Gaming laptops and limited budgets don’t usually make for good friends. But at just $1,099, this Lenovo portable (opens in new tab) packs a surprising punch. The critical aspect with any gaming laptop is the GPU, and the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro rocks an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070, which is only one tier below the absolute best laptop graphics chip, the RTX 3080. It’s an extremely quick mobile graphics chip.
To that you can add the next most important aspect, the screen. The Legion 5 Pro rocks an extremely impressive 16-inch 1600p panel (it’s essentially a slightly taller 16:10 aspect take on the more common 1440p thing) running at fully 165Hz. That’s pretty much exactly what we’d recommend as the perfect balance between size, resolution and speed for a laptop panel. What’s more, the panel is also DisplayHDR 400 certified. Nice
The third element of the critical gaming laptop trifecta is, of course, the CPU. Here the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro nails it again with an AMD 7 Ryzen 5800H. OK, it’s a last-gen chip. But the latest 6000 series Ryzen laptop chips only got tiny tweaks. And the 5800H remains an eight-core monster of a mobile CPU.
Elsewhere, you get 16GB of DDR4 memory and a 512GB NVMe drive that’s guaranteed to run proper TLC flash, not the cheapo QLC stuff. Meanwhile, the chassis sports an advanced dual-fan design with user-configurable cooling while the keyboard has what Lenovo describes as “soft-landing switches” that deliver deeper strokes with equal force on every strike.
Connectivity is also well covered and includes dual USB-C ports, HDMI 2.1 Wifi 6 and Bluetooth, plus a physical LAN port. The battery is an 80 WHr item, which is reasonable. Lenovo claims eight hours of battery life. That sounds a little optimistic, but this certainly won’t be one of those really short-lived gaming portables that keels over after a couple of hours.
All told, this is a very nicely balanced package with some outstanding components for a very reasonable price. Affordable laptop gaming has surely never looked so good.
Where are the best Black Friday gaming laptop deals?
- Amazon – RTX 3050 laptops from Acer and Dell starting at $650 (opens in new tab)
- Asus – high-end ROG Zephyrus 14 with Ryzen 9 and RTX 3060 at Best Buy (opens in new tab)
- MSI – RTX 3080 gaming laptops up to $200 off at Newegg (opens in new tab)
- gigabyte – up to 50% off Gigabyte gaming laptops at Newegg (opens in new tab)
- Walmart – cheap Gateway laptops. Remember them?! (opens in new tab)
- B&H Photo – up to $500 off Lenovo, Asus, & MSI gaming laptops (opens in new tab)
- target – sub-$1,000 gaming laptops (opens in new tab)
- Staples – up to $300 off MSI gaming notebooks (opens in new tab)
- Lenovo – $1,000+ discounts on Legion laptops (opens in new tab)
- Razer – discounts on Razer Blade laptops, our favorite notebooks (opens in new tab)
- Newegg – $500+ off RTX 30 series gaming laptops (opens in new tab)
- Best Buy – save up to $500 on gaming laptops (opens in new tab)
- Microsoft – up to half price on last-gen laptops (opens in new tab)
- Dell – save over $300 on Dell and Alienware gaming laptops (opens in new tab)
- RTX 3050 Ti – Gigabyte G5 MD |
$999.99$549.99 (save $450) (opens in new tab) - RTX 3060 – Acer Nitro 5 |
$798$649 (save $149) (opens in new tab) - RX 6800S – Asus ROG Zephyrus 14 |
$1,899.99$1,399.99 (save $500) (opens in new tab) - RTX 3070 – Lenovo Legion 5 Pro |
$1,298.97$1,099 (save $199.97) (opens in new tab) - RTX 3070 Ti – Gigabyte Aero 5 XE4 |
$2,199$1,149.99 (save $1,049.01) (opens in new tab) - RTX 3080 – MSI GP66 Leopard |
$2,399$1,399 (save $1,000) (opens in new tab) - RTX 3080 – Razer Blade 14 |
$2,799.99$1,999.99 (save $800) (opens in new tab)