IT is always nice to get the chance to put a gaming laptop on the review bench, and the latest machine I’ve been putting through its paces is the Lenovo Legion 5i Pro Gen 7.
The 16in screen has 360mm x 264mm x 26.6mm and weighs 2.5kg, which isn’t an issue for carrying around the house but might become noticeable if you need to cart it around in a backpack or should bag all day.
The review unit was running an Intel i7-12700H 2.3Ghz processor with 16GB RAM, an Nvidia RTX 3060 GPU and a clear 2560×1600 display with 165hz refresh. Unusually, storage is via dual 1TB SSDs in a RAID 0 configuration, presenting as a 2TB drive.
Also worth noting is that the system comes with Windows 11 as standard . I hadn’t played around with the new OS much previously, but found it pretty similar to Windows 10 and easy to navigate.
Overall the Legion 5i Pro Gen 7 a well-built system, and continues the Lenovo design theme of “gaming laptop that won’t look inappropriate in a business meeting”.
The keyboard is comfortable to type on, having Lenovo’s TrueStrike system along with the obligatory RGB functions.
There are plenty of USB ports on the laptop as well –a Thunderbolt 4 and USB-C port on the let hand side, as well as a USB-A port on the right hand side alongside the headphone jack and the switch which disables the 720p webcam.
On the rear of the unit are another USB-C port (which can be used for charging at up to 135W), another USB-A port, an HDMI 2.1 port, and a Gigbit Ethernet port, as well as the AC adaptor socket. Helpully, little icons on the back of the laptop make it easy to see what port does what.
While it’s tempting to go “Only an RTX 3060?” like some kind of GPU snob, it’s still a serviceable card had no trouble at all running God Of War on default settings at 70+fps.
The 3DMark scores backed up this up as well, scoring 8523, with PC Mark returning a result of 6924.
It does seem a bit odd to have a 16in, 16:10 2K 165hz screen being run by a 3060, though, but there is a 3070 version available if you want to spend a bit extra,
One pleasant surprise I received was the SSD read/write speed, with Crystal Disk Mark 8 returning a read rate of 13,518mb/s and a write rate of 10,392mb/s – by far and away the fastest results I’ve recorded to date with any SSD, internal or external.
Power for the laptop comes from an 80Wh battery and I found that it offered pretty much the standard gaming laptop experience – an hour or so of AAA gaming at full power, and more than six hours of “general internet and work” provided you dial the power consumption settings down. I did like the rapid charge feature, though – it will recharge the battery from flat to 80% in about half an hour.
One of the major improvements over its predecessor is the ability to switch between integrated graphics and the RTX 3060 as needed, which means big improvements in battery life as well as the very welcome ability to force the laptop to keep using the Nvidia GPU even on battery, allowing for a much better (but obviously much shorter) gaming experience.
Lenovo make a big deal of the cooling tech in the laptop and it certainly seemed to work as intended. The upper part of the system (eg the keyboard and where I was resting my wrists) didn’t have any heating issues that I experienced, but the bottom did get pretty warm on my lap; to be fair that’s more or less standard for gaming laptops and not an issue if you’re running it on table, bench, large book, etc.
While the Legion 5i Pro does a lot of things very well, I found it also had two frustrating design flaw which holds the experience back.
Fiurstly, the touchpad is mounted too far off-centre to the left, to the point where my left-hand thumb would keep brushing against it and move the cursor around, while when using my right hand to try and “click” where the mouse button equivalents would be, I kept right-clicking instead of left-clicking because the touchpad was just that bit too far over. While this can be mitigated by using an external mouse , it’s still a disappointing design element.
Secondly, the numpad is positioned a bit too closely to the main keyboard; about half the time I went to hit the “backspace” key I hit the numlock one instead.
Included software was McAfee antivirus and Lenovo Advantage – the former of which I am generally indifferent to and the latter of which is necessary for managing system profiles, RGB, etc and does so without any issues I’ve encountered.
All in all, I’ve found the Lenovo Legion 5i Pro Gen 7 to be a solid laptop that does what Lenovo promise and does it well. It’s not a top-end gaming laptop for ultra performance use, but it’s more than capable of 1080p gaming and any general computing tasks you could ask of it, and as a result is definitely worth considering if you need a beefier computer than a standard work device, but don’t want to go for an all-out gaming powerhouse either.
