Benchmarks: Vitals and Battery Life
Lenovo is keen to extol the virtues of its vapour chamber and dual-fan system of 73 liquid-crystal polymer fan blades. Credit where it's due, the cooling configuration keeps temperatures in check while finding an acceptable balance of noise level. The fans switch off at low load and tend to stay that way until there's some heavy lifting. It's so quiet, in fact, that we tend to notice some coil whine on our review unit. The fans are of course clearly noticeable when gaming, yet even then it's a fairly smooth noise profile.
Is battery life the Legion 7i's Achilles' heel? We use a pair of PCMark 10 benchmarks to gauge battery life; Modern Office, which intermittently uses the writing, web browsing and video conferencing workloads from the main PCMark 10 benchmark; and Gaming, which uses the common Fire Strike test to stress the GPU until the battery is drained.
In order to make the results comparable between laptops, each system is configured with a purpose-built power plan, wireless radios disabled, and screen brightness set as close to 200 nits as possible using a calibration device.
On the one hand, a return of nearly six hours might be deemed decent given the laptop's powerful innards. On the other hand, if you're hoping to get through a full day of work, the Legion 7i won't quite get you there. Depends how you look at it, but either way, it's worth noting that Lenovo's Rapid Charge Pro technology promises to restore a 50 per cent charge in under 30 minutes.
