Lenovo completely redesigned my favorite gaming laptop from last year

By Jacob Roach Published January 7, 2025

Hands down, if you ask me what the best gaming laptop is, I’ll point you toward the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i. It’s speedy, reasonably priced, and it has a fantastic keyboard — just read our Lenovo Legion Pro 7i review. So, you can imagine my surprise when Lenovo told me that it was completely throwing out its winning formula to fully redesign the laptop for CES 2025.

It looks like the redesign could pay off, though.

With the laptop open, not much has changed. You’re still getting Lenovo’s excellent TrueStrike, as well as a slim number pad and trackpad that’s offset to the left of the key deck. This updated model features an OLED display, however. Previous Legion laptops have had serviceable gaming displays, but Lenovo is pushing into a premium tier of gaming laptops alongside the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 with the OLED panel.

It’s quite the panel, too. It’s a 16:10 panel with a WQXGA display — or 2,560 x 1,600. It also comes with a 240Hz refresh rate, and according to Lenovo, a sub-0.5ms response time. Lenovo also says the laptop claims up to 500 nits of peak brightness, which is fairly typical for OLED panels in laptops.

Alongside the new display, Lenovo redesigned the external chassis. One of the biggest changes is the back of the laptop, which no longer features any ports. On laptops like the Legion Pro 7i and Legion Pro 5, Lenovo previously placed the charging port, alongside large connectors like the HDMI port, on the back of the laptop. They’ve been moved to the sides now to provide better ventilation, Lenovo tells me. In their place, Lenovo now has a strip of RGB lighting that provides some back glow to the laptop.

Although the ports have moved, Lenovo is still giving users a lot of connectivity options. You get two USB-C ports, three USB-A ports, HDMI 2.1, and an Ethernet connection, along with Wi-Fi 7.

Under the hood, Lenovo says you’ll be able to pack in up to an Nvidia RTX 5090 laptop GPU, along with either a Core Ultra 9 275HX or Ryzen 9 9955HX. Similar to previous Legion laptops, Lenovo is offering the Legion Pro 7 and Legion Pro 5, the latter of which is less expensive with fewer options. Ther are both AMD and Intel options. Lenovo hasn’t revealed the specs of the Legion Pro 5 range yet, however.

To power this hardware, the Legion Pro 7i has a total of 250 watts that it shares between the CPU and GPU, while the Legion Pro 5 has access to 200W.

Lenovo is rolling out its new Legion range slowly. It starts with the Legion Pro 7i in March, which has an expected starting price of $2,399. The Legion Pro 5i arrives in May, starting at $1,499, while the Legion Pro 5 comes in June at $1,399.