Lenovo Legion 5i Gen 10 Review: A Rare Double-Duty Laptop for Gaming and Work

The Lenovo Legion 5i Gen 10 is overkill for most budget gaming laptop shoppers, both in terms of price and features. But if you view it as two laptops in one — a competent gaming laptop with a reasonably large 15.1-inch display and a general-use laptop that’s thin and light enough to carry around more than occasionally — then its price north of $1,500 begins to look like a great value.

Gamers and creators alike will make good use of the Intel Core i7-14700HX and Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 pairing, but the real star of the show is the Legion 5i Gen 10’s OLED display. Gamers don’t necessarily need an OLED, but the excellent contrast allows you to see details in dark scenes, and it has a 165Hz refresh rate for smooth action. Creators will appreciate the display’s crisp 2.5K resolution, surprising brightness and accurate color performance. 

The Legion 5i Gen 10 is definitely geared toward power rather than efficiency, providing excellent overall performance, but at the expense of battery life. The short battery life comes with the territory, but it also means this isn’t the perfect student laptop to take across campus all day and then be able to game at night. But for a post-college lifestyle where you’re never seated too far from a power outlet and running around with a laptop in a backpack less, then the Legion 5i Gen 10 is a great pick if you want a single laptop for both work and gaming.

You’ll find Intel Arrow Lake and Raptor Lake versions of the Legion 5i Gen 10 on Lenovo’s site. The series starts at roughly $1,340 (Lenovo’s discounts are always shifting, so you might see a slightly different price) for a fixed configuration with a Core Ultra 7 255HX chip from Intel’s Arrow Lake series, RTX 5060 graphics, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. This same config is also available as a customizable model with options to upgrade to a Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU and double the RAM and storage. The nice thing is that all models have the 15.1-inch, 2.5K-resolution OLED display. 

There are also fixed and customizable configs with the same Arrow Lake chip but with RTX 5070 graphics.

There’s a lone Raptor Lake model listed on Lenovo’s site, but it’s a bit of an odd duck, pairing a high-end CPU in the Core i9-14900HX and the higher of the two GPUs offered in the RTX 5070, but with only 16GB of RAM and an undersized 512GB SSD. 

The system I tested isn’t listed on Lenovo’s site, but it is a much more well-rounded machine. It’s sold at Newegg for $1,569 and features a Core i7-14700HX and RTX 5060 graphics, along with ample 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD that most gamers will end up maxing out sooner rather than later. Thankfully, the bottom panel is easy to remove, and once inside, you’ll find a free M.2 slot to add a second storage drive.

The Legion 5i Gen 10 starts at £1,279 in the UK and AU$2,399 in Australia. 

Lenovo Legion 5i Gen 10 performance

Following the Acer Nitro V 16S AI and MSI Katana 15 HX, the Legion 5i Gen 10 is the third gaming laptop I’ve tested with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 50-series GPU. The MSI machine is a true budget laptop, priced at just $999, with entry-level RTX 5050 graphics and an old-school 15.6-inch display. At $1,300, the Acer entry sits between the MSI and the Legion 5i Gen 10 and supplies a larger 16-inch display powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 260 and RTX 5060 graphics.

The Legion 5i Gen 10 bested them both in testing, and a big reason why it finished ahead of the Acer on all but one of our benchmark tests was that its RTX 5060 is set to run at its full 115 watts while Acer throttles its GPU, limiting it to 85 watts. And even with the high-powered Core i7-14700HX and full-wattage RTX 5060, the Legion 5i wasn’t any louder than the Acer. Among gaming laptops, both were on the quiet side. The Legion 5i Gen 10’s two cooling fans kept the laptop cool under load without getting too loud. I wouldn’t describe them as “whisper quiet,” but I’ve heard worse.

After acing our application tests, the Legion 5i Gen 10 proceeded to net excellent results on our 3D graphics and gaming benchmarks, as you can see below. It bested both the Acer Nitro V 16S AI and MSI Katana 15 HX on every test with the exception of our two newest gaming tests. On the built-in benchmark of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, which we run at 1,920×1,080-pixel resolution with the High preset, the Legion 5i Gen 10 finished a single frame per second behind the Nitro V 16S, but still managed to keep its average frame rate above 60fps for smooth gameplay. And on F1 24, it lost out to the MSI, which was the surprising victor with its RTX 5050 graphics.

The Legion 5i Gen 10’s gaming success requires a sacrifice in battery life. Despite featuring a big, 80-watt-hour battery, it lasted less than 5.5 hours on our YouTube streaming battery drain test. That’s a poor result even among gaming laptops. The bright, high-res OLED display also doesn’t do any favors for the laptop’s battery life. The Legion 5i Gen 10 is certainly a laptop that doesn’t allow you to stray from a power outlet for very long, but the excellent performance and awesome OLED display will be worth the trade-off in battery life for many gamers and creators.

Gaming laptop in disguise

This Legion is about as thin and light as it gets for a gaming laptop. Some budget laptops like the MSI Katana 15 HX feature dated 15.6-inch, 16:9 displays, but more commonly, you’ll find 16-inch, 16:10 displays, as with the Acer Nitro V 16S AI. The Legion 5i offers a compromise, supplying a modern 16:10 aspect ratio but in a more compact 15.1-inch size. 

I’ll get to the display itself shortly, but the benefit of sacrificing a bit of screen size — while still getting plenty of space from top to bottom for seeing more on the screen and scrolling less when reading, browsing or working — is greater portability. The Legion 5i Gen 10 weighs 4.3 pounds, which is less than the 4.6-pound Nitro V 16S AI and the 5.6-pound Katana 15 HX. This is the rare gaming laptop that I wouldn’t mind carrying with me on something approaching a daily basis. But you’ll need to lug the hefty power brick along with you, given the short battery life. And the power brick is the typical anchor you get with a gaming laptop; the power cord and brick add 1.5 pounds to your bag, putting the total travel weight at 5.8 pounds.

It’s not a plastic hulk like some budget gaming laptops, but it is trim and rigid. The keyboard deck and bottom panel are plastic but have a firm feel. The lid is made from aluminum, giving it a bit more of an upscale look and feel.

If you want to tote the Legion 5i around as your do-it-all laptop, it won’t look out of place whether you’re working in an office, shared workspace, coffee shop or gaming at a friend’s house or school lounge. The laptop comes dressed in business black and lacks the aggressive venting and sculpted plastic flourishes found on many gaming laptops. Other than the Legion name on the lid, which other gamers might recognize, the only gaming-centric part of the overall design is the Eye of Sauron power button, whose white LED lighting is nearly always on. (This motif is repeated in the “O” in the Legion branding on the lid as well as the icon on the “O” key.)

The power button remains illuminated when the Legion 5i Gen 10 is on, only turning off when you power off the laptop and pulsing when the laptop dips into sleep mode. You’re given great control over the keyboard’s RGB backlighting, but I found nothing for turning off or even dimming the power button’s LED. And its shine is bright, especially in a dark room.

When you turn on the Legion 5i Gen 10’s RGB keyboard backlighting, it suddenly looks like a gaming laptop. Most budget and midrange gaming laptops provide single-zone or four-zone RGB lighting at best, but the Legion 5i Gen 10 serves up an impressive (on paper) 24 zones. In practice, the effect of this 24-zone RGB LED keyboard is muted. The zones are vertical strips, and the RGB effects and patterns don’t look all that different flowing over these skinny columns as they do on a four-zone keyboard. The gap between typical four-zone RGB lighting and the 24 zones you get here is much smaller than it is going from these 24 zones to per-key RGB lighting, where you can really dial in your intended effect.

The keys themselves are very firm, which makes the keyboard feel fast when you’re mashing keys during a frantic scene in a game because they snap back quickly. I prefer a slightly softer feel with shallower travel for typing. The touchpad is a bit undersized, but I liked its firm click response. The touchpad is centered below the keyboard, which is off-center to accommodate a numberpad. More than the numpad, I was excited to see four full-size arrow keys on the keyboard.

I was also excited to find a free M.2 slot when I removed the bottom panel. Having a second M.2 slot means you can expand the laptop’s storage without replacing the primary SSD. The Legion 5i Gen 10 has a 1TB SSD, which is roomy for most laptops, but many of today’s games have huge file sizes, so having an easy route to expansion is always appreciated on a gaming laptop.

Outstanding OLED

The Legion 5i Gen 10’s OLED wins the Triple Crown for displays: a high resolution for crisp text and images, a speedy refresh rate for smooth movement and a high peak brightness that allows colors to pop. It’s one of the best laptop displays I’ve ever seen. 

The 2.5K resolution is perfect for the size because it allows for a sharp picture without being overkill and shortening the battery life even further. You don’t need a 4K resolution on a 15.1-inch display. 

The 165Hz refresh rate allows for smooth gameplay. Higher-end gaming laptops provide even faster displays, but you’re unlikely to hit more than 165fps in most games on the RTX 5060-powered Legion 5i Gen 10, so the 165Hz OLED panel more than suffices.

OLED panels are able to produce effectively zero-nit black levels because individual pixels can be turned completely off, resulting in incredible contrast. Because of this, they don’t need to get as bright as an LCD to produce a great-looking picture. The Legion 5i Gen 10 must have missed the memo about OLED having limited brightness. It achieved a peak brightness of 518 nits on my tests with a Spyder X colorimeter when the brightest OLED laptops typically top out around 400 nits. And the Legion 5i Gen 10 excelled on my color accuracy tests, covering 100% of the sRGB and P3 gamuts and, more impressively, 99% of the larger AdobeRGB color space.

The webcam sits in a little bump-out above the display. The good news is that it’s a 1440p cam that produces a much crisper, cleaner and better-balanced picture than the 720p cams on the Acer Nitro V 16S AI and MSI Katana 15 HX. The bad news is that it lacks an IR sensor for using Windows Hello facial recognition. Without a fingerprint reader, the Legion 5i Gen 10 is devoid of biometrics for easy, secure logins.

The laptop’s 2-watt stereo speakers are also lacking. They produce passable audio but don’t have the full sound you’ll want for games. Keep your headphones handy.

The Legion 5i Gen 10 has plenty of ports, but none of them are fast. The two USB-C ports offer only 10Gbps transfer speeds, which is only a fraction of the 40Gbps you get with Thunderbolt 4. 

Is the Lenovo Legion 5i Gen 10 worth buying?

Yes! It provides great performance for the price, and its OLED display is outstanding. It’s a great pick for gamers, but it’s more than just a gaming laptop. Creators engaged in color-accurate work will love the bright, high-res OLED display and the laptop’s portability relative to other gaming laptops. For everything it can do, the Legion 5i Gen 10 is a great value at less than $1,600.