The highest-performing RTX 4060 laptop we’ve ever tested.
THE LENOVO LEGION Pro 7i Gen 8 delivered a superb mix of performance, size, and price. We expected similar results from the Legion Pro 5i Gen 9. Instead, we’re feeling miffed by the new Gen 9 model. With impressive gaming performance, you’d think we’d be all over this thing, and yet we can’t get over its lackluster memory configuration and low storage capacity.
First, the good stuff—the Pro 5i Gen 9 comes equipped with the Core i7 14650HX. A 24-thread processor, divided into eight P-cores (16 threads with Hyper-Threading) and eight E-cores. That’s a lot of processing power for what is ostensibly a gaming laptop on the more affordable end of the market.
The GPU is very much a known quantity: the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 mobile, with 8GB of GDDR6 and rated to a total graphics power (TGP) of 140W. That last bit is important, as it determines how much head room the GPU has available, and has a pretty significant impact on the overall gaming performance of the machine. The good news here is that 140W is as good as it gets for the RTX 4060 mobile—a 115W TGP with an extra 25W boost—and it’s far and away the fastest RTX 4060 we’ve tested to date as a result.
Now, let’s talk about a few things the Pro 5i Gen 9 doesn’t do well. It comes equipped with only a single stick of DDR5 memory, rated at 5,600 MT/s. While retaining 16GB capacity—suitable for a laptop at this price point—a single stick limits the overall bandwidth. It could be much higher with dual-channel memory. While a single stick doesn’t appear to hinder the laptop hugely in many games I’ve tested, it could, it might, and it probably will at some point.