This video is not sponsored, but lenovo being the absolutely awesome people they are sent me this laptop to review. This is a Lenovo Legion Slim 7. I recently did a review on my personal Legion 7, a laptop I have used for over half a year and really love. And am really excited to compare the two.
External – The first main point of the legion slim is just that… it’s slimmer than the standard legion. By a significant amount, the hinge especially sticks up on the standard legion. I’ve noticed it tends to catch when sliding it in and out of a bag. That alone gives a point to the slim, while both fall under the category of “desktop replacement” I feel like the slim lends itself to being more portable.
Looks – Overall The Slim is a lot more of a sleek design, rounded corners, less aggressive vent grills, a more uniform black with these almost holographic looking labels and area behind the screen and by the branding on the lid. They both have very thin bezels around the screen, and a few design element changes like Red ring vs red light on the power button. But the black shows finger prints far more than the silver.
Ports (brighter lights) The slim has fewer ports than the standard, you lose out on 1 USB type C, gigabit ethernet, AND an HDMI port which really surprises me. With such a big laptop, there is plenty of room for it, and it’s not like they are going for budget here. I know a Type C can handle the vido, but that requires a dongle. but it has brighter labels for the ports in the back, and it has a full sized SD card reader on the side.
Fan noise – to my ear, the slim is quite a bit louder than the standard. Neither is quiet, not by any stretch, but the standard has a lower tone to it’s more of a woosh, where the slim has a slightly higher pitch. If they were not next to each other, it would be hard to tell them apart, but I prefer the sound of the standard.
Keyboard – As far as I can tell the keyboards are identical. Even the key caps are the same color. A decent keyboard, but not my favorite, as I’ve stated before, I’m a thinkpad fanbody for sure.
Touchpad – While both have very responsive touchpads with mutli touch, The slim’s touchpad is the bigger touchpad I want on my Legion.
RGB – The ring around the base, the logo on the lid, the Legion 7 just has more RGB goodness than the slim. If that is important to you, there is clearly only one choice. I’ve kinda gotten use to my RGB, and would miss the ring for sure, I never see the lid. iCue is trash, It has never worked on my legion 7, the rgb just freezes and does not restart until I do a reboot. I do not use it. The icue is similar on the slim 7. I know that lenovo is coming out with their own RGB software for their next gen of laptops, and I hope it is backwards compatible to these systems.
Sound – The speakers on the slim are A LOT quieter on the slim than they are on the the standard legion. Like 40% quieter. Sitting in my office when a plane goes overhead, and my AC is blowing, The legion overpowers that without issue, the slim? Gets drowned out real fast, and I have to actually wear headphones to hear over it. So big point to the legion for sound.
Temps – So this one is is hard for me to quantify, I don’t have a thermal camera, and the areas that are warmer between the two are different on the keyboard. But I would have to say. “Overall” the slim is slightly cooler than the 7. The clock speeds on the slim also went over their 4.4ghz rating at 4.446, the 7 hit just 4.8 of it’s 5ghz limit, and both hit a package temp of 99 degrees. Now if I prop them up with these wrist rests right in the back, Things change a touch. Slightly lower package temp (98 vs 99) and a better score on the performance test. If you plan on using this for extended periods on high performance, I would absolutely make sure that it gets as much air as it can.
I covered the following in my previous video:
Internals – This surprised me. The cooling is a different setup. You would think that they would keep a similar config, since the laptop is very similar, but it’s quite a bit different. Both seem to be plenty effective for what they need to do. There are two m.2 slots, the wifi card is removable, but what confuses me on the slim is the ram slot. There is only 1 with an 8 gig dimm, but the laptop has 16 gigs of ram. This means that the slim has a soldered 8 gigs of ram. Meaning you’re probably leaving performance on the table AND you’re capped at 8gigs + what ever dimm you put in there, right now that would be 40gb, or 16 gigs + whatever you’re wanting to put there (48 gigs). The standard also has 2 m.2 slots, and TWO ram slots to have full upgradeability, giving you the ability to have 64 gigs total with matching memory speeds.
Performance in CPU – Not much of a contest here, the Ryzen of the 5th generation is faster than the 10th gen core processors. It also has two more cores, and 4 more threads. So if CPU performance is critical, then your choice is obvious. But that being said… In every day use can I tell the difference between the two? Nope, in fact, in my personal workflow, they seem to be pretty equal, if anything the intel edges out the amd! Now I usually do video editing, and using the most unoptimized editor I could find… Windows movie maker. Exporting a 4 minute 4k video took nearly 23 seconds longer on the amd side… because even this old piece of software utilizes the GPU for rendering, and the 2070 super is faster than the 3060 in that regard. So how the CPU performance affects you will really come down to YOUR workflow. The AMD IS faster, just, not for me.
Gaming Performance – This is another one of those yeah ok, but… So 7 has two modes, hybrid, or Nvidia gpu only. When in hybrid, it has to push all the data of the nvida gpu through the integrated GPU to the screen, and this causes a HUGE performance hit, like 10-15%. But it saves battery when you’re on the battery. If you want to switch out of hybrid mode and have the full fat nvida chip, you have to reboot the system. The slim has a Mux chip, which means it can switch what is going to the screen on the fly and gpu’s performance isn’t hampered by being in an automatic mode. So when doing a performance test, initially the 2070 super slightly edges out the 3060, UNTIL I put both into the nvida mode only (and reboot the 7) and then it’s no contest, the scores for both go up, but the 2070 super has a big jump up in performance. So if you do much gaming, or you plan on just leaving it plugged in, have it set to dedicated video, as you’re going to leave a lot on the table.
Screen – The screens on both of these are excellent, the legion 7 has a 240hz display, and uses x-right to adjust the color. The Slim has a 165hz display, but does not have a dedicated app out of the box to adjust the color.
Weight – The slim is lighter and you can feel it. Both are pretty heavy, especially when you take into account the power brick, but the slim also feels lighter in the hand, because it’s a more sleek design, it doesn’t feel the pressure on you hand.
Battery Life – The slim has a smaller battery, by a fair bit… but with both systems in an automatic/hybrid mode when it comes to the graphics, the slim smashes the standard. Now for my testing. I made 0 changes to the laptops from out of the box, no special settings, Just charged to a full charge, un plug, and put into “battery saver mode”, after 1 hour, the original had 64% left, and the slim had 82% left, 2 hours 30% vs 66%, and at 3 hours, the original was DONE, and the slim still had 40% left!
That being said. A few things, 1) I absolutely could squeeze better battery life out of both of them, but I was trying to keep things as “fair” as I can. And 2) out of the box the slim had some settings the original is not set up for. First and foremost the screen is MUCH dimmer, and performance was turned down significantly. I don’t know if I played with the settings if I could come up with nearly double the battery life that the slim had vs the original, but I am sure I could make it closer.
In the end, do I regret not getting the slim? I’m not sure, both are amazing machines, but I have to say I don’t regret my purchase at all. The ability to upgrade both ram slots, and the additional ports is probably the deciding factor for me. I do enough work where I plug into a network cable, that not having to carry around a dongle just for that, or a dongle for plugging into my TV, makes me glad I picked the one I did.