Lenovo's 8th generation Slim gaming laptops are portable powerhouses

Lenovo's latest gaming laptops don't ask you to choose between power and portability

Lenovo Legion Slim 8th generation
(Image credit: Lenovo)
Carrie Marshall
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It's a good time to be a PC gamer, with some of the best gaming laptops offering serious power without sacrificing portability. Lenovo's Legion Slim gaming laptops are a great example of that, and Lenovo has just launched the latest, eighth, generation.

There are five laptops this time around: the 16-inch Legion Slim 7 or 7i, the 16-inch Legion Slim 5 or 5i, and the 14-inch Legion Slim 5. Lenovo hasn't made a Legion that small before, and it's a great option for gamers who want to play on the go without having to lug heavy hardware around.

All five models are the first in the series to get Lenovo's LA artificial intelligence chips. They're there to keep an eye on your cooling, automatically adjusting performance to keep your Legion cool while keeping it quiet and maintaining optimum power output.

What's new in the 8th generation Legion Slim?

The 8th generation Slim 7 is available with up to a 13th generation Intel Core i9-13900H processor (Slim 7i) or an AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS (Slim 7), and you can choose graphics and memory options including an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 and up to 32GB of 5,600MHz DDR5 RAM. The 16-inch, 16:10 display is available in two flavours: a WQXGA 240Hz 500-nit panel for fast response times, or a 3.2K 165Hz 430-nit panel with 100% DCI-P3 colour accuracy for content creators.

The battery is as big as you can get without being banned from aeroplanes, with a whopping 99.99WHr capacity and Super Rapid Charge to get you from flat to full in as little as 80 minutes. And these are among the very first laptops with Wi-Fi 7.

The Slim 5 and 5i can be configured with up to a 13th-gen Core i7-13700H or a Ryzen 9 7840HS. The Slim 5 and 5i also get Lenovo's LA1 AI chip for performance and heat balancing, and you can configure the laptop with up to 32GB of 5,600MHz DDR5 RAM. The display here is a 16:10 WQXGA with 500 nits of brightness and up to 240Hz VRR, and the battery is up to 80Wh.

As for price and availability, you're looking at a starting price of $1,199 (about £975) for the Legion Slim 5, rising to $1,769 (around £1,440) for the Slim 7 and 7i; prices for the 14-inch Slim 5 haven't been revealed just yet.

The Slim 5i and 7i models are expected to ship in April with the 5 and 7 following in May. The 14-inch 5 is scheduled to launch in October.

Carrie Marshall
Carrie Marshall

Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).

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