With Lenovo Legion 5i 15IAX10, a new graphics card is no longer needed
We tested the Lenovo Legion 5i 15IAX10
Looking ahead, the future for those who want to play PC games at a high level looks rather bleak due to an easily predictable (and practically already announced) difficulty in finding RAM and graphics cards at affordable prices. A solution for all those willing to make some compromises (and who don't have crypto reserves) can be to turn to gaming laptops, which at still accessible prices offer desktop-level performance with the advantage of portability. And in recent weeks, we've had the opportunity to test a laptop that perfectly fits this description in our daily lives: Lenovo Legion 5i 15IAX10.
Lenovo Legion 5i 15IAX10, design and build
The slogan on the official website of the Lenovo Legion 5 Series speaks of a "perfect combination of minimalism and pure power," and for once, the advertising isn't trying to deceive you: minimalism and power is exactly the synthesis of our experience with the Lenovo Legion 5i 15IAX10, which we were able to test in recent weeks. Although the main target of this laptop is undoubtedly gamers, as evidenced by the omnipresent gaming references on the official page, once unboxed, the Legion 5i 15IAX10 presents itself with a black chassis cut by essential lines that culminate in rounded corners. The only flourish is the slight protrusion of the central upper edge of the screen to house the camera (which lacks a mechanical cover), in addition to the glossy LEGION logo on the back of the screen itself, made of elegant aluminum, rotatable on its hinges up to 180°.
Dimensions and profiles convey a sense of compactness, confirmed by actual measurements of 1.9-2.2 cm in thickness and 34.5 and 25.5 cm for the long/short sides, respectively. The thickness data is particularly impressive, which, combined with a weight of about two kilograms, makes the Lenovo Legion 5i 15IAX10 easily transportable in a backpack or shoulder bag. The frame is made of black plastic, except for the aluminum top part as mentioned, with a smooth and pleasant-to-the-touch texture on the area below the keyboard, where hands and wrists rest. The keyboard offers good solidity and doesn't feel like it's bowing when pressing keys with more force than necessary. Despite its contained dimensions, a numeric keypad is also included: the result is a somewhat compact keyboard, but one where fingers can move well, making it optimal for gaming.
Lenovo Legion 5i 15IAX10, performance and specifications
If, as we said, the appearance doesn't betray the power of the Lenovo Legion 5i 15IAX10, a quick glance at the system specifications is enough to begin to grasp how much affinity this laptop has with gaming. Let's start with the processor, a 14th generation Intel® Core™ i9-14900HX, supported by an NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 5070 8GB GDDR7 GPU, 32 GB DDR5-5,600MT/s RAM, and a 1 TB SSD M.2 2242 PCIe Gen4 TLC hard drive. The Lenovo AI Engine LA1+ further contributes to computing power, designed to improve performance through the pre-installed Legion Space app.
But how does all this power perform when games are launched? Let's try to dispel any doubts with numerical data. In our tests, we ran Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 at 2560*1600 at over 110 FPS on epic preset, while the Extreme graphics mode of the very recent COD BO gave us about 100 FPS at the same resolution. Results comparable to those of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, with over 110 FPS with Epic graphics settings and light beams activated. For now, to challenge the Lenovo Legion 5i 15IAX10, we have found nothing but Path Tracing: activating it on DooM: The Dark Ages causes performance to plummet with any graphics preset, while deactivating it allows you to venture well above the High preset with which we recorded an average of 130 FPS. Thinking we could replicate these difficult conditions with games that make abundant use of effects, we moved on to MARVEL Spider-Man 2, instead recording a surprising result: with the Super preset, Ray Tracing applied to everything except shadows, and all other details at maximum, Spidey's latest adventure proved playable, with a framerate of about 30 FPS (still at 2560*1600 and 105 Hz) stable enough to allow us to fly around and enjoy the illuminated and reflective panorama of New York. In all the situations just described, the cooling work required by the system must be taken into account, which translates into a certain noise from the fans, certainly perceptible, but not such as to compromise the experience.
The display of Lenovo Legion 5i 15IAX10
If what was written above wasn't already a great selling point, the screen can undoubtedly be added to the pros of this device: 15.1" OLED in 16:10, with an aluminum lid, 165 Hz, 100% DCI-P3, 500 nits, VESA True Black 600 certified, Dolby Vision® support, and X-Rite™ certified calibration. The only criticism that can be made concerns reflections, which are particularly annoying especially in bright conditions. For the rest, it's a practically perfect screen for gaming; blacks are incredibly deep, colors are vibrant, and response times are minimal, ideal conditions to enjoy some of the smoothest gaming experiences ever.
Legion 5i 15IAX10, battery life and portability.
Where it becomes evident that this Legion 5i 15IAX10 is a laptop conceived with gaming in mind is on the power consumption front. In our empirical tests, a standard workday, meaning without particularly demanding audio/video editing applications, can be completed without being plugged in only by reducing all power consumption settings to the minimum. However, if daily activity goes beyond browsing/writing, it's difficult to exceed 6/8 hours. The 80 Whr rechargeable lithium-ion battery is not among the largest for this type of laptop, but it compensates with a super-fast charge that allows the battery to go from 0% to 70% in about 30 minutes. The trade-off for this convenience is a power adapter that weighs almost a kilogram, bringing the total weight you have to carry in your backpack or bag to about 3 kg to face a workday without risks. Mobile use is still possible and, all in all, normal in terms of comfort and effort. As mentioned earlier, outdoors and with a lot of light, you might have some problems with reflections, while on the audio front, we are within the norm for a laptop, which means that outdoors it's better to use headphones unless you are in a very quiet place (but at that point, you might be the one disturbing others, so perhaps headphones are better anyway).
Legion 5i 15IAX10, the final verdict
Let's start with a fact: the configuration we tested currently costs around €2,000, a sum with which it's difficult to buy a good graphics card. Perhaps, given what awaits us, it starts to make more sense at these prices to buy a complete machine, with which, by the way, you can play the latest AAA titles very well. But beyond the flights of fancy, narrowing down the reasoning, Legion 5i 15IAX10 is an excellent gaming laptop with which today you can play virtually all AAA titles at very high performance on an excellent OLED screen. The main limitation is battery life, which is remedied by convenient fast charging. As for us, we found it very good both in daily use for work, connecting it to an external monitor to perform multiple multitasking activities always with maximum fluidity, and obviously in gaming moments, where power and versatility allow you to push the settings pretty much wherever you want.