce RTX 2060 (Max-Q) GPU, flanked by lots of RAM and storage.
Well, potentially anyway—there are different makeups of the Legion Slim 7. Starting with the CPU, configurations will come with a Ryzen 7 4800H, Ryzen 9 4900H, or a mystery "Ryzen 9 4600H." No such chip exists, and I'm guessing Lenovo really meant either a Ryzen 5 4600H or Ryzen 9 4900HS.
Regardless, the Ryzen 9 4900H stands out from the pack as AMD's flagship mobile CPU. It is an 8-core/16-thread part with a 3.3GHz base clock, 4.4GHz max boost clock, and 8MB of L3 cache. The Ryzen 7 4800H, meanwhile, is the same CPU that was in the Asus TUF A15 Dave reviewed in April, and scored a 91/100.
There are three GPU options as well: GeForce GTX 1650 Ti, GeForce GTX 1660 Ti (Max-Q), and GeForce RTX 2060 (Max-Q). Granted, Max-Q GPUs do not perform as well as their full-powered counterparts, but they do enable thinner and lighter designs. In this case, the Legion 7 Slim is just 0.7 inches thick and weighs 3.96 pounds.
For RAM and storage, Lenovo offers 8GB, and 16GB, and 32GB DDR4-3200 options for the former, and 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB M.2 NVMe SSDs for the latter. So potentially you could deck this out with a Ryzen 9 4900H, 32GB of DDR4-3200, 2TB of storage, and an RTX 2060 Max-Q GPU.
Keeping in the theme of threes, Lenovo is offering a trio of 15.6-inch display options. Two of them are 1920x1080 screens, one at 60Hz and the other at 144Hz. Both are IPS screens with 300 nits brightness and HDR (Dolby Vision) support. The third display option is a 4K IPS screen with a higher 500 nits brightness capability and DisplayHDR 400 certification. For gaming, 4K is a tough ask for even the RTX 2060 Max-Q.
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Other features include Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) wireless connectivity (along with an optional Killer AX1650 upgrade), Bluetooth 5.1, a pair of 2W Dolby Atmos speakers, two USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C ports, two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, a 4-in-1 media card reader, and an audio jack.
As with any thin and light laptop with high-powered components, cooling would be my primary concern. I have not tested this laptop, but having an all-aluminum chassis should help dissipate heat, at least in theory. Lenovo also hypes its "Coldfront 2.0" system, which essentially entails a vapor chamber cooling scheme, dual fans, and four dedicated thermal channels to direct airflow.
The Legion Slim 7 will go on sale sometime this month starting at $1,370.
