Lenovo Legion Pro 5i 16 Gen 9 review

Lenovo has sat in the top spot of our best gaming laptop guide for well over a year now—the Legion Pro 7i Gen 8 delivering a superb mix of performance, size and price. I had expected similar results from the Legion Pro 5i Gen 9. Instead, I'm feeling miffed by the new Gen 9 model. With impressive gaming performance, you'd think I'd be all over this thing and yet I can't get over its lacklustre memory configuration and low storage capacity.

The Pro 5i Gen 9 comes equipped with one of the latest Intel Core processors, the Core i7 14650HX. It's a mobile version of Raptor Lake, the same architecture currently leading the way on desktop for Intel. A 24-thread processor, divided 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 on the more affordable end of the market.

The GPU is very much a known quantity: the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 mobile, with 8GB of GDDR6 and rated to a total graphics power (TGP) of 140 W. That last bit is important, as this determines how much headroom the GPU has available to it and ultimately has a pretty significant impact on the overall gaming performance of the machine. The good news here is that 140 W is as good as it gets for the RTX 4060 mobile—a 115 W TGP with an extra 25 W boost—and it's far and away the fastest RTX 4060 we've tested to date as a result.

CPU: Intel Core i7 14650HX
GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 mobile (140 W)
RAM: 16 GB DDR5-5600 (1 x 16 GB)
SSD: 512 GB PCIe 4.0 NVMe (2x NVMe slots total)
Screen: 16-inch IPS w/G-Sync
Resolution: 2560 x 1600
Refresh rate: 165 Hz
Dimensions: 363.4 x 261.75 x 21.99-26.95 mm
Weight: 2.5 kg
Price: $1,520 (1 TB model)

Before we get to that shortly, we first need to talk about a few things the Pro 5i Gen 9 doesn't do well.

It comes equipped with only a single stick of DDR5 memory, rated at 5,600 MT/s. While retaining 16 GB capacity—suitable for a laptop at this price point—a single stick limits the overall