Look, slim it ain’t. Let’s get that out of the way right up front. Being honest, if you wanted a thin gaming laptop you’d be looking at something like an Asus Zephyrus G14 or Zephyrus G16. But then you’d also be looking at more than twice the price of this excellent Lenovo machine.
With the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 available at Best Buy for $900 you’re getting a, shall we say, well proportioned gaming laptop for a pretty damned good price. This is a proper 16-inch notebook with a 16:10 screen capable of delivering a 1920 x 1200 native resolution and a 144 Hz refresh rate. Though that’s neat, it’s not the primary concern when you’re thinking about what you want in a new gaming laptop. That’s the GPU and CPU combo.
And there’s a great pairing in this Legion lappy, with an AMD Ryzen 5 7640HS processor packing six full Zen 4 cores (with 12 threads of number crunching grunt) and the Nvidia RTX 4060 coming in with a 125 W TGP. I’d have very much preferred a more capacious SSD, as the bundled 512 GB drive is pretty small, but inside there is a secondary M.2 slot, which makes upgrading the storage as simple as dropping in a new SSD.
In our Legion Slim 5 review we looked at a slightly pricier spec—with a Ryzen 7 7840HS and a 1600p panel—but the styling, chassis, and keyboard are all still the same and we were super impressed with that one. And it is worth spending a moment on that keyboard, because Lenovo makes some of the best lappy tappers in the business.
PC gaming is still a mouse and keyboard world and you’ll be spending a lot of time hitting those switches with your digits, and the fact you’re getting decent travel and a full numpad included makes the Legion Slim 5 a joy to type on. It’s also got a rather pleasing trackpad slotted in underneath it, too.
Connectivity is excellent, the design (though not slim) is grown up and doesn’t feel so overtly gamer-y that you’d be afraid to pull it out in a meeting or in class, and it’s got the right components inside to give you some proper gaming performance. In all, it’s a well specced gaming laptop particularly at this sub-$900 price.
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