Lenovo Legion 5i Gen 10 (15IAX10) review: Great gaming laptop that struggles to justify its price

• By Kunal Khullar
Published On: 14 August 2026 | 22:09 IST

Lenovo’s latest Legion 5i Gen 10 is aimed at gamers who want high-end performance without moving into the more extreme territory occupied by the brand’s flagship Legion Pro models. At its core, the Lenovo Legion 5 sticks to the familiar gaming-laptop formula by including a powerful processor and GPU, a fast high-refresh-rate display, and enough hardware to handle demanding games and productivity workloads.

The laptop is available in several configurations, including Intel’s Arrow Lake-HX processors alongside older 13th- and 14th-gen Core chips, with Nvidia’s latest RTX 50-series GPUs. The model we have for review is the top-end configuration, featuring an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor, GeForce RTX 5070 graphics, 32GB RAM, and a 1TB SSD. The question is, how well Lenovo has balanced performance, thermals, battery life, and everyday usability in this generation. After spending time with the laptop and putting it through a series of benchmarks and real-world tests, here’s how the Legion 5 performs.

Familiar Legion design

The Legion 5i doesn’t stray too far from the design language Lenovo has established with its recent Legion notebooks. It has a relatively understated appearance, with an Eclipse Black finish, clean lines and minimal branding. Apart from the Legion branding on the lid and the RGB keyboard, there isn’t much here that immediately gives away its gaming credentials. I personally like this approach, as the laptop doesn’t look out of place when used for work or other everyday tasks.

The chassis measures 344.9 x 255.35mm, while the OLED version is between 19.95mm and 21.54mm thick. It weighs around 1.9kg, which is fairly reasonable for a 15-inch gaming laptop with hardware of this class. The lid is made from aluminium, while the bottom section uses ABS plastic. The combination gives the laptop a solid feel without making it unnecessarily heavy, although the plastic base does remind you that this isn’t one of Lenovo’s more premium all-metal Legion models.

In terms of ventilation, the bottom panel has a substantial section with a pattern that gives the impression of a large intake. However, the actual ventilation is only over the cooling fans and a small area at the bottom. Hot air is exhausted at the back via vents placed under the display.

One of the laptop’s strengths is its selection of ports. You get a USB-C port with 10Gbps speeds, DisplayPort 2.1 and up to 100W Power Delivery, along with another USB-C port offering Thunderbolt 4 and 40Gbps connectivity. There are also three USB-A ports, an HDMI 2.1 port, Gigabit Ethernet, and a 3.5mm headphone/microphone combo jack. There’s even a dedicated physical toggle switch for the webcam.

Lenovo has sensibly distributed the ports across the left, right and rear, with the HDMI and power connector placed at the back. Wireless connectivity is handled by Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 on our configuration.

Overall, the Legion 5i doesn’t try to reinvent the gaming-laptop design. Instead, it sticks with a familiar and fairly practical Legion formula, combining a relatively restrained exterior with a sturdy chassis and a comprehensive selection of connectivity options.

A solid OLED display

The display is easily one of the highlights of the Legion 5, which is a 15.1-inch OLED panel with a resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels and a 16:10 aspect ratio. It runs at 165Hz and has a claimed response time of under 1ms, making it well suited to both gaming and everyday use. The higher 1600p resolution also provides a noticeably sharper image than a conventional 1080p or 1200p gaming laptop display, while the 16:10 aspect ratio gives you a little more vertical screen space for productivity. Lenovo also claims 500 nits of typical brightness, and in my usage, the display appears to get very close to that level.

Being an OLED panel, you get the usual advantages of the technology, including deep blacks, excellent contrast and vibrant colours. Lenovo rates the panel for 100% DCI-P3 colour coverage, along with a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio. It is also factory colour-calibrated, which is useful if you plan to use the laptop for tasks beyond gaming. The bundled X-Rite Colour Assistant app makes this even more practical, allowing you to quickly switch between different colour profile presets depending on what you’re doing. This means you can easily move between colour-accurate profiles for content creation and other presets suited to general use or entertainment without having to manually adjust individual display settings.

The panel is also HDR-capable, with VESA DisplayHDR True Black 600 certification and a claimed peak brightness of up to 1,000 nits when viewing HDR content. It supports Dolby Vision as well, so compatible movies and other content can take advantage of the display’s HDR capabilities. The combination of OLED’s deep blacks, wide colour gamut and HDR support makes supported content look particularly impressive.

For gaming, the 165Hz refresh rate, 1600p resolution and OLED panel make for an excellent experience. Games look sharp and fluid, while darker scenes benefit considerably from the panel’s ability to produce true blacks. The glossy surface can pick up some reflections under strong ambient lighting, but I didn’t find this to be a major issue during normal indoor use.

Comfortable full-size keyboard, awkwardly placed trackpad

The laptop features a full-size keyboard that includes a dedicated number pad, making it useful for both gaming and productivity. The keys offer good travel and a responsive feel, and I found them comfortable for extended typing sessions. Lenovo also includes 24-zone RGB backlighting, which can be customised through Legion Space or quickly toggled through presets using the Fn and Spacebar keys. The lighting looks vibrant without being overly flashy, with different effects and brightness levels available.

The trackpad is reasonably large, smooth and responsive, but its off-centre placement takes a little getting used to. Due to the arrow keys positioned lower than the main keyboard area, the trackpad sits slightly to the left of the laptop’s centre. I initially found myself reaching for it at a slightly different position than expected, particularly when clicking the left mouse button. It’s not a major issue, and I got used to it after spending some time with the laptop, but it is noticeable when you first start using it. As with most modern laptops, the trackpad supports all Windows touch gestures.

Overall, though, the keyboard and trackpad combination works well for everyday use, with the full-size layout and RGB lighting adding to the Legion 5’s gaming-focused character.

Plenty of power, limited GPU potential

The configuration tested here is built around Intel’s Core Ultra 9 275HX, paired with an RTX 5070 laptop GPU, 32GB of DDR5-5600 memory, and a 1TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD. The Core Ultra 9 275HX is an impressive 24-core processor with 8 Performance cores and 16 Efficiency cores, with P-cores reaching up to 5.4GHz. On the graphics side, the RTX 5070 has 4,608 CUDA cores and 8GB of GDDR7 memory, with Lenovo configuring it at up to 115W including boost.

The 32GB memory comes as two 16GB modules, while the 1TB SSD uses the PCIe Gen 4 interface. In CrystalDiskMark, the SSD delivered peak sequential read and write speeds of around 6,994MBps and 5,861MBps, respectively. These are solid numbers for a PCIe Gen 4 drive and mean that storage performance isn’t going to be a bottleneck for everyday use.

If we look at productivity benchmarks, the Core Ultra 9 275HX delivers strong overall performance, although the Legion 5 wasn’t always the fastest among comparable machines. In Cinebench R24 multi-core, the laptop scored 1,778 points, placing it behind the Dell Alienware 16X Aurora (1,900) and ASUS ROG Strix G16 (1,946), both of which use the same processor. However, the Legion performs well in PCMark 10, scoring 10,014, ahead of both the Alienware 16X Aurora (9,110) and ROG Strix G16 (9,197). The extended test showed a similar advantage, with the Legion scoring 13,576, compared with 12,179 for the Alienware and 12,660 for the ROG Strix. Geekbench 6 also put the Legion in a strong position for single-core performance, with 3,011 points, although its multi-core score of 17,347 was behind the Alienware’s 19,977 but ahead of the HP Omen’s 13,166 and ROG Strix G16’s 16,564.

As for AI-focused CPU tests, the Legion’s ONNX and OpenVINO scores are generally below those of the Alienware 16X Aurora and ROG Strix G16, although it remains ahead of the older HP Omen 15 in several tests. For content creation, the Legion also posted 9,485 points in the PugetBench DaVinci Resolve test, ahead of the ROG Strix G16’s 8,826. Overall, the Core Ultra 9 275HX is clearly capable of delivering high-end CPU performance, but these results suggest Lenovo hasn’t quite squeezed every last bit of performance out of the chip

In the GPU-focused 3DMark tests, the Legion 5i delivers mixed results against the competing laptops. It scored 13,892 in 3DMark Time Spy, slightly behind the Dell Alienware 16X Aurora’s 14,139 but ahead of the HP Omen 15’s 10,310. In Fire Strike, the Legion posted 31,046 points, beating both the Omen 15 (26,092) and ASUS ROG Strix G16 (29,819), although it fell behind the Alienware 16X Aurora (37,798). The same pattern is seen in the more demanding tests, with scores of 2,765 in Time Spy Extreme, 8,816 in Fire Strike Ultra and 17,966 in Fire Strike Extreme. Overall, these results show that the Legion’s RTX 5070 is competitive but tends to trail the other RTX 5070-equipped laptops in several GPU-intensive workloads.

The difference becomes more obvious in actual games, with the Legion 5 trailing other RTX 5070 laptops in our comparison. In Cyberpunk 2077, it managed 50 FPS at FHD native resolution, compared with 85 FPS on the HP Omen 15 and 107 FPS on the Dell Alienware 16X Aurora. At QHD resolution, the Legion dropped to 29 FPS, while the Omen and Alienware managed a much more playable 51 FPS and 68 FPS, respectively

A similar trend was seen in Forza Horizon 5, where the Legion averaged 70 FPS at FHD native compared with 99 FPS on the HP Omen 15 and 158 FPS on the ASUS ROG Strix G16. Black Myth: Wukong was even more demanding, with the Legion managing just 24 FPS at FHD native and 19 FPS at QHD.

Overall, while the RTX 5070 is capable of handling demanding games, the Legion 5i consistently trails the other RTX 5070 machines in several tests, suggesting there is some room for optimisation. It is also worth noting that the RTX 5070 isn’t necessarily the only variable here. The three RTX 5070 laptops in this comparison are all rated at 115W, but cooling, power limits, firmware and CPU behaviour can all affect real-world performance.

Another thing that I noticed is that while all testing was conducted using Lenovo’s Performance profile, the fans surprisingly did not ramp up aggressively even during demanding workloads. Switching to the Custom profile and increasing the CPU and GPU power limits caused the fans to ramp up considerably, but the benchmark scores didn’t improve significantly. This suggests Lenovo could fine-tune the performance and thermal profiles to find a better balance between cooling, power delivery and performance, rather than simply running the fans at higher speeds. The Legion 5i Gen 10 is by no means a slow gaming laptop, but its results are somewhat below what is expected from a Core Ultra 9 275HX and RTX 5070 combination, and there appears to be some performance left on the table.

Keep your charger close

The Legion 5i packs an 80Wh battery, which is fairly typical for a gaming laptop of this class. The Core Ultra 9 275HX is also a power-hungry processor, so battery life was never going to be its biggest strength. In everyday use, I got close to 4 hours when using Lenovo’s Quiet Power profile and sticking to relatively light workloads. That’s enough for some basic work away from a power outlet, but you’ll still want the charger nearby for longer sessions.

For a more consistent comparison, I also ran the PCMark 10 video battery test at 80% screen brightness, where the Legion 5 lasted only 1 hour and 49 minutes. The high-resolution 165Hz OLED display and power-hungry hardware clearly take their toll on endurance. Lenovo bundles a fairly sizeable 245W power adapter, which provides enough headroom for the Core Ultra 9 275HX and RTX 5070 when the laptop is running at full performance.

Verdict

The Lenovo Legion 5i manages to get a few things right, like the understated design, excellent 15.1-inch OLED display, comfortable full-size keyboard and the capable Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU. However, the RTX 5070 doesn’t perform quite as well as expected in our testing, particularly when compared with other RTX 5070-equipped laptops. The relatively conservative fan behaviour in the Performance profile and limited gains from pushing the power limits in Custom mode also suggest Lenovo still has some optimisation work to do.

The bigger issue, however, is price. The Legion 5i Gen 10 starts at Rs 2,14,990, but this top-end configuration with the Core Ultra 9 275HX, RTX 5070, 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD costs over Rs 2,80,000. At that price, I personally find it difficult to recommend an RTX 5070 laptop, especially when the gaming performance doesn’t quite match what some competing RTX 5070 machines can deliver. The excellent OLED display and premium hardware package do add value, but they don’t fully offset the price premium. If you can find it at a significant discount, the Legion 5 Gen 10 becomes much more appealing.

There are a couple of alternatives worth considering. If you like Lenovo’s ecosystem, the Legion 7 is worth considering as it offers essentially the same Core Ultra 9 275HX and RTX 5070 hardware, but steps up to a larger 16-inch 2.5K 240Hz OLED display. We recently saw the laptop selling for around Rs 2,73,500 on Amazon, which makes more sense, especially given the larger and faster display. If portability isn’t a priority, the ASUS ROG Strix G16 is another compelling option. A similarly configured model with the Core Ultra 9 275HX and RTX 5070 is available at around Rs 2,30,000 lakh, putting it substantially below the Legion 5 configuration reviewed here. The Strix is a larger and more performance-oriented machine, so you do give up some portability, but the considerable price difference makes it a much easier recommendation for someone primarily interested in gaming performance.

Editor’s Rating: 7/10

Pros:

• Clean understated design
• Vivid OLED panel
• Flagship CPU performance
• Great port selection and placement

Cons:

• Underpowered RTX 5070 GPU
• Battery life
• Expensive compared to similarly specced laptops