Lenovo Legion Slim 7i Gen 7 (16in Intel)

A sleek and fast gaming laptop, with only lacklustre battery life holding it back from an award

- TIM DANTON

PRICE £1,416 (£1,700 inc VAT) from lenovo.com

Consider the Legion Slim 7i Gen 7 as a stealth gaming laptop. You can buy a version with per-key RGB lighting, but this model (part code 82TF004JUK) uses a more conservative white backlight, so only the GeForce RTX sticker on the palmrest and Legion logo on the lid give its gaming skills away. With a sober gunmetal grey finish and separate number pad, it almost exudes a business-like air.

But it's what inside that matters. First up is the 100W version of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3060 GPU, which pushed this machine to 8,327 in 3DMark Time Spy; that's around 1,600 ahead of the 75W RTX 3060 in the Alienware X14, and I saw the same pattern repeat in gaming benchmarks.

Take Metro Exodus. With Ultra settings, at 1080p, the Alienware averaged 50fps while the Slim 7i returned 54fps. In Total War: Three Kingdoms at the same settings the X14 managed 52fps compared to 65fps for the Slim 7i.

If you want to play AAA games at the panel's native 2,560 x 1,600 resolution you'll need to drop down a setting or two. In Metro Exodus, it managed 40fps in Ultra settings but Low boosted that to 179fps, above the screen's 165Hz refresh rate. Shadow of the Tomb Raider looked superb at High settings, with an average of 90fps.