When you buy through links in our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.
Lenovo has been at the top of our best gaming laptops guide for over a year now: the Legion Pro 7i Gen 8 delivers a great mix of performance, size, and price. I expected similar results from the Legion Pro 5i Gen 9. Instead, I find myself annoyed by the new Gen 9 model. With impressive gaming performance, you’d think I’d be crazy about this thing, but I can’t stand the mediocre memory configuration and low storage capacity.
The Pro 5i Gen 9 features one of the latest Intel Core processors, the Core i7 14650HX. It’s a mobile version of Raptor Lake, the same architecture that’s currently leading the desktop market for Intel. A 24-thread processor, split up into eight P-cores (16 threads with Hyper-Threading) and eight E-cores, that’s a lot of processing power for what is ostensibly a gaming laptop at the more affordable end of the market.
The GPU is a known quantity: the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 mobile, with 8GB of GDDR6 and a total graphics power (TGP) of 140W. The latter is important, as it determines how much headroom the GPU has at its disposal and will ultimately have a quite significant impact on the overall gaming performance of the machine. The good news here is that 140W is the best you can get for the RTX 4060 mobile – a TGP of 115W with an additional 25W boost – and it’s by far the fastest RTX 4060 we’ve tested to date.
Legion Pro 5i Gen 9 Specifications
CPU: Intel Core i7 14650HX
GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Mobile (140W)
RAM: 16GB DDR5-5600 (1 x 16GB)
SSD drive: 512 GB PCIe 4.0 NVMe (total 2x NVMe slots)
Screen: 16-inch IPS with G-Sync
Solution: 2560×1600
Refresh rate: 165Hz
Dimensions: 363.4 x 261.75 x 21.99-26.95mm
Weight: 2.5 kilos
Price: $1,520 (1TB model)
Before we get into that, we should first discuss a few things that the Pro 5i Gen 9 doesn’t do well.
It comes with just a single stick of DDR5 memory, rated at 5,600 MT/s. While it retains a 16GB capacity, which is appropriate for a laptop in this price range, having one stick does limit the overall bandwidth, which could be much higher with dual-channel memory. While having one stick doesn’t seem to hamper the laptop all that much in many of the games I tested, which is a matter of luck with our choice of tests, it could, might, and probably will at some point.
Single-channel memory also doesn’t really scream ‘Pro’, which for me is a miss on the ‘Pro 5i’.
The good news is that you can easily access the laptop’s internals via 10 Phillips screws. Adding a second stick or upgrading to a whole new kit (the latter is probably better to avoid compatibility issues, but comes at a higher cost) is as simple as removing the metal shield, popping out the old stuff, and sliding in the new stuff.
You’re probably already in the chassis of this laptop, shortly after you bought it. And with that, we’re talking about the second disappointment.
The SSD in the Pro 5i is abysmal. It’s a paltry 512GB. Combined with a Windows 11 installation and a few pre-installed Lenovo apps (including McAfee), it’s a tight squeeze for some big AAA games. I ran into storage space issues during benchmarking, and had to uninstall one game to test another. Thankfully I have a handy external SSD to shuttle my game library back and forth, which saves me the hassle of constantly re-downloading games, but if you don’t have one you may have to rely on re-downloading game files.
Although, again, you can take the chassis off and add another larger gaming SSD. There is an extra slot available, a small compensation for the lack of capacity out of the box.
The odd thing about the SSD is that it’s small but mighty. It’s one of the faster drives in our tests. That performance feels a little wasted, but it would make a fantastic boot drive alongside a much larger data drive in that second NVMe slot.
When I opened this laptop up, I realized that this isn’t just another budget gaming laptop. The cooling, motherboard, and layout inside the machine are far more impressive than most around this price point or lower. That certainly says something about this laptop: for PC builders who are used to tearing machines apart and installing new parts, there’s plenty of room for upgrades. Although that’s beside the point.
You shouldn’t have to rip the back off your shiny new gaming laptop to fix a pretty crappy configuration in 2024, at least not at this price. I couldn’t find a retailer selling this exact model (SN: 83DF000DUS), though Lenovo sells a nearly identical unit with a 1 TB SSD for $1,520 (I’ve also seen discounts of $1,274/$1,330).
That goes some way to solving the storage issue, though that model also has single-channel memory, according to Lenovo’s own specs database, and you can pick up a Lenovo laptop with the RTX 4060 for a lot less.
Or even an RTX 4070 for less.
What’s frustrating is that with more memory and a larger SSD as standard, this laptop would be fantastic. The display is a 16-inch IPS with a 165Hz refresh rate and a resolution of 2560 x 1600, 16:10. The keyboard is a full-size unit with a numeric keypad and full RGB backlighting. There are a ton of ports, a decent webcam with a privacy switch, and a responsive trackpad.
It’s all good, except for those few major misses.
Fortunately, there is a saving grace for this machine. The gaming performance is absolutely amazing, somewhat astonishing for a laptop with single-channel memory. The extra power of the graphics wattage makes for a higher performance and it is handled well thanks to the high-quality interior.
I ran multiple benchmarks on this laptop in performance mode to see where it performed best, at 1080p, 1440p, and the native resolution of 2560 x 1600. In most games, the Pro 5i Gen 9 performed exceptionally well, with RTX 4060 machines delivering the best performance.
This is the first RTX 4060 laptop we’ve tested with a 140W TGP, and it’s a real winner.
The GPU reaches a moderate 75°C under load while gaming, but the CPU gets hot at 100°C. What’s interesting is the high GPU clock of 2,709MHz, which is higher than the comparable laptops shown in the charts and the result of a small GPU overclock applied automatically in performance mode, and yet an average wattage just 1W higher than the Gigabyte G6X.
I have to admit I’m a little surprised by the results. I expected single channel memory to hold this laptop back more than it actually did.
That’s not to say I’m softening my stance on single-channel memory – at this price, this laptop should absolutely have dual-channel with 16GB of memory – but in practice it didn’t make much of a difference about our benchmarking suite as I thought. However, we do know that single-channel can have an impact on performance in some cases.
This gaming laptop isn’t great in terms of battery life. When running it on the high-wattage RTX 4060, its 80 WHr battery can’t keep it going for long. Even after disabling Performance mode and running it in the default Balanced mode with Hybrid GPU switching enabled (which alternates between iGPU and discrete GPU as needed), the Pro 5i only managed 41 minutes of battery life in the PCMark gaming battery benchmark.
Buy as…
✅ You’re not afraid to look under the hood: If you’re handy with a screwdriver, you’ll find a spare NVMe and SO-DIMM slot under the hood for future expansion.
Do not buy if…
❌ You want the best value: There’s no way around it: you’re paying a lot for a laptop that has only half the SO-DIMM sticks and storage space you probably should have.
❌ You strive for performance: It may be the fastest and most impressive RTX 4060 laptop on the market, but it’s priced at just RTX 4070.
❌ You want decent battery life: The power-hungry RTX 4060 here consumes a lot of battery quite quickly.
A few thumbs up and a few thumbs down, so the Pro 5i is really a mixed bag. The deciding factor is the price tag hanging on this gaming laptop. Let’s just go with the 1TB model, since 1) I can’t find a listing for the 500GB model, and 2) I wouldn’t buy the 500GB model anyway.
So if I were to spend the $1,520 (or even $1,274) asked for the 1TB model on a gaming laptop, would I spend it on this one?
No, I wouldn’t. There are far too many great deals on gaming laptops right now that beat this laptop hands down in the gaming stakes. The HP Victus with a Core i7 13700H, 16GB of RAM and an RTX 4070 is now $1,199 . There’s also Lenovo’s own Legion Slim 5 with a Ryzen 7, 16GB of admittedly single-channel RAM and an RTX 4070 for $1,220 .
As well as the RTX 4060 runs in the Pro 5i Gen 9, it can’t match the superior RTX 4070 silicon.
There’s a lot to like about the Lenovo Legion Pro 5i Gen 9 — that might sound odd for a laptop I only gave a 58% rating — but with a few tweaks it could be a lot more impressive. The screen is good, the chassis is good, the internals are good. That said, I glance at the specs in front of me and it’s not a particularly balanced machine. Not at all.
The Pro 5i’s performance could be undermined by its single-channel memory. Its high-wattage GPU destroys battery life. Plus, it’s just not competitive enough at its current price point. In three generations of comparable laptops with RTX 40-series GPUs, we’ve had no shortage of truly excellent gaming laptops to choose from today, and there’s no reason to buy this particular laptop at all.