Gaming laptops and limited budgets usually don't make good friends. But at only $1,099, this Lenovo portable (opens in new tab) packs a surprising punch. The key to any gaming laptop is the GPU, and the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro is powered by an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070. This is a very fast mobile graphics chip.

To this we can add the next important aspect, the screen: the Legion 5 Pro has a very impressive 16" 1600p panel (a slightly taller 16:10 version of the common 1440p aspect), running at 165Hz. This is about what we would recommend as the perfect balance of size, resolution, and speed for a laptop panel. In addition, this panel is also DisplayHDR 400 certified. Excellent.

The third important gaming laptop element is, of course, the CPU: the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro is powered by an AMD 7 Ryzen 5800H. Okay, this is a previous generation chip. But the latest 6000 series Ryzen laptop chips are only slightly tweaked. And the 5800H is still a monster 8-core mobile CPU.

Elsewhere, 16GB of DDR4 memory and a 512GB NVMe drive ensure that proper TLC flash, not cheap QLC flash, will work. Meanwhile, the chassis features an advanced dual-fan design with user-configurable cooling, and the keyboard has what Lenovo describes as "soft landing switches."

Connectivity is also well covered, with dual USB-C ports, HDMI 2.1 Wifi 6, and Bluetooth, as well as a physical LAN port. The battery is a reasonable 80 WHr. Lenovo claims a battery life of 8 hours. This sounds a bit optimistic, but it won't be a truly short-lived gaming portable that will power down after a couple of hours.

All in all, this is a very well balanced package with excellent components at a very reasonable price. Affordable laptop gaming has never looked so attractive.