Lenovo Legion 16" Legion 5i Gray 2025

The Lenovo Legion 5i is a beastly creator laptop with a top-tier Core Ultra 9, 64GB RAM, and a stunning 16-inch 240Hz display. Its thick chassis and heavy weight make it terrible for travel, but the port selection is outstanding. Gamers will find the RTX 5060 a bit underwhelming at this $2,350 price point, but for CPU-bound workloads it's hard to beat.

And then there's the form factor. At 2.45kg (5.4 lbs) and 0.85 inches thick, this isn't something you'll toss in a backpack every day without thinking twice. The compact score in our database reflects that: it's only in the 12th percentile for this category. But what you lose in portability, you gain in connectivity. There's Thunderbolt, two USB-C ports, three USB-A, HDMI 2.1, Ethernet, and Wi-Fi 7. That's genuinely one of the best port selections we've seen, which matters if your desk is permanently covered in dongles and external drives.

The RTX 5060, on the other hand, is a solid performer that doesn't quite match the CPU's stardom. It lands in the 83rd percentile for GPU, which is well above average but not top-of-the-charts. For 1600p gaming, you'll comfortably hit high frame rates in esports titles like Valorant or Apex Legends, and you can run most AAA games at high settings with DLSS turned on. But the 8GB VRAM is starting to feel cramped for 2025, especially if you're playing at this resolution with ray tracing. Our benchmarks show it's about 20% behind an RTX 5070 in raw rasterization, so if pure gaming is your focus, you might want to save a bit for a higher-tier GPU option.

That said, pricing across vendors has been steady, and we haven't seen significant discounts yet. The sheer amount of RAM and storage helps justify the sticker price, but only if you actually need it. If you're just gaming and browsing, you can find plenty of RTX 5070 laptops with 32GB of RAM for less money, and they'll deliver higher frame rates in most titles.

The elephant in the room is the Apple MacBook Pro M4 Max. It's faster in many creative workloads and sips power, but it's locked into macOS and costs a fortune to configure beyond 36GB of RAM. Gamers will also bounce off it hard. The ASUS ROG Flow GZ302EA, meanwhile, takes the opposite approach: it's compact and versatile with a convertible design, but its cooler can't sustain the same clock speeds as the Legion under heavy loads, and you sacrifice screen size and port selection. For someone who wants one machine that does everything at a desk, the Legion makes a compelling case.

This laptop also won't satisfy anyone who plans to frequently game away from a wall outlet without headphones. The fans become a vocal presence under load, and the battery evaporates quickly. If you need a quiet machine for a shared office or classroom, a more efficient ultrabook or a console might be a better fit.

For pure gamers, it's a bit of an odd choice. The RTX 5060 is no slouch, but you're paying for a lot of resources you won't fully use. You could drop down to 32GB of RAM and an RTX 5070 for the same price elsewhere, which would give you a noticeable bump in frame rates and future-proofing. This laptop is best when your workflow looks more like After Effects and Premiere than Fortnite and Overwatch. If you know you need every ounce of CPU power, this is one of the smartest buys right now.