Comments
It’s been seven years since Lenovo launched its Legion series of gaming laptops, which have now become a distinguished lineup. With each year, the company has improved its offerings in this performance-driven gaming device, across price points. This year is no different. The latest Lenovo Legion 5i is here for review and here’s my take on it.
Design
Weighing in at around 2.36 kg, the Lenovo Legion 5i was a strain on the back when I shuttled it to work every day. Soon, I decided that for the remainder of my usage, it’d be permanently planted on my home desk, set to snipe away enemies in Sniper Elite 5. So, if portability is what you’re looking for, you may not find it here.
The laptop is designed with an aluminium top and a polycarbonate-ABS bottom chassis. The unit I reviewed featured the Luna Grey colour which looked quite mute. The lid picks up finger smudges easily, but thankfully it’s not too visible against the grey of the lid.
The keyboard has a good amount of key travel and the response between a keypress and the action rendered on-screen was instantaneous without any ghosting or double presses. The one thing that immediately lends a gaming laptop aesthetic is the four-zone RGB backlighting for the keyboard. I could control this using the Lenovo Spectrum feature in the Vantage app. The keyboard also features a dedicated key for calling upon CoPilot (Preview), which is Microsoft AI integrated into Windows 11.
Display
The Lenovo Legion 5i features a 16-inch WQXGA (2560x1600) IPS display with 100% sRGB. It offers up to 165 Hz refresh rate along with Dolby Vision support, rendering transitions seamlessly and in vivid colours - one of the best experiences I’ve had to date on a gaming laptop. The display was able to easily render fast-paced gaming with a lot of detail in the light and dark areas of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, with the graphic set to Ultra.
The display has a little bit of a wobble to it, but the lid can be opened easily with one hand. It was a lively experience watching the teaser trailer of Mufasa: The Lion King on YouTube and Laapataa Ladies on Netflix with a true-to-life colour rendition. The built-in 1080p webcam and mics were good enough for work meetings. Sometimes the video looked grainy, so the webcam works just about well for those hurried Microsoft Teams meetings.
Sound
The laptop features two 2-watt stereo speakers optimised with Nahimic Audio. The sound through the built-in speakers was great. The app makes the acoustic experience deeply customisable, giving me the choice to tweak the soundstage, voice profiles and noise cancellation levels.
Ports
The Lenovo Legion 5i has the best assortment of ports with three USB-A ports, two USB-C ports, an HDMI 2.1 port with support up to 8K/60Hz, a 3.5mm jack, an ethernet port, a microSD card reader and the power port. I wish the two USB-C ports were on either side of the laptop, just as the USB-A ports were. The micro-SD card may be a put-off for users who would prefer an SD card reader in its place.
Performance
The Lenovo Legion 5i features the latest Intel Core i7-14650HX processor, with 16 cores/24 threads. Paired with 16 GB RAM, 1 TB storage, and an NVIDIA RTX 4060 8 GB graphics card, the Legion 5i breezed through both synthetic benchmarks and real-life usage.
On CineBench 24, the Lenovo Legion 5i scored 96 points on single-core, 1,184 points on multi-core placing it below Apple M1 Ultra, Intel W Series and AMD threadripper chips. It led the pack at 10,499 points on the GPU score.
I played Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 90+ FPS on Ultra settings. The device tends to get quite hot around the keyboard area, but it didn’t cause too much discomfort. During long hours of usage, the fans kicked in the moment there was demanding work like gaming or video editing. In performance mode, although the fans get too noisy for my liking, at least they helped keep the laptop cool.
The laptop was able to export a 4k video project in DaVinci Resolve in under 2 minutes making the Legion 5i a perfectly capable video-editing laptop, with a great colour-accurate display.
Battery
The 80 Wh battery in the Lenovo Legion 5i was average at best lasting close to 2-3 hours at best while browsing websites and listening to music. With heavy usage such as gaming or editing videos, it kept me company for just about an hour unplugged. With the 230W power brick, it took about two hours to charge the laptop. In case you are in a hurry to charge the laptop before a road trip, it offers a rapid charge feature that powers the laptop fully in one hour, but only once a day.
Conclusion
The Lenovo Legion 5i is a gamer’s dream when it comes to striking the right combination of performance, display, colour and acoustics. With competition from the likes of Dell G15 and the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, the Lenovo Legion 5i holds its own against the competition and does come out on top of it too.
Price: ₹1,29,990 onwards
Pros: Great performance, good display, sound quality
Cons: Gets warm while gaming, average battery life.
Comments
COMMENT NOW
