It’s too easy to get swept up in the chase for faster and faster components. If you’re looking for an affordable gaming laptop, the Lenovo Legion 5i packs a punch with an Intel Core i5 CPU and NVIDIA GTX 1650 GPU. This budget gaming laptop excels in biggest competitive e-sports titles like Valorant and League of Legends. Let’s unbox and test it out.

Unboxing

Lifting the Lenovo Legion 5i from the exterior packaging is a weirdly pleasant experience, compared to most bog-standard boxes. Pull and push on the foam padding and the laptop rises up to greet you, wrapped in a protective sleeve.

Under the reassuring amount of foam are the accessories, including the detachable power cable and power brick. It’s surprisingly low profile considering this unit is rated up to 170W – a considerable amount more than power-sipping laptops – to properly fuel the gaming-grade hardware inside.

Build quality

The Legion 5i is a cheaper alternative to the monstrously specced-out Legion 7, but they each share a very familiar, high-quality chassis with soft-touch plastics to help obscure pesky fingerprints. This includes Lenovo’s reputable keyboards. To narrowly squeeze into a 15” laptop form factor, it’s shrunk marginally. But you’d hardly notice as it, thankfully, retains a full-sized layout. The arrow keys aren’t butchered and chopped up – an unfortunate compromise on many other laptops. There is also a row dedicated to media functions and a number pad. With anti-ghosting switches and 1.5mm of travel, it feels responsive and comfortable for both typing and lengthy gaming sessions.

Backlighting is present, but isn’t RGB customizable, with only one dazzlingly bright white pre-set. A sizable, button-less touchpad makes navigating around the operating system without your trusty gaming mouse less of a chore. Minimal bezels make for an enjoyable viewing experience, with a little protrusion to house the webcam and integrated privacy shutter.

Ports

Let’s quickly spin around the outside of the Lenovo Legion 5i to check out the available ports. Being a gaming laptop, most of them are conveniently situated on the rear so cable clutter doesn’t intrude on your gaming mouse space.

On the left-hand side there’s a standard 3.5mm combo-jack and a USB 3.0 port with charging capability for topping up your phone’s battery. Buckle in – there’s a lot to cover on the rear. Starting off with the obligatory Kensington lock, then a power-in, full-sized HDMI, a pair of USB Type A, a USB Type C and finally an ethernet. On the right-hand side’s a lone USB 3.0 and LED indicators for current power and charging status.

You’ll also notice an encouraging amount of ventilation, from a well-perforated bottom panel to numerous exhausts. Thermal throttling is the biggest issue concerning gaming laptops, and Lenovo’s taking appropriate measures to counteract toasty gaming components.

Specs

Windows 10 comes pre-installed on the 256GB solid-state drive for rapid start-up and game launch times and a single 8GB stick of RAM is easily upgradable for dual-channel performance if you’re a heavy multi-tasker.

To accurately assess the IPS display’s image quality, we’ve loaded up a richly detailed 4K video. While the display is only 1080p, it’ll up the streaming bitrate and downsample for improved clarity. You aren’t going to match the fidelity of a full-fat 4K panel with a fancy quantum dot make-up, but it holds up surprisingly well. From the bright-red sandstone to the surrounding greenery, it’s vivid and has decent dynamic range for undoubtably a great budget gaming laptop in 2021.

The display is only one part of the equation – what about the speakers? While a dedicated gaming headset comes strongly recommended for observing subtle details like an enemy’s footsteps, you need the speakers to be somewhat decent for kicking back and watching YouTube or Netflix. Check out the video above for an audio test – cranking the volume to 100% they’re not bad at all with minimal distortion.

Intel Core i5 10300H processor

We’ve previously covered a whole host of Lenovo gaming laptops, here on the Gaming Hub and over at the Ebuyer YouTube channel. Whether it’s the top-of-the-line Legion 7 or AMD-powered Legion 5, we’re left continually impressed.

The ‘i’ suffix of this particular model indicates that it’s powered by an Intel processor – the Core i5 10300H. A 4-core, 8-thread chip boosting up to 4.5GHz, by utilizing Intel’s Thermal Velocity Boost technology to smartly tune up performance under demanding scenarios.

Casually flicking through web pages, the processor barely breaks a sweat and maintains a low, efficient clock speed to keep temperatures and power consumption to the lowest possible values. When suddenly hit with an intensive task, like gaming, the processor dynamically adjusts its speeds to address the impending workload.

This automatic, hands-off approach frees you from incessantly micro-managing settings and thermals, letting you focus on clutching wins.

NVIDIA GTX 1650 graphics card

Of course, a gaming laptop’s nothing without a powerful, dedicated graphics card. The Lenovo Legion 5i comes well equipped with the NVIDIA GTX 1650 for plenty of punch in competitive e-sports titles like Counter Strike: Global Offensive and Valorant. Lined up against the top-tier Legion models with real-time raytracing and AI-enhanced features, a GTX 1650 may feel underwhelming, but it makes for a great value-orientated option.

As you’ll see in our real-world gaming scenarios, the Lenovo Legion 5i can handle triple-A titles with some targeted, optimised adjustments. In less taxing games, expect to saturate the fluid 144Hz, 1080p IPS display.

Plus, an extra benefit of these efficient components is reduced thermals and consequentially reduced noise. Paired with Lenovo’s advanced cooling solution, the fans won’t whir like they’re about to blast off into the stratosphere any time you open an application.

Gaming performance – Dirt 5

On this occasion, we’ve ditched Ebuyer’s favourite Forza Horizon 4 in favour of Dirt 5. Only releasing at the tail end of last year, Dirt 5 lets us gauge the laptop’s performance in a more up-to-date racing simulation with triple-A quality graphics. It too has a built-in, repeatable benchmark so you can compare our results against your current system! Running at native resolution with medium settings across the board, the Lenovo Legion 5i is achieving 54 frames-per-second on average, with 1% lows at only 46 frames-per-second. This is a more accurate metric than a redundant minimum frames-per-second number as it accounts for any weird anomalies, like a split-second pause in loading assets, which don’t impact the playability of the game.

Take advantage of dynamic resolution scaling and you should be able to hold a rock-solid 60 frames-per-second, the gold standard for PC gamers. Given the smaller screen size compared to a massive TV, 1080p appears razor-sharp on this gaming laptop. Slight resolution scaling is less noticeable, so this is a sure-fire method to boost performance.

Gaming performance – Valorant

Now, here’s a game the Legion 5i excels at – Valorant. An immensely popular free-to-play first-person shooter which represents a broader category of games a world-wide audience enjoy on the daily. If the Legion 5i runs Valorant, other big-name titles with similar performance profiles should run too, like League of Legends and Counter Strike: Global Offensive. With a competitive-optimised mix of medium-high settings at native resolution in the game’s practice range, we’d expect at least 100 frames-per-second, but this gaming laptop effortlessly doubles that figure.

While guest presenter James was focused intently on trying to beat his high score, he caught a quick glimpse of the frame rate counter as it exceeded a blindingly fast 250 frames-per-second average with no distracting stutters. Frame rates reign supreme in competitive shooters and by quadrupling our Dirt 5 result, it rises to the occasion. Fully realising the 144Hz refresh rate of the display, you’ll spot enemies peeking corners that little bit earlier, giving you a distinct edge over the competition. Valorant is absolutely a secure bet for high refresh rate gaming on the Lenovo Legion 5i gaming laptop.

All-around performer

With strong performance at a budget-orientated price tag, it works especially well in competitive e-sports titles using the 144Hz high refresh rate display – a massive bonus. The carefully thought-out cooling, rigid chassis and satisfying typing experience make owning the Lenovo Legion 5i a solid all-around performer in 2021 and for the years ahead. Check it out, over at Ebuyer.