It may only be slim in terms of price but this misnomered $900 Legion gaming laptop packs a lot of punch

Lenovo Legion Slim 5 gaming laptop
(Image credit: Lenovo)
Lenovo Legion 5 Slim | RTX 4060 | AMD Ryzen 5 7640HS | 16-inch | 144 Hz | 1920 x 1200 | 16GB DDR5 | 512 GB SSD | $1,349.99 $899.99 at Best Buy (save $450)

Lenovo Legion 5 Slim | RTX 4060 | AMD Ryzen 5 7640HS | 16-inch | 144 Hz | 1920 x 1200 | 16GB DDR5 | 512 GB SSD | $1,349.99 $899.99 at Best Buy (save $450)
The latest Legion machines have been some of my favorite gaming laptops of the past year or so, and this Legion 5 Slim is a great price for a real quality piece of notebook engineering. The RTX 4060 is a good GPU for a sub-$1,000 machine, and a great fit for a 1200p 16-inch display. While it's not really slim when compared to something like an ultrabook, the Lenovo is still pretty svelte by budget gaming laptop standards, and the Legions have some of the best keyboards you'll find on any mobile machine.

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.

Dave James
Editor-in-Chief, Hardware

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.

Read more
The Lenovo Legion LOQ gaming laptop on a blue background
Okay, so it's not technically in the Amazon Big Spring Sale, but this is the cheapest RTX 4070 gaming laptop you'll find today
A Lenovo LOQ 15.6 inch gaming laptop on a teal deals background
Ahead of RTX 50-series gaming laptops you can snag an RTX 4070 Lenovo machine for just $900
The Dell G16 7630 RTX 4070 gaming laptop on a teal deals background
It might be a bit of a chonk, but this 240 Hz RTX 4070 Dell gaming laptop is a seriously powerful machine for $1,300
The Lenovo Legion 5i gaming laptop on a teal deals background
I still can't beat the sheer value for money this 240 Hz Lenovo RTX 4070 gaming laptop provides for $1,399 and it's starting to bug me
The Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 on a teal deals background.
Even with the next-gen Nvidia mobile GPUs on the way, I'm still remarkably tempted by the RTX 4070-touting Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 for $1,100
The Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 on a teal deals background with the Asus logo displayed on screen.
The 240 Hz OLED gaming laptop of my dreams is down to the lowest price I've seen yet
Latest in Gaming Laptops
The Lenovo Legion LOQ gaming laptop on a blue background
Okay, so it's not technically in the Amazon Big Spring Sale, but this is the cheapest RTX 4070 gaming laptop you'll find today
A promotional image for the Compal Adapt X modular laptop, as presented by the iF Design Foundation
If you've ever wanted to upgrade a laptop with 'modular AI units' then Compal might just have the very thing you're looking for
MSI Raider gaming laptop
Become Dragonforged, achieve dominance
The Dell G16 7630 RTX 4070 gaming laptop on a teal deals background
It might be a bit of a chonk, but this 240 Hz RTX 4070 Dell gaming laptop is a seriously powerful machine for $1,300
The UHPILCL water cooled gaming laptop
This water-cooled gaming laptop packs a full-size desktop RTX 5090 and even fits in a backpack, but I sure wouldn't want it in mine
Lenovo Yoga Solar PC
Lenovo's clever solar-powered laptop can turn 20 minutes of sunlight into an hour of video playback but sun-powered mobile gaming still isn't a goer
Latest in News
Image of Cersei Lanniser from Game of Thrones: Kingsroad Steam early access trailer
A new Game of Thrones RPG is coming to Steam today with a cast of 'familiar faces,' which is good because it's really the only way to tell it's a GoT game at all
The new Prime Asset featured in the upcoming update for the Outlast Trials.
The Outlast Trials puts its already paranoid players under surveillance for a time-limited story event
A Viera looking confused in Final Fantasy 14.
Old armor continues to fall victim to Final Fantasy 14's bizarre two-channel dye system, unless you're super into changing the colour of teeny-tiny eyelets: 'Why even bother at this point?'
Starfield: Shattered Space
By the time Bethesda was on Starfield, you'd 'basically get in trouble' for breaking schedule, says former dev: 'A lot of the great stuff within Skyrim came from having the freedom to do what you want'
Otter AI Meeting Agent
As if your work meetings weren't already fun enough, now Otter has a new all-hearing AI agent that remembers everything anyone has said and can join in the discussion
Monster Hunter Wilds' stockpile master studying a manifest
As layoffs and studio closures continue to deathroll the western AAA industry, analyst points out 5 of 8 major Japanese companies hit all-time share prices this year