The Lenovo Legion Pro 5i is the gaming laptop I wish I’d bought

Back in 2022, I bought my first gaming laptop in over a decade. I've had a solid few months with it, and during that time, very few complaints. It fills the niche in my life that I needed it to and it runs the games I want to play very well.

Despite that, it didn't long before the Lenovo Legion Pro 5i ruined that and gave me a bad case of buyer's remorse. I've reviewed a lot of gaming laptops over the years and I can honestly say that if there ever was a gaming laptop that lived up to the costly asking price, it might be this one.

I don't know if I could have justified the higher-price tag here, but the Legion Pro 5i is probably the laptop I wish I'd bought regardless.

The Lenovo Legion Pro 5i (Gen 8) in Australia starts at $3499 for the base model. A higher-end model with better specs starts at $3899. That's fairly expensive as far as laptops go, but it's not a huge deviation from what a gaming one with these specs or from this brand will usually cost.

If you're looking to get thrifty with it and lock in the best bargain Australia's retailers offer when it comes to the Lenovo Legion Pro 5i, check out the table below.

Before you make a decision, be sure to read our recommendation for the specs.

The Lenovo Legion Pro 5i is less attached to LED-laden aesthetics than some of its competition, but it still looks like a gaming laptop in many of the same old ways. If you're looking for the touchstones of modern gaming laptops, you'll likely recognise them here. All the old favourites are present, from the backlit keyboard to the matte black finish.

However, say you're someone who has spent a lot of time looking at gaming laptops. In that situation, a different set of details stand out and tell a different story. To the trained eye, the Lenovo Legion Pro 5i doesn't just look like another gaming laptop. It looks like one that doesn't just stick to the formula but elevates it.

The 16-inch display on the Legion Pro 5i sits at the heart of things. It's got slick bezels, WQXGA resolution, a 240Hz refresh rate and support for Dolby Vision HDR. It's not OLED, but that's pretty much the only display spec you're missing out on here. This IPS canvas here also comes with 100% sRGB coverage, Pantone factory colour calibration and an anti-glare coating.

In action, I found that the screen on the Legion Pro 5i was both nice and big enough that I often preferred it to my usual desktop monitor. Your individual mileage may vary on that specific front, but safe to say that the display on Lenovo's latest is primed to not just deliver a level of visual fidelity that feels within spitting distance of the categories' highest benchmarks.

Rather than take a swing at reinventing the wheel, it feels like Lenovo have looked at how people actually use gaming machines like the Legion Pro 5i and tweaked the equation accordingly. The sides of the gaming machine are set up with two USB Type-A ports, one USB-type C port, a privacy shutter and a headphone jack. In other words, the kinds of inputs and toggles you might need access to every day or on short notice.

The rest of the retinue here is hidden on the back side of the machine, neatly wedged next to a host of heat vents. There's another USB Type-C port, another two USB Type-A ports, a single HDMI output and a lone Ethernet jack. Simply put, there's a logic to the layout here that works to elevate an already-generous spread of ports.

Unfortunately, the same kind of thought isn't really found on a few of the other features in the mix. For instance, the webcam built into the Legion Pro 5i is a bit disappointing. It works as advertised, but it's not really good enough that I'd want to stream with it. It doesn't even support Windows Hello facial recognition, which is almost a decade old at this point.

The built-in speakers are similarly functionality-first in execution. They sound loud enough to help cover the noise made by the fans inside the Legion Pro 5i but rarely exceed that remit. Simply put, it just doesn't feel like these aspects of the Legion Pro 5i have gotten the same level of attention as the most essential parts of the form factor.

Weight-wise, the Lenovo Legion Pro 5i walks a delicate line with impressive grace. It is heavy, but it doesn't ever feel bulky. At 2.49kgs, it's not as lightweight as the latest MacBook and it's got a fair amount of heft when held in your hands.

Nevertheless, this isn't one of those gaming laptops that pays lip service to the idea of on-the-go gaming and nothing else. The Lenovo Legion Pro 5i is as close to a genuinely mobile gaming machine as I've ever seen. It is light enough that you could carry it around with you every day and use it on the go if you wanted to.

Under the hood, the base version of the Lenovo Legion Pro 5i is kitted out with Intel's Core i7 13700HK processor, 16GB of DDR5 RAM, 1 TB of M.2 SSD storage and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060. The more expensive model ups the ante to 32GB of RAM, 2TB of storage and an RTX 4070.

There's also an 80Wh battery, which is fairly close to the legal limit for laptops that you can take on a plane (though not as close as some). While some specs for this particular gaming laptop lean closer to our Enthusiast designation, the model we reviewed was firmly in Extreme territory.

Benchmarks rarely tell the whole story but our testing saw the Lenovo Legion 5i Pro come out with the highest scores we have seen over the last twelve months across every single front. From Total War: Warhammer 3 to Shadow of the Tomb Raider, every game we threw at the laptop ran smoothly and more or less without issues.

However, there is a pretty big caveat that has to be added to this high-end performance. It's utterly contingent on you leaving the Legion Pro 5i plugged in. If you aren't connected to the power supply, you'll see a significant drop in frames per second and overall performance. You'll also be forced to confront the limits of the 80Wh battery inside the Legion Pro 5i.

By most metrics, the battery life of the Lenovo Legion Pro 5i is not great. It took just 3 hours and 20 minutes of video streaming to run the battery in the Legion Pro 5i down from 100% to zero and its track record for on-the-go gaming isn't much better. For comparison, it took just 47 minutes of Cyberpunk 2077 for the laptop to empty an entire charge while Age of Darkness: Final Stand lasted roughly 1 hour and 5 minutes.

The Lenovo Legion Pro 5i isn't perfect and it is expensive. All the same, the aspects where I could find fault with it stand out like a sore thumb because the rest of the machine gets right that it's easy to forgive than it might be otherwise. It's the definition of a product that's more than the sum of its parts.

The Lenovo Legion Pro 5i is built to be better, combining striking design with top-notch performance to great effect. This is one of the rare few gaming laptops that lives up to the asking price that comes with the high-end hardware and then some.