The Legion and Legion Pro range of Lenovo laptops are part of the brand’s “traditional” laptop lineup, according to the website, but really these are gaming laptops with a, shall we say, less over-the-top design than some competitors. But as always with a PC, it’s what’s under the hood that counts, and this latest generation of the Legion Pro 5i delivers.
Lenovo Legion Pro 5i (Gen 9) review
- What’s new?
- First impressions
- Specs and price
- Design and ergonomics
- Setup
- Gaming performance
- Desktop and work performance
- Who is it for?
What’s new?
The case design of the Legion has been tweaked for this new generation but it’s still recognisably a Legion. My 2023 Legion has whacky blue “exhaust tips” on the back and somewhat more over-styled fan intakes, but this new Legion Pro 5i delivers a sleeker, blacker look with just a few subtle chamfers and cutaways to both facilitate airflow and let gamers know this is still a machine for them.
The Legion platform is configurable on the Lenovo website, though there are some preset designs to choose from. In late 2024, you can select from Intel or AMD CPUs and essentially spec up the machine and pay as much as you want, from around $2,300 for a modestly specced unit all the way up to $7,200 and beyond for something with the latest CPU and 32GB of RAM.
Legion Pro has 5i, 7i, and 9i SKUs with the two higher-numbered models offering higher-end graphics chips, bigger batteries, onboard liquid cooling, and Thunderbolt ports. That’s not to say this Legion Pro 5i test unit is anything like “low end” – it has the same 14th generation Intel i9-14900HX CPU as the Legion Pro 7i, and the same 16-inch 240Hz 2560 x 1600 IPS display.
First impressions
The Lenovo Pro 5i is not an especially exciting laptop to look at but that’s part of why users choose Lenovo. Born from IBM’s venerable ThinkPad range (which still exists under Lenovo, of course) Lenovo saw a market for people who want powerful laptops that don’t necessarily look flashy, sci-fi, or especially blingy. If there’s one thing I can say about this generation of Legion, it’s that the machine is definitely not blingy.
The most immediately impressive thing about the Legion Pro 5i is its 16-inch display. It’s a proper old-school 16:10 IPS screen maxing out at 2560 x 1600 but with a decidedly next-gen 240Hz maximum refresh rate (and HDR 400 too). That means less-demanding games will run silky smooth, and that little bit of extra height (the equivalent desktop display would be 2560 x 1440) really does make the desktop feel like a more flexible space.
Lenovo Legion Pro 5i (Gen 9) specs and price
| CPU | 14th Generation Intel Core i9-14900HX Processor |
| GPU | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 8GB |
| Memory | 2x 16 GB DDR5-5600 |
| Storage | 1 TB SSD PCIe |
| Display | 16-inch WQXGA (2560 x 1600) IPS display 240Hz refresh rate |
| Connectivity | 3 x USB-A (USB 5Gbps / USB 3.2 Gen 1) 1 x USB-C (USB 10Gbps / USB 3.2 Gen 2), with DisplayPort 1.4 1 x HDMI 2.1, up to 8K/60Hz 1 x Ethernet (RJ-45) 1 x USB-A (USB 5Gbps / USB 3.2 Gen 1), Always On 1 x USB-C (USB 10Gbps / USB 3.2 Gen 2), with PD 140W and DisplayPort 1.4 Wi-Fi 6E Bluetooth 5.1 |
| Battery | 4 Cell Li-Polymer 80Wh 300W Slim 3pin AC Adapter |
| Dimensions | 363.4 x 261.75 x 26.95 mm |
| Price (RRP) | $4,439 |
| Warranty | One year |
| Official website | Lenovo Australia |
Design and ergonomics
While this is unmistakably a Lenovo Legion, it’s also a fairly subtle if chunky laptop. To the uninitiated, it looks like a powerful desktop replacement machine, because that’s essentially what it is.
At 16 inches it’s not overlarge but that bigger screen allows for a full-size keyboard with numpad to slot neatly in the case and still look surprisingly compact. It’s a good size, avoiding the awkward areas of blank plastic you see on the 17- and 18-inch behemoths of the laptop world.
Lenovo uses a non-ghosting keyboard which is essential for gaming, and you can configure the colour and animation of the LED backlighting. Irritatingly, the hardware-level LED options are limited to rainbow and flashy pulsing, with no option to just have the keys light up a colour (I use white, crazy I know).
To get a solid colour backlight, I needed to set up the machine, launch Lenovo Vantage, struggle to find the keyboard options, Google to discover that Lenovo Hotkeys needs to be launched on startup to get keyboard options, edit the startup apps list, reboot the machine, and then I could choose a single colour backlight for the keyboard.
Yep. The Lenovo Legion Pro 5i is definitely still a PC.
Setup
Like other Windows 11 laptops, Lenovo benefits from Microsoft’s increasingly streamlined out-of-box experience (OOBE), where the software giant continues to do its best to make setting up a new laptop like setting up a new phone. Unfortunately, overall the OOBE is still a bit of a mess, especially if you have another computer that is backed up to OneDrive. This will result, as it did for me, in a new Legion desktop covered in icons that are broken links to games that are not installed on the new machine.
Maybe it was because of this glitch (not Lenovo’s fault) that I was then made hyper-aware of the surprisingly invasive, even irritating, amount of additional software that comes on this machine. Or rather, not the software itself but the way it constantly messages and notifies the user about updates and opportunities.
Now, I can take being reminded of the alleged awesomeness of Dropbox and the importance of antivirus, users expect that stuff. But Lenovo’s own Vantage suite – which lets you do things like check hardware health and do system updates – has the brass balls to refuse to shut down until it asks my opinion about how I found the experience of, say, changing the keyboard’s LED colours, via a pop-up.
Ooh, those pop-ups. When booting the machine for this review, I received a pop-up asking to upgrade the Xrite colour management experience, a pop-up offering a Dropbox deal for Lenovo customers, a pop-up about a McAfee antivirus deal that I didn’t read, a pop-up reminding me to disable HDR mode before upgrading the Xrite colour management experience, a pop-up about the Tobii head-tracking feature that only works in certain games, and then finally Legion Arena popped-up by itself because I’d installed Cyberpunk 2077 yesterday.
Oh, wait, my notes go to a second page: the FINAL pop-up was from Lenovo Vantage asking if it could pin itself to the taskbar. I know this is a subjective opinion but I think that’s too many pop-ups.
Gaming performance
This Lenovo Legion Pro 5i review unit came configured with the Nvidia RTX 4070 Mobile gaming GPU, 32GB of RAM, and Intel’s i9-14900HX CPU. That’s more than plenty of grunt for pushing even the most demanding games to the 2560 x 1600 display.
Keep in mind of course that the mobile series RTX chips are considerably less powerful than their desktop equivalents. For example, my RTX 3080 Ti is about 7% faster than a desktop RTX 4070, but it’s more than 35% faster than an RTX 4070 Mobile. You’ll mostly only see this difference if you connect the Legion Pro 5i to a 4K display, however. On the laptop’s own display, Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake II easily topped 60 frames per second with ray tracing set to Ultra and DLSS to Performance.
Lenovo is keen to push the 80-watt-hour battery as a feature, but honestly, battery life is essentially irrelevant for gamers. Unplugged, the laptop throttles down to save on power, so if you’re playing, you’re plugged in. That said, 80Wh gives you work-day endurance as long as you resist the urge to boot up Elden Ring on your breaks.
Desktop and work performance
Like most (if not all) new Windows 11 laptops, the Lenovo Legion Pro 5i now includes a hardware Copilot button on the keyboard. It’s to the right of right-Alt, so now we have Windows, Alt, Space, Alt, and Copilot. Pressing the key is the same as clicking the Copilot icon in the taskbar, but could end up with different behaviours as Microsoft’s AI matures.
Copilot was recently added to Microsoft 365 (Word, Excel etc.) so having that key there might end up useful. I pressed it once, to launch Copilot on the desktop, and then never touched it again.
Dubious AI future aside, one of the most compelling reasons to choose the Lenovo Legion Pro 5i as your “everything” PC is because when you aren’t gaming on it, it feels like a sensible, low-key, business laptop. Having a 16-inch display over the more typical 15-inch doesn’t just make games look better, it gives you a crucial little bit of extra space for work. And the full keyboard means you don’t have to constantly contort your fingers into various Fn+whatever combos just to scroll the page.
Who is the Lenovo Legion Pro 5i (Gen 9) for?
The Lenovo Legion Pro 5i is a solid and well-built all-rounder laptop that harnesses the best of what today’s hardware can offer. Like any branded laptop, the “extra” software is invasive and annoying, and there remains a niche here for a manufacturer to give us a “clean” Windows 11 out-of-box experience, you know, like on a Pixel smartphone.
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