Lenovo Legion 5i Pro (16in)

A well-built and power-packed system that plays games beautifully - and you may get £200 off the price

- TIM DANTON

PRICE £1,667 (£2,000 inc VAT) from lenovo.com

The Legion 5i Pro is Lenovo's no-holds barred gaming laptop. With a 2.5kg T weight and height of 26.6mm, it's designed with thermals in mind rather than portability.

This allows Lenovo to not only pack in thunderously powerful components but feed them with all the watts they desire. With 125W to play with the RTX 3070 Ti graphics card is particularly noteworthy, ripping through games faster than rivals with the same headline specs. The MSI Creator Z16P could only feed around 105 W to the card, while the Asus ROG Zephyrus M16 (see issue 331, p59) provided 100W.

This extra firepower pushed the Legion 5i Pro to 11,912 in 3DMark Time Spy compared to the MSI's 9,854 and the Asus' 9,534. Likewise in Metro Exodus and Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1080p at High settings, where the Legion averaged 104fps and 140fps to the 85/90fps and 134/132fps of its rivals.

Ideally, you want to take advantage of the panel's 2,560 x 1,600 resolution. This peaks at 165Hz, but even with the spec here you'll struggle to hold a solid 165fps. Still, Shadow of the Tomb Raider hit 122fps at High settings and Metro Exodus 176fps at Low quality.

This is with the backing of Intel's Core i7-12700H, which propelled the Legion 51 Pro to 497 in the PC Pro benchmarks and 17,335 in the multicore section of Cinebench R23. That's ahead of both the MSI and the Asus machines, but by a lesser margin.