Lenovo Legion 5i review: This speed demon is a bargain

The Lenovo Legion 5i is a 16-inch gaming laptop for the masses. While a GeForce RTX 4060 isn’t the highest-end GPU, Lenovo pairs it with a high-end Intel Core i9 CPU along with a great cooling system in an unabashedly chunky chassis. The result is a gaming laptop that delivers surprisingly high performance for the hardware — and at a very reasonable $1,399 retail price.

Further reading: Best gaming laptops 2025: What to look for and highest-rated models

Lenovo Legion 5i: Specs

The Lenovo Legion 5i (Gen 9) is a 16-inch gaming laptop with a variety of configurations — but all of them have an Intel CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics. We reviewed the Lenovo Legion 5i available through Costco for $1,399, although Lenovo offers other configurations elsewhere.

The Costco model includes a 14th-generation Intel Core i9-14900HX CPU with 24 cores, GeForce RTX 4060 graphics, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, and a 1 TB SSD. It pairs that with a 2560×1600 display with 165Hz refresh rate and 300 nits of brightness. On paper, it sounds like a solid gaming package for the price — not the highest-end GPU or display, but at a very reasonable price.

The GeForce RTX 4060 graphics hardware here can run at up to 140W of TGP (total graphics power.) That’s one reason why it outshines other gaming laptops with RTX 4060 graphics, which may be running that hardware with a lower power draw.

• Model number: 16IRX9
• CPU: Intel Core i9-14900HX
• Memory: 32GB DDR5
• Graphics/GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060
• Display: 16-inch 2560×1600 IPS display with 165Hz refresh rate
• Storage: 1 TB M.2 PCIe SSD
• Webcam: 1080p webcam with electronic shutter switch
• Connectivity: 3x USB Type-A (USB 3.2 Gen 1), 2x USB Type-C (USB 3.2 Gen 2), 1x combo audio jack, 1x microSD card reader, 1x RJ45 (Ethernet port), 1x HDMI 2.1, 1x DC power in
• Networking: Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, Ethernet port
• Biometrics: None
• Battery capacity: 80 Watt-hours
• Dimensions: 14.16 x 10.33 x 0.99 inches
• Weight: 5.2 pounds
• MSRP: $1,399 as tested

The Lenovo Legion 5i is an all-around high-quality gaming laptop and a great value.

Lenovo Legion 5i: Design and build quality

This laptop has an understated design. It’s not the sleekest 16-inch gaming laptop. At an inch thick and 5.2 pounds in weight, it’s on the heavy side. The chassis is all grays and blacks. The lid and top of the laptop are made of metal, while the bottom is plastic.

Aside from the laptop being on the chunky side and the word “LEGION” on the lid, there’s not anything here that marks this as a “gaming laptop.” However, the keyboard does have four different zones of LED lighting — that’s where the colorful gamer aesthetic comes in, if you like!

The build quality feels solid. There’s no weird flexing when you hold the laptop, and it’s easy to open the lid with one hand thanks to all that weight. The hinge stays nicely in place. The hinge also tilts further back than the average laptop, going flat if you like.

The laptop’s blocky and chunky design helps with cooling: The cooling system works well, blowing hot air out of the back of your laptop and not out of the left or right side onto your mouse hand. The WASD area of the keyboard stays rather cool to the touch while gaming.

It’s a well-built gaming laptop for this price range, but it’s not a premium all-metal gaming laptop or the thinnest and lightest gaming laptop you’re going to find.

There’s a typical amount of bloatware preinstalled — offers for McAfee and Dropbox will pop up, for example. I’d prefer to see none of these nags, but they’re not a big deal as you can uninstall them from the Control Panel.

Lenovo Legion 5i: Keyboard and trackpad

The Lenovo Legion 5i includes a full-size keyboard complete with a number pad. It has four zones of LED lighting, so you can configure the lighting however you like — one color, four different colors, animated transitions, or no backlight at all.

The keys are a good size and feel decent to type on. This isn’t the snappiest keyboard I’ve ever used — it doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of key travel. But the keys don’t feel mushy. It’s not the most premium keyboard, but it’s totally fine for gaming, typing, and anything else you might use a laptop keyboard for.

The trackpad is a good size and is in a good position — a little to the left, below the space bar. It feels nice and responsive when moving the cursor around, and the click feels fine and not mushy or clunky. (I do prefer haptic trackpads, but those are still tough to find.)

Lenovo Legion 5i: Display and speakers

The Lenovo Legion 5i includes a 16-inch IPS display with a 2560×1600 resolution and a 165 Hz refresh rate. On paper, that sounds pretty good — and it does look good when gaming. It’s a good screen. I was perfectly happy with it when playing everything from Indiana Jones and the Great Circle to the new season in Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred.

The display is on the dim side, though. It has 300 nits of brightness, I’d really like to see at least 400 nits. More premium displays often deliver much brighter screens as well as higher refresh rates. They may also use OLED panels — the IPS panel here doesn’t have the vivid colors you’ll find on a gaming laptop with a nice OLED display. These aren’t deal-breakers given the price of this machine, but you should be aware of what you can find in other machines.

This laptop’s speakers are okay. They’re loud enough to outcompete the laptop’s fans while gaming, and they have decent clarity. As usual with laptop speakers, though, there’s just not enough bass. I’m almost never a huge fan of built-in laptop speakers compared to a good pair of headphones or external speakers, so I’m picky. The speakers here are very average.

Lenovo Legion 5i: Webcam, microphone, biometrics

The Lenovo Legion 5i has a 1080p webcam. Webcam quality often isn’t a priority on a gaming laptop, but thee camera here captures an unusually good picture compared to the 720p webcams you’ll see on some gaming laptops. In fact, the picture seems clearer than some of the 1080p webcams I’ve seen on other gaming laptops. For a gaming laptop in this price range, this is a nice webcam.

Lenovo also includes an e-shutter switch at the right side of the laptop. When flipped, this physically disconnects the webcam hardware from the laptop. It’s always nice to see this kind of physical privacy switch.

The integrated microphone setup isn’t as impressive. It did a great job of canceling out background noise, but voice quality wasn’t as good as the best microphones I’ve used on other laptops. I’d classify it as an average microphone for a gaming laptop like this one. That’s fine as many gamers opt for external microphones or headsets.

Unfortunately, this laptop does not have any biometrics — no fingerprint reader and no IR camera for facial recognition. You can’t use Windows Hello to sign in without adding some extra hardware. That’s disappointing, as the circular power button above the keyboard looks like a great place for a fingerprint reader.

Lenovo Legion 5i: Connectivity

The Lenovo Legion 5i has a good number of ports. In total, you get three USB Type-A ports and two USB Type-C ports.

• On the left, you’ll find one USB Type-A (USB 3.2 Gen 1) port, two USB Type-C (USB 3.2 Gen 2) ports, and a combo headphone jack.
• On the back bar, there’s a DC power-in port as well as an HDMI 2.1 out port.
• On the right, the machine has an Ethernet (RJ45) port, a microSD card reader, and two USB Type-A (USB 3.2 Gen 1) ports.

I would prefer to see more of the ports on the back of the laptop instead of the sides, but I’m pleased to see the power port on the back — it’s always nice to have that power cable out of the way. Most gamers will find everything they need here with no need for a dock or dongle.

This laptop includes Wi-Fi 6E hardware as well as Bluetooth 5.2. The Wi-Fi worked well in our testing setup. It would be nice to see Wi-Fi 7 support. We’re right on the cusp of Wi-Fi 7 becoming widespread, and we should see it become standard in future gaming laptops with newer CPUs.

Lenovo Legion 5i: Performance

The Lenovo Legion 5i performed well in PC gaming and general desktop usage tasks. That’s no surprise — we’re talking about a machine with a beastly Intel Core i9 CPU, 32GB of RAM, and discrete Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 graphics.

It is worth noting that, despite the high-end CPU and generous amount of RAM and storage, the RTX 4060 graphics Lenovo includes here are far from the highest-end part. You may end up with better gaming performance with a gaming laptop that pairs and RTX 4070 with a lower-end CPU and less RAM.

But benchmarks will tell the story. As usual, we ran the Lenovo Legion 5i through our standard benchmarks to see how it performs.

First, we run PCMark 10 to get an idea of overall system performance. While it’s designed to be a holistic benchmark, the machine’s CPU is a huge factor in this benchmark. The Lenovo Legion 5i delivered a score of 8,751, which is a great score — largely thanks to its incredibly powerful CPU.

Next, we run Cinebench R20. This is a heavily multithreaded benchmark that focuses on overall CPU performance. It’s a quick benchmark, so cooling under extended workloads isn’t a factor. But, since it’s heavily multithreaded, CPUs with more cores have a huge advantage.

The 24-core Intel Core i9 CPU in the machine delivered excellent performance here, too — a nice high score of 10,888 in the multithreaded benchmark.

We also run an encode with Handbrake. This is another heavily multithreaded benchmark, but it runs over an extended period. This demands the laptop’s cooling kick in, and many laptops will throttle and slow down under load.

The Lenovo Legion 9i finished the encode process in 725 seconds, which is just over 12 minutes. That’s another great showing that demonstrates the high performance of the CPU and how well the Legion laptop’s cooling works.

The laptop stays surprisingly cool and quiet throughout CPU benchmarks like this one. The keyboard warms up a bit, but it doesn’t get uncomfortable. The fans blow hot air out the back of the machine, but they aren’t particularly loud most of the time.

Next, we run a graphical benchmark. This is a gaming laptop, so GPU performance is critically important. We run 3Dmark Time Spy, a graphical benchmark that focuses on GPU performance.

With a score of 10,415, the Lenovo Legion 5i appears to squeeze a lot of performance out of its Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 graphics hardware. It comes out well on top of some other machines with Nvidia RTX 4060 graphics we compared it to. But it still can’t keep up with a system with higher-tier Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 graphics.

Moving on to gaming benchmarks, we run a standard benchmark suite in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. While this is an older game, it’s a great way to compare performance across different laptops.

The Lenovo Legion 5i ran the benchmark at 138 frames per second. It’s getting great performance out of its GPU and CPU — impressively, it comes very close to the RTX 4070-powered Alienware m16 R2 in this benchmark.

Finally, we run a benchmark in Metro Exodus. This is a very demanding game and we run the benchmark with high graphical settings. With an average FPS of 41, the Lenovo Legion 5i once again outcompeted the other RTX 4060-powered laptops we compared it to. But it came short of the RTX 4070-powered laptop, naturally.

Overall, this machine delivers great performance. But don’t get too distracted by its high-end CPU when comparing machines — for most gaming tasks, the GPU is what matters most.

Lenovo Legion 5i: Battery life

The Lenovo Legion 5i has an 80 Watt-hour battery, which is a good size. But it’s also a 5.2-pound gaming laptop and those don’t tend to deliver the best battery life.

To benchmark the battery life, we play a 4K copy of Tears of Steel on repeat in the Movies & TV app on Windows 11 with airplane mode enabled until the laptop suspends itself. (We set the screen to 250 nits of brightness and turn off the keyboard backlight for our battery benchmarks.) This is a best-case scenario for any laptop since local video playback is so efficient and real battery life in day-to-day use is always going to be less than this.

In our standard battery life rundown test, the Lenovo Legion 5i lasted for an average of 303 minutes before suspending itself — that’s just over five hours. It’s a little on the low side for a gaming laptop thanks to that power-hungry CPU, but I’ve seen much worse from gaming laptops. Still, if battery life is a priority, this may not be the machine for you.

Lenovo Legion 5i: Conclusion

The Lenovo Legion 5i is an all-around high-quality gaming laptop and a great value. It’s not the most premium machine, but it’s a very good price for a gaming laptop with discrete Nvidia graphics, a screaming fast Intel Core i9 CPU, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB solid-state drive.

While the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 graphics here is far from the fastest part, this machine is set up to squeeze lots of gaming performance out of its hardware.

Laptops with higher-end graphics — a GeForce RTX 4070 and up — will perform better in games, even if their other specs appear lower. But they’re also more expensive: That RTX 4070-powered Alienware m16 R2 we compared it to costs $1,849. That’s $449 more than the Lenovo Legion 5i.

Of course, Nvidia’a GeForce RTX 50-series parts are on the way. Laptops like this one might end up on a good sale price soon. But, in the current market, this machine is a good buy even at its retail price.