Lenovo Legion 5i Gen 7 Review

Lenovo offers almost as many different Legion gaming laptops as it does ThinkPad business models. The Legion 5i Gen 7 seen here (starts at $1,249.99; $1,549.99 as tested in model 15IAH7H) is positioned below the Legion 7 and Legion 5 Pro; it's a midrange rig with a 12th Generation Intel Core i7 processor, a 6GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 GPU, and 15.6-inch display that offers 1440p instead of vanilla 1080p resolution. It won't bring you high-end bragging rights, but it's a fast and attractive system that delivers a surprisingly loud bang for not too many bucks.

Known by Many Names 

On Lenovo.com this laptop is called the Legion 5i Gen 7 (the “i” indicating its Intel rather than AMD CPU) and starts at $1,249.99 with a Core i5-12500H processor and 1,920-by-1,080-pixel display. Our review unit, with a more exact product number of 82RB006JUS, is a $1,549.99 Costco configuration with a Core i7-12700H chip (six Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 20 threads) and a 2,560-by-1,440-pixel IPS screen with a 165Hz refresh rate. Both Costco and Newegg offered it at various discounts during our testing, the former once cutting it to a bargain $1,099.99 (though incorrectly listing its screen resolution as 2,160 by 1,350). 

Combining a black aluminum lid and a black plastic bottom, the Lenovo measures 0.95 by 14.1 by 10.3 inches and weighs a not overly portable 5.29 pounds. That's more or less the same size as the 15.6-inch Acer Predator Helios 300, though the latter is a tad lighter at 4.8 pounds. The slightly-larger-screened Dell G16 is 1.06 by 14.1 by 10.7 inches and 5.6 pounds.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

While the Dell makes do with Wi-Fi 6 and a single keyboard backlight color, the Legion 5 offers Wi-Fi 6E and customizable four-zone lighting, though not the per-key RGB rainbow of high-end gaming notebooks. Build quality is good, though there's some flex if you grasp the screen corners or mash the keyboard. 

Medium-thin bezels surround the non-touch screen; the webcam centered at top doesn't have a sliding privacy shutter but can be disabled with a toggle switch on the right side. Bundled third-party software is limited to a McAfee LiveSafe trial. In addition, Lenovo Smart Noise Cancellation focuses on a single or multiple speakers around a conference table. And Lenovo Vantage combines system updates, Wi-Fi security, keyboard-lighting controls, a choice of performance modes (we used the noisy-cooling-fans max setting for benchmarks), and pitches for $29.99 performance-tuning and $49.99 security annual subscriptions.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

On the laptop's left side are two USB-C ports, one version 3.2 Gen 2 and one with Thunderbolt 4 support. The right side holds an audio jack, the webcam slider, and a USB 3.2 Type-A port. As with other Legions, a protruding rear block holds additional ports—Ethernet, HDMI, three more USB 3.2 (two Type-A, one Type-C), and the power connector.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Subpar Sound, Decent Display 

Like too many gaming notebooks, the Legion 5 has neither a fingerprint reader nor face-recognition webcam, so you can't skip typing passwords with Windows Hello. The webcam is a chintzy 720p component that captures colorful but blurry and blotchy images with considerable static; you'll want a better USB camera to trash-talk your opponents online. 

Bottom-flank speakers produce fairly loud but harsh and hollow audio. There's no bass to speak of, though you can make out overlapping tracks. Nahimic software offers faux surround sound with music, movie, gaming, and voice presets plus an equalizer; some of the settings yielded raucous, tinny sound.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

The 15.6-inch screen isn't up to creative workstation standards but is just fine for gaming, with broad viewing angles, good contrast, and plenty of brightness as long as you stick to the top two or three settings. Colors are rich and well saturated, and fine details are sharp, with no pixelation around the edges of letters. Blacks are inky-dark, and white backgrounds are clean instead of dingy, helped by the ability to tilt the display far back. 

The keyboard is a little less satisfactory, with a slightly mushy typing feel, though it's not hard to maintain a brisk pace. There's a numeric keypad (with keys slightly smaller than the main group) including Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys above it so you needn't pair the Fn key with the cursor arrows, and the latter are full-size and arranged in the proper inverted T instead of an awkward row. The buttonless touchpad is ample in size and glides smoothly, with a slightly stiff click.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Testing the Legion 5i Gen 7: Startling Speed for Work and Play 

For our benchmark charts, we pitted the Legion 5 15IAH7H against four other gaming notebooks including the abovementioned Acer Predator Helios 300 and Dell G16 (7620). The Acer Nitro 5 is comparably priced and equipped with a larger 17.3-inch screen. The last slot goes to the MSI Raider GE67 HX, a 15.6-inch laptop that costs roughly $1,000 more thanks to a snazzy OLED display and step-up GeForce RTX 3070 Ti graphics.

Productivity Tests 

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet work, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage. 

Three further benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). 

Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The Legion 5i Gen 7 breezed through our benchmarks, nearly doubling the 4,000 points in PCMark 10 that indicate excellent everyday productivity for Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, and almost keeping up with the MSI's higher-rated Core i7-12800HX in our CPU tests. It offers near-workstation performance for video or image editing or other digital content creation. 

Graphics and Gaming Tests 

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark benchmarking suite: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). 

We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better. 

Our next three tests involve real games—specifically, the built-in 1080p benchmarks from an AAA title (Assassin's Creed Valhalla), a fast-paced esports shooter (Rainbow Six Siege), and a sports racing sim (F1 2021). We run each benchmark twice, using different image quality presets for Valhalla and Rainbow and trying F1 with and without Nvidia's DLSS anti-aliasing technology.

The Lenovo's frame rates in our real-world game tests were eye-opening—outpacing the MSI Raider despite a GPU two rungs lower on Nvidia's product ladder. It made the most of its 165Hz screen refresh rate, easily surpassing the 60fps that gamers consider today's baseline. That even held true when I reran the three game benchmarks at the Legion's native 2,560-by-1,440 resolution at the higher of the two quality settings (85fps in F1 2021, 76fps in Valhalla, 182fps in Siege). It isn't the fastest gaming laptop we've tested, but it's remarkably potent for its price. 

Battery and Display Tests 

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

The Legion's battery life is nothing to write home about (duh, it's a gaming laptop), and its IPS screen's color coverage is no match for that of the Raider's OLED panel. But it's more than bright and colorful enough to satisfy an avid gamer or busy productivity user, if perhaps not a professional photo editor. No complaints here.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Verdict: Tempting…Even Without a Discount 

If we could be sure of Costco's extending its price cut for the Legion 5 15IAH7H from $1,549.99 to $1,099.99, this would be a five-star review with “Buy It” in blinking red letters. Even at its everyday price, however, this Lenovo is a genuine find, a not-svelte but not-too-hefty gaming rig with sharper-than-usual screen resolution and performance that tops most GeForce RTX 3060 laptops. It's a midrange system that can run with some high-end models.