Amongst the slew of announcements of laptops and gadgets at CES, Lenovo announced their latest Legion gaming range including the 2024 edition Gen 9 Legion Pro 5i. The laptop has been on-sale in Australia and the Lenovo Australia team have sent across one of their higher specced models for review.

Priced with a RRP of $4,489.00, the review unit is top of the line – but there’s a few good deals around on this machine if you look around. The review machine includes a 14th gen Intel Core i9-14900HX processor with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU and 32GB of DDR5 RAM and a 1TB gen 4 M.2 SSD.

The Lenovo Legion brand has a strong reputation in gaming, and after a couple of weeks with the Legion Pro 5i, here’s how it went. 

Hardware

Design

The Legion Pro 5i has the distinct look and feel of a Lenovo Legion laptop. It has a thicker profile which you expect for with a bump at the back that extends past the hinge of the display, giving you more room for both ports and cooling exhaust. 

There’s chunky exhaust vents for cooling on the back and sides, with hexagonal slots on the bottom cover for air-flow. It’s all a part of their ColdFront cooling system which uses dual fans and a heat pipe, with software to tune the system to be quieter – though in performance mode, I can tell you it moves a lot of air.. 

That thicc rear gives a lot more room for ports – and there are a lot of ports on this laptop. You get an ethernet jack, USB Type C and dual USB Type A ports alongside a HDMI port and the proprietary power connector port on the rear, with a simple USB Type A and Type C ports on the left, and USB Type A port on the right alongside the combo audio jack and the privacy shutter for the webcam.

The overall shape of the laptop is defined by the 16-inch, 16:10 aspect ratio display. The display has small bezels at the side, but a larger one on top which also includes a small lip that contains the webcam and also makes it a little easier to flip the lid open. 

While there is a webcam, it’s not Windows Hello compatible, and there’s no fingerprint reader either – both fairly common omissions on gaming laptops, just something to be aware of.

There’s a full-sized Lenovo Legion ‘TrueStrike’ keyboard on the lower deck which includes a numeric keypad. It’s a comfortable keyboard to type on, with raised guides on the usual F & J keys as well as the S key, making it easier to centre your fingers on the old WASD keys for  game play. 

Lenovo says they’ve used a high abrasion resistant paint on the keyboard to keep it looking fresh even after a heap of gaming sessions. 

The keyboard includes a 4-zone RGB backlighting system which can show a number of multi-coloured effects – or you can use FN+Space to just scroll through effects or turn it off. 

Display and Audio

Lenovo has included a 16″ WQXGA (2560 x 1600) resolution IPS panel and paired with a dual speaker system tuned by Nahimic Audio.

The display is nice and big with great viewing angles and it’s super responsive – with support for up to 240Hz refresh with a 3ms response rate using NVIDIA G-Sync. There’s a load of other certifications including coverage for 100% Adobe RGB, Dolby Vision certification and it’s Pantone Certified. 

I like the viewing angles on the IPS panel, but I would like to see an option for an OLED panel to give deeper blacks and a little more pop to the colours as I find this to be a little muted. 

Overall though it’s a decent display that can be seen in almost any lighting conditions, with the matte finish a great help to eliminate reflections and glare. 

The audio is surprisingly good for a 2-speaker system, though running 2W speakers is a great way to do it. There’s plenty of power in the speakers, which isn’t a problem with the Nahimic Audio tuning delivering a clear sound full of crystal clear mids and highs, with a satisfying low end that while it isn’t super bass heavy, delivers more than I’m used to on a laptop. 

Performance

As a gaming machine, you want the best of everything from performance to connectivity. The Lenovo Legion Pro 5i includes it all, from the Intel Core i9-14900HX processor paired with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU to the 32GB of DDR5 RAM and 1TB gen 4 M.2 SSD, this makes for a powerful device. 

Any day-to-day office work, web browsing and even up to photo and video editing or 3D rendering is just easy. There’s no lag, it simply runs and runs fast.  

As you’d expect, playing games on the Legion Pro 5i is awesome, with scores up around 70-80fps on the likes of Cyberpunk 2077 and Sons of the Forest and 50-60fps in Fortnite when using the dGPU exclusively.

The performance is great, however you do get a lot of fan noise if you’re using the performance option. You can choose to use a more hybrid model or integrated GPU to get the laptop a little quieter. You’ll notice the performance drop on the lower performance profiles, but it’s also a lot quieter.

On the connectivity front you already have a load of options, including hardwired ethernet on the rear, but you also have Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 offering a good way to connect wirelessly.

As usual we sent it through 3DMark and here’s how it went

Battery and Charging

The Lenovo Legion Pro 5i packs in a massive 80 watt-hour battery with a 300W charger included in the box. 

The 80 Whr battery is a bit of a mixed bag, depending on what you want. You can get just under an hour of gaming in performance mode before you start to get skips, reduced frame rates and warnings. For office work though, you can get anywhere up to around 6 hours – but it is a stretch to say the laptop will last all day.

The 300W charger though is fast. SUPER fast, getting you up to 50% charge in just 15 minutes before a full charge in under an hour. That’s very fast and definitely appreciated when you need power in a hurry. Just a word of warning, the power supply is simply massive.

Overall, it’s got decent, but not great battery life but if you aren’t too far from a power point you should be fine.

Software

The Lenovo Legion Pro 5i includes a copy of Windows 11 Home with an assortment of pre-installed apps and utilities. 

The pre-installed apps include the usual suspects: MS Office 365 trial, McAfee Livesafe 30-day trial (which it will remind you is about to expire constantly), as well as some Lenovo utilities.

The list of Lenovo utilities includes Lenovo Now, a sort of hub for Lenovo services. You also get apps for all those services including Lenovo Vantage which is used to manage your laptop or get support, Lenovo Hotkeys, a place to set custom functions like changing the power profile or refresh rate, Legion Arena for managing your games.

While there’s a lot there, I generally use Lenovo Vantage the most. It’s easy to use and changing settings is relatively pain free. I’ve often changed to the dGPU only for gaming before switching back to the integrated GPU for simple office work – it helps with fan noise. 

Should you buy it?

The Lenovo Legion Pro 5i is a great gaming machine with a load of performance, a big, bright display and lots of connectivity options. 

The Legion Pro 5i plays games like a dream at some very high frame rates with the only downside is the battery drains far too quickly, though with an RTX 4070 driving a big 16” display and cooling the system it’s easy to see why.  That said, the charging is fast, and can get you back on the road in no time. 

While the RRP is fairly high, there’s good deals to be had through the Lenovo online store and if you’re serious about gaming it’s a great option. 

You can check it out over on the Lenovo Australia website.