I tested the Lenovo Legion 5i Gen 11 — it almost achieves gaming laptop greatness, until you see the upgrade prices

Lenovo’s Legion laptops traditionally sit comfortably in the chunky, high-performance desktop replacement zone. They’re thick, with heavy power supplies, and abysmal battery life. However, this year’s Legion 5i changes that formula.

The Lenovo Legion 5i Gen 11 offers a more streamlined chassis and better battery life compared to previous models, but still offers the same robust gaming performance, a crisp OLED display, along with Lenovo’s industry-leading keyboard for an all-around powerhouse of a laptop. If not for a sub-par onboard audio experience and expensive upgrades, it would be perfect.

The real question is: are those downsides enough to keep the Legion 5i Gen 11 from becoming one of our best gaming laptops?

Lenovo Legion 5i Gen 11: Cheat sheet

• What is it?: The Legion 5i Gen 11 is a more toned-down version of Lenovo’s Legion Pro, offering a fantastic balance between powerful gaming performance and crisp visuals with more affordable pricing compared to the Pro model.
• Who is it for?: Gamers and STEM students who want a powerful RTX 50-series laptop with Lenovo’s sturdy build quality, while sticking to a more affordable price tag.
• What does it cost?: The starting price for the Legion 5i Gen 11 is $1,899 while our review spec costs a bit more, running the tab up to $2,825. However, Lenovo is running a special on an RTX 5060 configuration that brings the price down to just $1,899.
• What do we like?: The new, sleeker chassis makes the Legion 5i a bit more portable, and the improved battery life is fantastic for students or working professionals. The Legion 5i also sports one of Lenovo’s fantastic keyboards, a crisp OLED display, and a powerful Nvidia RTX 50-series GPU.
• What don’t we like?: Upgrading your RAM and storage, or switching to the RTX 5070 model come at steep premiums which make the affordable Legion 5i Gen 11 a much less attractive bargain.

Lenovo Legion 5i Gen 11: Specs

Lenovo Legion 5i Gen 11: The ups

The Legion 5i is Lenovo’s mid-tier gaming laptop, and it’s got plenty to recommend it as your next gaming laptop. Between the new sleek chassis, crisp OLED display, fantastic keyboard, useful battery life, and powerful NVIDIA RTX 50-series graphics the Legion 5i has some serious selling points.

Sleek redesign

Lenovo has been thinning out the Legion lineup a bit over the years, and the 11th Gen Legion ditches the clunky hub on the back for a more beveled edge across the entire laptop. While it doesn’t shave a ton off the Z-height of the laptop, the loss of the hub and the bevelling make the Legion 5i feel much slimmer despite being nearly equal in thickness.

The design overhaul also makes the Legion 5i a bit easier to carry, even with a slightly heavier weight than the 10th Gen Legion 5i which was 0.8 inches thick and weighed 4.1 pounds. The 11th Gen is 0.79 inches thick and weighs 4.25 pounds.

Overall, the new design still keeps some recognizable Legion touches from the smudge-magnet Eclipse Black colorway to the Legion logo on the top cover panel, and Lenovo’s camera and microphone hub at the top edge.

While this doesn’t drastically change the dimensions of the Legion, it does make it feel more like a modern gaming laptop than previous iterations (particularly the 9th Gen and earlier) which were starting to feel dated.

Industry-leading keyboard

Lenovo makes good keyboards. That’s just kind of a universal fact at this point. And the Legion 5i Gen 11 is no exception to that rule.

The typing experience is the perfect combination of crisp with deep keytravel to avoid bottoming out your fingers while frantically typing instructions to your party in the in-game text window. It’s both satisfying and comfortable, which is a hard sweet-spot to hit for a laptop keyboard.

The off-set arrow keys also make navigating games a little easier and the included num-pad is great for binding macros and additional skills for input heavy RPGs and MMOs.

The Legion’s keyboard features 1.6mm key travel with a 0.3mm dish on each key, with swappable keycaps and Lenovo’s Spectrum RGB software for controlling the 1-zone or 24-zone RGB depending on your keyboard upgrades.

And even with just 1-zone RGB, you still get the same 1.6mm key travel and 0.3mm dish, which means if you don’t go for the 24-zone RGB upgrade, you still get the same great typing experience.

Crisp display

OLED displays offer some serious gaming benefits, and they’re even better when you’re using your gaming laptop to binge a TV series over a weekend. Getting an OLED display on a mid-range gaming laptop isn’t always a guarantee, so it's incredible to see that as a standard panel option on the Legion 5i.

From crisper blacks and more vibrant colors, the Legion 5i’s display looks absolutely stunning when watching nature documentaries like The Loneliest Whale or when playing visually intense games like Avowed. Toggle on HDR, and you’ve got a gaming laptop that can actually display the final season of Game of Thrones.

While my eyes absolutely enjoyed my time with the Legion 5i, that experience is also backed up by our lab testing. The Legion 5i Gen 11 covered 137.5% of the DCI-P3 color gamut with an average brightness of 490 nits and a peak HDR brightness of 1,049 nits.

This is pretty great for an OLED, and absolutely fantastic when compared to other mid-range gaming laptops like the MSI Stealth 16 AI+ or HyperX Omen 16 Valorant Edition which both lack HDR support and manage just 85% and 81% coverage of the DCI-P3 spectrum respectively.

Solid RTX 5070 gaming chops

While the Legion 5i isn’t Lenovo’s flagship gaming laptop, it should still have solid gaming performance. Particularly our review model which features the powerful Intel Core Ultra 7 251HX and Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 combination.

My current go-to games aren’t exactly strong benchmarks so I expected the Legion 5i to have no problems whatsoever running Baldur’s Gate III and Final Fantasy XIV on high graphics presets at the Legion’s max 1600p resolution. In Baldur’s Gate III, I had the Legion running on High graphics presets at 1600p and was easily getting over 90fps.

In Final Fantasy XIV, I had the Legion running High (Laptop) graphics presets at 1600p and could get frame-rate peaks of over 100fps though the game tended to settle around 90fps in most zones. Any frame drops I noticed were more due to pop-in rate and high player traffic than anything hardware wise with the Legion.

To make the Legion 5i work a bit harder, I also booted up Avowed which has a tendency to run at low frame-rates because of its intense graphics and poor optimization. The Legion did stumble here a bit, but then I’ve also seen RTX 5090 laptops struggle with Avowed.

However, while keeping my resolution set to 1600p (because Avowed sometimes gets awkward on lower resolutions) , opting for Medium graphics settings got me a perfectly playable game which held at about 59 to 61 FPS, and I didn’t lose too much graphic detail either.

In our lab tests, the Legion also performed well. Our review unit for the Legion 5i Gen 11 features the upgraded Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 (12GB) model, which outperformed the HyperX Omen 16 Valorant Edition which featured the 8GB version of the RTX 5070. The Legion also held the lead over the MSI Stealth 16 AI+ which featured the RTX 5060.

This meant the Legion 5i averaged 9 fps more than the HyperX and 21 FPS more than the Stealth on Black Myth Wukong at 1080p on Medium settings. The Legion’s lead died down a bit on Cinematic settings and 1600p resolution. The Legion also held a 9 FPS lead on the HyperX on Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p and a 6 FPS lead at 1600p. The Stealth lagged behind the Legion by 12 FPS at 1080p and 8 FPS at 1600p on Cyberpunk.

While the Legion can still struggle to surpass 60fps on intense titles at max resolution, it can easily clear the 60 FPS mark on High or Ultra settings at 1080p. Which is pretty impressive for an RTX 5070 laptop. It does help that Lenovo opted for the 12GB VRAM model which gives the Legion’s RTX 5070 just enough extra horsepower to clear the competition.

Respectable battery life

Legion laptops rarely win awards for having long battery life, and usually that’s expected. Legion laptops tend to sit in the desktop replacement sector, where you don’t really expect much in terms of unplugged performance for laptops that feature power-hungry CPUs and GPUs.

However, the Legion 5i Gen 11 does pack a pretty respectable punch when it comes to web surfing and gaming battery life. The Legion 5i lasted 7 hours and 3 minutes on our web surfing battery test and it survived an impressive 1 hour 27 minutes on the PCMark 10 Gaming battery life benchmark.

For context, the HyperX Omen 16 lasted just 2:41 on our web surfing battery test, while the MSI Stealth was one of our longer-lasting gaming laptops with a web surfing battery life of 10:49. For a Legion laptop to get over 7 hours of web surfing battery life? That’s a pretty damn impressive turnaround. The Legion 5i Gen 9 barely made it three and a half hours.

As for the PCMark 10 Gaming battery benchmark, the HyperX Omen 16 lasted 1:30 and the Stealth lasted 1:55. It’s pretty rare to see a gaming laptop hit 2 hours on the PCMark 10 test since any discrete GPU is going to put a major drain on the laptop’s internal battery. However, getting 1:27 is pretty solid. It’s not a great amount of game-time but it is enough that you don’t need to immediately worry if your cat unplugs your laptop mid-raid.

Lenovo Legion 5i Gen 11: The downs

The Legion’s downsides aren’t particularly plentiful, and there are ways to avoid these pitfalls. You can avoid the pricey upgrades by sticking with the pre-configured $1,899 model and you can use a quality headset or set of speakers to get better audio, they are problematic enough to be considered downsides.

RAMaggeddon Strikes Again

Gaming hardware has always been expensive, but budget gaming hardware is now almost non-existent.

Lenovo is currently offering a pre-configured version of the Legion 5i Gen 11 at $1,899. That model features the same Intel Core Ultra 7 251HX CPU, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, and 15-inch OLED display as our review configuration. However, it has the Nvidia RTX 5060 onboard instead. This is actually cheaper than the $2,355 starting configuration with just 512GB of SSD storage.

And really, that $1,899 price tag wouldn’t be considered budget just a year ago, but the RAM shortage has made any gaming laptop under $2,000 feel like a steal.

Unfortunately, the base configuration is more expensive, so if Lenovo ever stops running that sale, the Legion 5i goes from somewhat affordable to expensive. Especially if you need to upgrade the RAM, SSD storage, CPU, or GPU as those will come at steep premiums.

Upgrading to the Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX processor costs an additional $110 while upgrading to the Nvidia RTX 5070 graphics card adds $300 to the total price. Upgrading your storage to 1TB will set you back $190, upgrading to 2TB will set you back an additional $430 on top of that, while increasing your memory from 16GB to 32GB will come with a $370 price-tag.

Which is how you get our RTX 5070 configuration at $2,825. And that’s the kind of prices we saw on RTX 5090 laptops just a year ago. So if you want the Legion 5i Gen 11, you better grab the pre-configured model while Lenovo still has that special running. Because otherwise its hard to justify the price.

Don’t rely on the built-in audio

Considering the Legion 5i’s status as Lenovo’s mid-range Intel gaming laptop, a certain level of quality is expected on all fronts. And audio is no exception.

While laptop audio setups often have to make sacrifices due to the form factor, some laptops offer more robust built-in sound systems than others. And while the Legion 5i’s audio is perfectly usable, it’s hardly enjoyable.

Lenovo packed a quad (2x2W) Harman speaker system with Nahimic Audio drivers into the Legion 5i chassis. Unfortunately, those speakers are bottom-firing which leads to some issues based on your gaming surface.

Downward-facing laptop speakers rely on audio engineering to bounce the audio to the user, so they can be less consistent in audio quality than top or side-firing audio systems.

While the Legion 5i’s speakers are perfectly fine at lower volume levels (40% and below), the bottom-firing speakers get muddied, and everything sounds overly-sharp with no bass when played at higher volumes.

So it’s not exactly ideal for a movie or TV show binge. And while you might be able to play a casual game with the Legion’s speaker system, I would opt for a quality studio headset for anything more intense than Runescape.

Lenovo Legion 5i Gen 11: Verdict

Traditionally, a Lenovo Legion laptop is a chunky, high-performance desktop replacement laptop that you’d rarely dream of carrying to school or to work.

Between the previous generation and this current gen, that’s starting to change. The Legion 5i offers a sleeker, more modern chassis that’s much easier to carry, and it’s got battery life that’s actually useful for getting some work done.

Combined with one of Lenovo’s industry leading keyboards, a crisp OLED display, and the same robust gaming performance you’d expect from a Legion laptop and the Legion 5i is a potent powerhouse.

It could be the perfect laptop, if only its onboard audio system was a bit more robust and its base price and upgrades weren’t so expensive.

If you are going to nab the Legion 5i Gen 11, I would absolutely recommend sticking with the discounted $1,899 preconfigured model as it's actually affordable and comes with nearly all the same features as our review model.

The gaming performance will be a bit weaker, but it’s not worth the nearly $1,000 increase in price just to upgrade to the RTX 5070 model.