Slim or ......" I have no interest in undermining the body of a portable gaming device, but if the Lenovo Legion Chunky were to be released, it would need a bigger reviewer. Basically, I'm not convinced it's slight enough to justify its "slim" moniker.

Still, there are advantages to having something so substantial on your lap. The keyboard is not oppressive and has a numeric keypad. The trackpad is reasonably sized, and the 16-inch laptop screen feels luxurious when used two feet from your nose. Plus, there is extra space for a cooling system and, theoretically, a battery. More on this point in a moment.

The Lenovo Legion Slim 5's price/performance equation combines an AMD and Nvidia combo to deliver good frame rates at a gratifying price. That said, in an era when even popular top-down CRPGs take up 136GB and Ark: Survival Evolved doubles that, I'm beginning to question the utility of a 512GB SSD in a gaming laptop just to play Stardew Valley. It would be nice to have a little more capacity, as it is unlikely that I would buy a laptop like the Slim 5. Also, given the current low price of SSD storage, it would be expected.

But if you want to offload your Steam library to an external drive, at least you have options. On the left side of the chassis are two USB-C ports with USB 3.2 Gen 2 and DisplayPort, one of which can provide 140W of power for charging devices, but not for charging the laptop itself. On the back of the machine are two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A USB ports, a dedicated charging port, Ethernet, and HDMI 2.1; there is also an SD card slot and a headset combo jack, making this a laptop with excellent connectivity.

It is an interesting choice that many ports are located on the back of the chassis rather than on the sides. The fact that power, USB, HDMI, and Ethernet are located on the back of the laptop suggests a more sedentary lifestyle, as Legion spends much of its time at a desk.

At its heart is the AMD Ryzen 7 7840HSCPU, an 8-core chip with 16 threads, 3.8 GHz base clock and 5.1 GHz turbo. manufactured in the TMSC 4nm process, the Zen 4 chip provides up to 54W of power. 16GB DDR5-5600MHz RAM and backed up by a 512GB PCIe 4 SSD, the machine is well specced even before the RTX 4060 is installed. While this is clearly not the best graphics card on the market, Nvidia's xx60 card is a popular mid-range gaming chip and is known for its performance at a fair price. 1600p 16:10 IPS screen is enough to push it, plus the DLSS and Frame Generation System increase frame count.

In our benchmarks, the RTX 3060 performed as expected and frequently recorded over 60 fps in ultra quality and 1080p resolution games. the RTX 3060 was the second most popular GPU in the 2023 Steam hardware survey, behind the GTX 1650 Therefore, the RTX 4060 should still have several years of life left in it, and has the advantage of bringing the full feature set of DLSS 3, which helps bring frames up to the screen's native resolution of 1600p.

This screen is an IPS model, which does not offer the saturated colors of an OLED, but it does not have the reflectivity issues. However, there are brighter screens out there, and they struggle a bit in darker areas of games and videos.

Unless you use a Bluetooth controller, the keyboard is the primary interface between you and your PC, and the Legion Slim has an excellent keyboard. The key travel is adequate, the backlight can be adjusted to highlight letters without causing migraines, and I'm not a fan of the recent trend of making the Enter key smaller and fitting extra punctuation on top of it. I don't use the backward slash and pipe characters enough to justify having a dedicated key, and I often type them incorrectly, especially when trying to send zingers in chat applications. The

numeric keypad is a cut-down model. It's nice that it's there, but if it had been cut down, there might have been more room for more speakers than the pair of small grilles between the keyboard and the screen hinge. The bottom trackpad is particularly comfortable to use. It has more grip than the glass pad, and my fingers sometimes glide over it like a raccoon on ice skates. There is also a backlight that can be switched to several modes using the Fn key and space bar, or controlled more precisely using Lenovo Vantage software, and instead of displaying a warning message about the warranty, the variable refresh rate can be It can also be enabled to add a few hundred megahertz of GPU and VRAM clocking.

Of course, there is a downside to this. In our tests under gaming conditions, the laptop battery gave out after one hour. If you're just fiddling with a web browser (or playing Stardew Valley), Lenovo's battery widget predicts it will last six hours. But once you fire up the GPU and start tossing around polygons, the endurance starts to degrade, and you'll only have enough time to dash between outlets, without having to use a USB-C tablet charger for a quick charge. [It looks like it could be the rising star of reasonably priced gaming laptops, but with a caveat. Of course, getting this level of performance for under $2,000 requires compromises, and in this case, the weak link is the base lithium brick. While we don't expect huge battery life from a gaming machine, an hour on a current Lenovo laptop seems a bit short.