A big part of my job is picking holes in PC gaming deals, dear Internet, and I’ve very nearly failed you. This Lenovo Legion 5i for $1,499 at B&H Photo is such a huge amount of laptop for the cash, I spent a good amount of time scratching my head trying to come up with caveats. I’ve eventually succeeded, of course, but it was a touch and go thing for a while there.
Let’s take a look at what you get for your hard earned cash. For $1,500, you’d probably be expecting a mid-range Intel or AMD chip, but this stunner has gone right for the high end with an Intel Core i9 14900HX.
That’s a 24 core behemoth of a mobile CPU, with eight Performance cores, 16 Efficient, and a max boost clock of 5.8 GHz. It’s one of the fastest chips you can cram in a laptop chassis, and it’s sitting here for medium money.
Then there’s the GPU. Okay, so you don’t get the big mobile RTX 4080, but the RTX 4070 here is the proper 140 W TGP version. I’ve had the pleasure of testing quite a few laptops with RTX 4070s at their hearts, and I can tell you it’s pretty much where you want to be GPU-wise if you can’t afford its bigger brother.
That’s all academic, of course, if the display you’re looking at all those pixels on is a turkey. This is a 1600p IPS panel, however, which is pretty much perfectly matched to that GPU. Oh, and if you want to get competitive with something undemanding but fast-paced like Counter-Strike 2, or Deadlock? It’s got a 240 Hz refresh rate.
That’s seriously speedy. But hey, this lappy probably has only 16 GB of RAM like most $1,500 laptop deals, right? Nope. 32 GB of DDR5 5600. Hmmm. Trouble is, it’s a bit of a chonky… no, that’s a no-go as well. This laptop is pretty slim and svelte, making it perfectly portable.
Okay, I finally have some critiques. First up, it’s only got 1 TB of storage. That’s absolutely fine for starters, but I think I’d be cracking it open fairly soon after purchase and sticking a cheap-but-excellent 2 TB NVMe drive in there. It’s also got a secondary M.2 slot inside, so you don’t even have to mess around cloning the boot drive, you can literally just add a new SSD and go.
Second? Ah, the old reliable when talking about gaming laptops: heat. That mega-CPU is surely an impressive beast, but we tend to find that it pushes laptop cooling systems to their maximum, so expect this lappy to run hot and probably a bit loud under heavy load.
Other than that though? Well, $1,500 normally gets you a very good gaming laptop, but here it gets you something properly powerful, wrapped up in a thin and portable chassis that you can stuff in your bag and take on the go. You can check it against all the Prime Day gaming laptop deals we’re furiously finding over the course of the sales and beyond, but this one might be the highlight of the whole lot.
