Lenovo Legion 5i Pro Gen 7 Review

Lenovo's Legion gaming laptop line includes a variety of AMD- and Intel-based rigs with 15.6-, 16-, and 17.3-inch screens. You might find it hard to resist the latest, greatest, and most specced-out models at the top of the range, but the 16-inch Legion 5i Pro Gen 7 (starts at $1,779.99) makes a compelling case for moderation. This machine combines Intel's 12th Generation Core i7 processor with Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3070 Ti for lively performance. It's not quite as quick as another Intel 12th Gen gamer, the MSI Vector GP66, but costs less and has a nicer display and keyboard. The Legion 5i Pro is an attractive pick in the upper middle of the gaming space.

For Gamers With Two Grand in Their Wallets 

Positioned below the also recently refreshed Legion 7 series, the Legion 5i Pro Gen 7 sports a 16-inch IPS non-touch screen with 16:10 aspect ratio, 2,560-by-1,600-pixel resolution, and 165Hz refresh rate with Nvidia G-Sync support. The CPU is the Core i7-12700H (six performance cores, eight efficient cores, 20 threads) and standard memory is 16GB of DDR5. 

Our Experts Have Tested 129 Products in the Laptops Category in the Past Year

Since 1982, PCMag has tested and rated thousands of products to help you make better buying decisions. (See how we test.)

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Walmart offers a $1,779.99 config with GeForce RTX 3050 Ti graphics and a 1TB solid-state drive, while a $1,999.99 model on Lenovo.com has an RTX 3070 Ti GPU and two 1TB drives. Our test unit (model 82RF000TUS) matched the latter except for having just a single 512GB SSD; its price and availability was unclear at presstime. 

Clad in monochromatic Storm Gray with an aluminum lid and bottom and plastic keyboard deck, the 5i Pro has stylishly slim bezels around the display and almost no flex if you grasp the screen corners or mash the keyboard. A large Legion logo decorates the lid, which doesn't open or let you tilt the screen back very far. At 1.05 by 14.2 by 10.4 inches (HWD), the Lenovo is about the same size as the HP Victus 16 and the 15.6-inch Vector GP66, though slightly heavier (5.49 pounds versus 5.44 for the HP and 5.25 for the MSI). 

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Like many gaming laptops, the Legion has neither a fingerprint reader nor face recognition webcam, so you're stuck typing passwords instead of using Windows Hello. The keyboard includes a numeric keypad; it splits the difference between one-color backlighting and per-key RGB illumination with four backlight zones, tweakable via a Spectrum module in the Lenovo Vantage utility software. 

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Connectivity is a strong suit. The left flank has two USB 3.2 Type-C ports, one with Thunderbolt 4 capability. On the right are a USB 3.2 Type-A port, an audio jack, and a webcam on/off switch. Two more USB-A ports and another USB-C port join HDMI and Ethernet ports and the power connector at the rear (with convenient labeling along the laptop's back edge). Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth handle wireless links.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Comfortable Keyboard, Strange Function Keys 

The keyboard has a shallow but snappy and comfortable typing feel. Its colorful backlighting is bright and its layout is first-class, but there's an annoying side effect to the common shortcut of pressing Fn+Esc to activate Fn Lock: While the setting lets you press F2 and F3 to adjust volume or F5 and F6 to adjust brightness with no need to hold down the Fn key, the Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys above the keypad stop working, serving as media play/pause and next/previous track keys instead. The buttonless touchpad glides smoothly but has a stiff click. 

The webcam has the usual skimpy 720p resolution but captures above-average images in terms of color and clarity, with accurate hues and reasonable brightness even in unexceptional ambient light. Our review unit's sound cut out several times, with Windows reporting no audio device installed until I ran the troubleshooter to restart it, but the problem didn't recur after a BIOS update. 

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Bottom-mounted speakers produce moderately loud, slightly hollow sound that's greatly enhanced by the supplied Nahimic software's music, movie, gaming, communication, and smart modes and equalizer. Bass is minimal, but you can make out overlapping tracks. Lenovo Vantage offers CPU and GPU monitoring, system updates, macro key recording, Wi-Fi security, and a choice of performance/cooling modes depending on your tolerance for fan noise. It also pitches $29.99 annual Smart Performance and $39.99 annual Smart Privacy subscriptions, while the McAfee security trial provides pop-ups galore. 

The 16:10 aspect ratio screen provides high brightness and contrast as well as wide viewing angles. Its 165Hz refresh rate and Nvidia G-Sync support will please gamers, and its colors are rich and saturated enough for photo or video editing. Fine details and the edges of letters are sharp, and white backgrounds are clean instead of dingy. X-Rite Color Assistant software lets you switch among default, sRGB, and Rec. 709 video profiles, but neither the software nor the display itself is up to the level of mobile workstation panels that support Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 modes.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Performance Testing: Elite Gamers Go Head to Head 

For our benchmark charts, we pitted the Legion 5i Pro Gen 7 against four other gaming laptops. All are above $2,000 except for the more affordable HP Victus 16. The MSI Vector GP66 and the 17.3-inch Aorus 17 XE also have 12th Gen Intel processors (the Aorus the same CPU and GPU as the Legion). The last slot went to the 5i Pro's 16-inch stablemate, the AMD-powered Lenovo Legion 7 Gen 6. You can see their basic specs in the table below.

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, spreadsheeting, 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 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 Pro obliterated the PCMark 10 productivity test—though frankly all these systems are sheer overkill for the likes of Word and Excel—and its Core i7 slugged it out with the MSI's Core i9 in our CPU benchmarks. Its performance and splendid screen make it a great pick for Photoshop, though it lacks an SD or microSD card slot for transferring digital images. 

Graphics and Gaming Tests 

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark. The Night Raid simulation is more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics, while Time Spy is 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 5i Pro generally finished second to the Vector GP66—perhaps because it runs its GeForce RTX 3070 Ti at 125 watts to the MSI's 150—but in all our tests except Rainbow Six Siege it was a very close second, and also upstaged the supposedly faster RTX 3080 in the Legion 7 Gen 6. If it's not quite a match for top-end gaming rigs with higher-refresh-rate 1080p displays, it's admirably equipped for brisk gameplay at both 1080p and its native 2,560-by-1,600-pixel resolution. 

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).

Its color fidelity was merely good, not spectacular, but the Legion 5i Pro Gen 7 delivered the highest screen brightness and the best battery life in the group, roughly tripling the MSI's unplugged runtime. Overall, it's hard to think any gamer will be dissatisfied with either its objective benchmark results or subjective impressions in everyday use.

An Admirable All-Rounder 

The Lenovo Legion 5i Pro Gen 7 isn't the very fastest gaming laptop you can buy, but it's extremely fast and fairly priced. Moreover, it's a stylish and well-built pick for productivity and creative work when not playing games, with an appealing screen and keyboard and all the connectivity you could want.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

A configuration with 1TB or 2TB of storage rather than our test unit's 512GB might have scored an Editors' Choice award. Even without one, this Legion shows why 16-inch gaming rigs are putting the hurt on traditional 15.6-inch models.