Lenovo Legion 5i
Stuck in the middle with you
Lenovo's Legion laptops run the gamut from entry level to top end, with the latest generation Intel-powered Legion 5i sitting in the middle of the pack at $2499. It's a solid entry in the series – but having tried it out, it lacks that bit of extra pizzazz that would make it shine brighter than the rest.
DESIGN & FEATURES
The Legion 5i won't be winning any Most Audacious Design awards. A deep blue lid is matched with a black body, the former embossed discreetly with the Legion logo on one edge. There's no RGB lighting to be found anywhere – which is fine by me, though it may be a deal-breaker for gamers who like the aesthetic – with the Lenovo TrueStrike keyboard featuring only plain white lighting you would be more likely to see on a business machine.
It has a nice array of ports: two Thunderbolt 4, four USB-A 3.2, Ethernet, HDMI 2.1, 3.5mm audio, and a full-sized SD card reader. The battery is 80Wh with fast charging; Lenovo says it can charge up to 50 per cent in 30 minutes.
DISPLAY & SOUND
A zippy 144Hz FHD IPS display is what you'll get with the Legion 5i, and it certainly impressed – image quality was good, and I was pleased with how smooth it was in games like Final Fantasy XIV, where I noticed no motion blur or lag while moving around. It's bright, too, with 300 nits luminosity, as well as antiglare technology to protect your peepers.
The sound was, unfortunately, a bit lacklustre, like with most laptop speakers: they fire downwards and are kind of tinny. Stick with headphones.
PERFORMANCE
The Legion 5i is powered by 11th-gen Intel Core i5 silicon, coupled with a Nvidia RTX 3060 mobile graphics card. It performs actually a little better than some other 3060 machines I've tested, running at around 40-50 frames per second at maximum visual and ray tracing settings in legendary GPU-buster Control, which pleasantly surprised me.
Unfortunately, I was less pleasantly surprised by its performance in Control with DLSS on: while it did bump the frame rate above 60 as per usual, it shaved off a bit too much fidelity in the finer details, which meant I struggled a bit to sort through some puzzles that required looking at tiny images.
VERDICT
The Lenovo Legion 5i is a perfectly good mid-tier laptop – it just doesn't have a whole lot that makes it stand out from all the other perfectly good mid-tier laptops you'll find at around the same price point. You can certainly do worse, though, and it's a decent enough pick if you want an affordable RTX 3060-powered machine.
+ Fast, bright IPS display 11th-gen Intel processor with Nvidia RTX 30-series graphics Surprisingly good performance at native 1080p resolution Good port selection
- Bland design Some loss of fidelity with DLSS enabled Lacklustre audio
Rating 8