I stumbled across this Lenovo Legion Slim 5 laptop deal this afternoon, while on the hunt for cheap RTX 4050 gaming laptops. The first that caught my attention was the price, rapidly followed by the graphics chip. An RTX 4060? Surely not for just $850?
Naturally, I assumed it would be a low-power version, something like 75W, but nope—according to Lenovo's spec sheet (pdf warning), it's the full 140W version. That's as high as you'll for any laptop with that chip, so you're pretty much guaranteed perfect 1080p gaming.
Better yet, it's been paired with an AMD Ryzen 5 7640HS processor. This is a Zen 4-powered CPU, with six cores, 12 threads, and a boost clock of 5 GHz. That's plenty enough for almost all games out there and since it tops out at 54W, it'll be much easier to keep cool compared to laptops with more CPU cores.
At this stage, I was certain there must be something wrong with it, to have that hardware and be well under $1,000. Well, the SSD is only 512GB in size and it'll quickly fill up with games. However, remove the chassis cover on the laptop and you'll spot a second M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 slot—stick a fast gaming SSD in there and you'll have no storage concerns.
I suppose the real negative is a subjective one. With a 16-inch screen, it's a pretty big laptop, despite it being a Slim model. It's not super heavy, no more than 2.4 kg (5.29 lbs), but that big panel won't make it easy to game on the go. At least the size allowed Lenovo to fit a capacious 80Wh battery in the chassis.
It also has a resolution of 1920 x 1200 (with a 16:10 aspect ratio), which is perhaps a little low for such a large display, and it's only rated to 60% sRGB—if you want to use it for professional image editing, then that's just not good enough. For gaming, though, it'll be fine and the 300 nits peak brightness will mean you won't need to hide in a darkened room to use it.
But these are very minor quibbles, in the grand scheme of things, and I can't see anyone being really disappointed by the screen or storage size. Not when you're getting a brilliant 1080p gaming rig for very little money.
Perhaps the only true downside to this lovely laptop is you just know it'll eventually be even cheaper once the new models from all the top vendors get released, but that's a tale as old as the humble PC itself.
