I picked up a Legion 5i at Officeworks on special before the end of the financial year here in Australia, and now that I've messed around with it for three months, I wanted to write something nice. Yes, nice - it's been a really lovely laptop to use. First of all it looks like this:
And my model has the following specs:
- 13th Gen Intel Core i7-13650HX (2.60GHz) - 14 cores!
- 16GB of RAM
- 500GB SSD
- NVidia GeForce RTX 4050 GPU
It cost me about $1300 AUD - it was marked down from $1800 and then had a further 5% reduction because it had been returned - the purchaser quote "didn't like the operating system", because there are a lot of preinstalled options to Windows 11 these days. At any rate, I picked it up for a song - potentially because it's a previous model - but who cares? It's got a 16" screen that supports 2560x1600 and it's really lovely to behold. The backlit keyboard with it's cascading light show is a nice touch too.
From a use case perspective, I've been using this laptop for gaming, regular work stuff, a bit of Ollama AI work and movies. I've played Baldur's Gate 3 and Fortnite on it most extensively and mostly used the Mistral model when using local AI. The games have been snappy and great, with lots of effects on and no real slowness which has been nice, and the AI has worked fairly quickly. The limitations of what you can do on an RTX4050 with 6GB of RAM are well known. It's nice to have a machine that can actually drive the thing though and I've had some real fun. It's important to note that like most Lenovo laptops, the keyboard is great to use for extended typing - and with extra little bumps on important keys (not just your home keys, but also the home keys for gaming) it's been pleasant to use - far more so than the Dell I use for work, which has an overly soft key press and much poorer tactile response.
The newer versions have i9 processors and a better GPU but appear to have much the same form and appearance. I'm very happy with it - the Windows 11 install doesn't have too much bloat so that's a good thing, and the Lenovo update system works pretty well as usual. Altogether I can recommend this laptop - it you want a nice mid-range gaming machine, or a big solid work laptop that can give you pretty much a desktop replacement with it's big monitor. Although I purchased it as a tax deduction and I've used it for a *lot* of work related activities (particularly stuffing around with locally hosted AI), I've been pleased with it's gaming capabilities too - perfect for the lad and I to get into a bit of FPS action.
