Lenovo Legion 5 Pro review

Frame rates

1920×1080, High preset, upscaling off. Averages 145fps across the 5 core benchmark games.

Measured on this machine. Source: Notebookcheck, 2025-06-27.

In use

The short version

The Legion 5 Pro in this configuration — RTX 5070 Ti, Core Ultra 9 275HX, 32GB of memory, a 16in 2560x1600 OLED at 165Hz — is one of the more interesting results on our frame rate leaderboard, and the reason is not the raw numbers on their own. It's what those numbers look like next to machines carrying nominally faster silicon. Across the eight games it shares with the Razer Blade 16 Core Ultra 9, a £5,000 laptop built around an RTX 5090, the measured figures put this machine dead level. Not close. Level. Across seven games shared with the Asus ROG Strix Scar 16, also an RTX 5090 machine, it gives up an average of 15fps — a real gap, but a much smaller one than the two GPU tiers between them would suggest.

That is the story of this laptop. A 5070 Ti in a chassis that appears willing to feed it properly will land within touching distance of a 5090 in a chassis that isn't. GPU tier tells you what the silicon is capable of; the cooling and power budget tell you what you actually get. The benchmark data here is a fairly blunt demonstration of the difference.

We have not published a score for this machine, and the reason is entirely mundane: we have no confirmed UK price for this exact configuration. Value accounts for 30% of our score and cannot be computed without a price, so the score is withheld rather than guessed. The benchmark suite is complete, the machine ranks normally on the frame rate leaderboard, and nothing about the measured performance is in question. When a UK price for this specific build is confirmed, the score will appear automatically.

Who should be interested: someone who wants a 16in machine that will run essentially anything at high frame rates at 1080p, who values an OLED panel over an extra GPU tier, and who is prepared to accept a 2.4kg carry weight. Someone who plays a mix of competitive titles and single-player releases, and who wants the competitive titles to actually saturate a 165Hz panel rather than merely approach it.

Who should look elsewhere: anyone whose primary interest is the newest, heaviest ray-traced releases at the panel's native resolution with everything turned up, because the measured figures in that category are respectable rather than commanding, and 12GB of VRAM is the specification here that will age fastest. Anyone who needs a laptop they carry daily rather than move occasionally. And anyone shopping strictly on frames per pound, because until there is a confirmed price, that calculation cannot be made — and there are RTX 5070 machines in our database at £2,095 and £2,312 that are closer on measured performance than the model numbers imply.

Performance

All the frame rates below were measured by Notebookcheck at 1920x1080, High preset, with upscaling off, on 27 June 2025. That last detail matters more than it usually does, and we'll come back to it, because the panel on this machine is 2560x1600 — a meaningfully heavier target than the resolution the benchmarks were run at.

The shape of the results

Ten games, and the spread runs from 403fps to 63fps. That is a factor of more than six between the lightest and heaviest title in the set, which should immediately tell you that any single "average frame rate" figure for a gaming laptop is a summary of a summary. The five games in our scoring suite average 146fps. That number is useful for ranking machines against each other, because every machine in the database runs the same five games, but it does not describe what any individual game feels like on this laptop.

Here is the full set, ordered as measured:

• Strange Brigade — 403fps
• Dota 2 — 190fps (scoring suite)
• Final Fantasy XV — 181fps
• GTA V — 180fps (scoring suite)
• F1 25 — 172fps
• Cyberpunk 2077 — 134fps (scoring suite)
• X-Plane 11 — 116fps (scoring suite)
• Baldur's Gate 3 — 108fps (scoring suite)
• Doom: The Dark Ages — 67fps
• Assassin's Creed Shadows — 63fps

The top of that list is not really a GPU measurement. Strange Brigade at 403fps is a Vulkan title with an aggressively efficient renderer, and at that frame rate a laptop is being limited by CPU throughput, driver overhead and frame pacing rather than by shader hardware. Its value in a benchmark suite is as a ceiling test: it tells you the platform isn't tripping over itself, that the CPU is keeping up, and that nothing in the power delivery is choking the machine when the GPU has an easy job. A 403fps result is a clean bill of health for the plumbing. It says almost nothing about how Cyberpunk runs.

Dota 2 at 190fps is in the same category for different reasons. It is a comparatively old renderer with modest per-frame GPU work, and on hardware of this class it becomes a test of single-thread CPU performance and how quickly the machine can push draw calls. The Core Ultra 9 275HX is doing the heavy lifting there. For anyone who plays Dota, League, CS or similar competitively, 190fps at 1080p on the highest preset means you have room to drop settings and push considerably further, or to hold that figure comfortably above the panel's 165Hz with the settings left alone.

Final Fantasy XV at 181fps and GTA V at 180fps are the older-engine group. Both are DirectX 11-era titles that have been benchmark fixtures for years, and both land in a band where the machine is producing frames faster than the display can show them at 1080p. They're included because they provide continuity across years of testing, not because they represent a current workload. Treat them as evidence that this laptop will make short work of any back catalogue you own.

F1 25 at 172fps is the most interesting result in the upper group, because it is a current release rather than a legacy title. Codemasters' engine has always been well optimised, but this is a 2025 game with modern lighting running above the panel's refresh rate at 1080p on High with no upscaling. For racing, where input latency and consistency matter as much as they do in any competitive shooter, that is exactly the result you want. It also means there is genuine headroom to move to the native panel resolution and still expect a high frame rate, though we don't have measured figures at 2560x1600 to quantify by how much.

The middle: where most single-player games live

Cyberpunk 2077 at 134fps, X-Plane 11 at 116fps and Baldur's Gate 3 at 108fps form the meaningful middle of this set, and they're the numbers to look at if you want to know what this machine feels like day to day.

Cyberpunk at 134fps on High with no upscaling and no ray tracing is a strong result. That game remains one of the more demanding raster workloads in circulation five years after release, and a triple-digit figure at 1080p with the reconstruction turned off gives you a lot of options: raise the preset, enable ray tracing at some level, move to the native panel resolution, or turn on DLSS and do two of those at once. The measurement is deliberately taken with upscaling off so that machines can be compared on like terms, but nobody actually plays that way on a laptop with a 2560x1600 panel and an RTX 50-series GPU. Read 134fps as the raster baseline from which your real settings decisions start, not as the frame rate you'd end up with.

X-Plane 11 at 116fps is a different sort of test again. Flight simulators are notoriously bound by single-thread CPU performance, scenery streaming and API overhead rather than by shader throughput, and results in this title tend to compress across GPU tiers — fast cards and very fast cards land closer together than they do anywhere else. 116fps is a healthy number, and it says more about the 275HX and the memory subsystem than about the 5070 Ti. If you fly, this is the result that matters most to you in the set, and it's a good one.

Baldur's Gate 3 at 108fps is the one people most often misread. BG3 is not especially demanding in open terrain, but Act 3 in the city puts an enormous number of NPCs, light sources and scripted objects on screen simultaneously, and that portion of the game is heavily CPU-bound. A 108fps average on High is comfortable — it means the difficult sections are unlikely to drop below the point where the game feels sluggish, which is the actual failure mode people encounter with that title on weaker hardware. It also sits close enough to the panel's 165Hz that you are not obviously wasting the display.

The bottom: 2025's heavyweight releases

Doom: The Dark Ages at 67fps and Assassin's Creed Shadows at 63fps are the two results that define the ceiling of this machine's ambitions, and they deserve careful reading rather than dismissal.

Doom: The Dark Ages is built on an engine that requires hardware ray tracing — there is no raster fallback path. Every frame in that game is doing work that most titles in this suite either skip entirely or offer as an optional extra. A 67fps average at 1080p on High therefore represents a substantially heavier per-frame workload than the 134fps in Cyberpunk does, and comparing the two numbers directly without that context will lead you to the wrong conclusion about the GPU. 67fps in a game with mandatory RT on a mid-to-upper-tier mobile GPU is a normal, functional result. It is above 60, it is playable, and it leaves upscaling and frame generation as untouched levers.

Assassin's Creed Shadows at 63fps is the heaviest raster-plus-lighting workload in the set. Ubisoft's Anvil engine in its current form is punishing at high presets, the game's global illumination system is expensive, and the open world design means there is no easy scene where the frame rate recovers. 63fps at 1080p High with upscaling off is, again, a workable result that most owners would improve substantially by enabling DLSS — which is the intended way to play it.

The important structural point about these two results: they are both 2025 releases, and they are both at roughly half the frame rate of the 2020-era Cyberpunk measurement. That is the trajectory of the next few years of releases. If you are buying a laptop expecting it to hold a specific frame rate in games that haven't shipped yet, the honest guidance from this data is that 60-ish at 1080p High without upscaling is where the current generation of heavy releases lands on this hardware, and the direction of travel is downward. Upscaling and frame generation are not optional extras on a machine at this tier by 2027; they're the baseline assumption.

What the power limit means here

We don't have a confirmed GPU power figure for this configuration in our data, so anything said about the power limit is inference from the comparative frame rates rather than a specification we can point at. That inference is fairly strong, though.

An RTX 5070 Ti that averages exactly level with an RTX 5090 across eight shared games — which is what the comparison against the Razer Blade 16 Core Ultra 9 shows — is not behaving like a mid-tier part. There are two things that can produce that outcome, and they are almost certainly both happening. The first is that the 5090 in the Blade 16 is heavily power-constrained by a thin chassis: Razer's design priority in that machine is thickness and weight, and mobile GPUs scale hard with sustained power, so a nominally enormous GPU in a very thin laptop can lose a large fraction of its theoretical advantage. The second is that this Legion is running its GPU near the top of the range Nvidia allows for the part, in a chassis with enough thermal capacity to sustain it.

The comparison against the three RTX 5070 machines in our database supports the same reading from the other direction. This machine averages +9fps over the MSI Katana 17 HX, +10fps over the Alienware 16X Aurora, and +26fps over the MSI Crosshair 18 HX AI. Those three rivals all carry the same GPU as each other. The spread between the smallest and largest of those deltas is 17fps, which means the three ostensibly identical 5070 machines differ among themselves by nearly as much as this 5070 Ti differs from the best of them. That is what a power-limit and cooling variance looks like in measured data, and it is the single most useful thing to understand when you're shopping by model number.

The practical consequences for an owner are worth spelling out. A GPU running near the top of its power allowance produces heat and needs to move air, and 2.406kg for a 16in laptop is consistent with a chassis carrying real cooling hardware rather than a minimal one. We have no measured temperature or fan noise figures for this machine, so we can't tell you how loud it is or how hot the keyboard deck gets, and we won't estimate. But the physics is not mysterious: sustained high GPU power in a laptop means audible fans under load. Anyone who plays with speakers rather than a headset, or in a shared room, should treat that as a known unknown rather than assume it's a non-issue.

The other consequence is that these frame rates are almost certainly plugged-in figures. Mobile GPUs are power-limited far below their mains figures on battery, and nothing in this data set tells you what the machine does unplugged. Do not buy this expecting the numbers above on battery.

The CPU's role

The Core Ultra 9 275HX is at the top of Intel's mobile enthusiast stack, and its influence is visible in specific places in this set rather than uniformly. Strange Brigade at 403fps, Dota 2 at 190fps, X-Plane 11 at 116fps and the difficult parts of Baldur's Gate 3 are all workloads where the processor is at least as important as the graphics card. The high results in the CPU-sensitive titles suggest the platform isn't leaving performance behind in the games most likely to expose a weak processor.

That has a real bearing on longevity in one specific direction: simulation and strategy games, which tend to become CPU-bound as their worlds grow, will hold up better here than on a machine with the same GPU and a lesser processor. The flip side is that in the two heaviest titles — Doom: The Dark Ages and Assassin's Creed Shadows — the CPU is not the constraint and a faster one would change nothing. You are paying for headroom that a subset of your library will use.

32GB of memory is the right amount for this class of machine in 2025 and removes what has become a genuine constraint at 16GB in several recent releases. 1024GB of storage is adequate rather than generous; two or three current open-world installs will consume a meaningful fraction of it, and anyone with a large library should plan on either managing installs actively or adding storage.

The VRAM question

12GB is the specification on this machine that will cause the most argument, and it deserves a plain assessment rather than either panic or dismissal.

At 1080p, which is where every one of these measurements was taken, 12GB is not a limitation in any of the ten titles here. The frame rates would show it if it were — VRAM exhaustion produces stutter and sharp frame time spikes rather than a gently lower average, and the results are consistent with a machine that has enough. At the panel's native 2560x1600 with high texture settings, ray tracing enabled and frame generation running, the margin narrows considerably, because all three of those things consume video memory. We don't have measurements at that resolution to tell you where the line falls.

The honest framing is this: 12GB is sufficient today for the resolution this machine is most likely to be played at with upscaling engaged, and it is the specification most likely to force a settings compromise in three years' time rather than the GPU's raw throughput. If you keep laptops for five years and play new releases on day one at maximum texture settings, that's a real consideration. If you keep them for three years and are comfortable stepping textures down one notch when a game demands it, it isn't.

What we don't have

To be clear about the boundaries of this analysis: the measured data covers ten games at one resolution and one preset, with upscaling off. We have no ray-traced measurements beyond what Doom: The Dark Ages implies by requiring RT, no upscaled figures, no measurements at the panel's native resolution, no battery runtime, no temperature or noise readings, no display brightness or colour measurements, and no confirmed UK price. Where those things matter to your decision, this review can't answer them and we're not going to invent answers.

The screen

A 16in 2560x1600 OLED at 165Hz is, on paper, the most attractive part of this specification, and it changes how you should think about the frame rates above.

Start with the aspect ratio. 2560x1600 is 16:10, which gives you meaningfully more vertical space than a 16:9 panel of the same diagonal. In games this is a modest benefit — a slightly taller field of view in titles that handle it correctly, occasional letterboxing in ones that don't. Outside games it's a substantial one. Anything involving a document, a spreadsheet, a code editor or a timeline benefits directly from vertical pixels, and if this machine is going to double as a work laptop, the aspect ratio is doing more for you than the refresh rate is.

OLED brings the things OLED always brings: true black, effectively unlimited contrast, and per-pixel response times fast enough that motion clarity at a given refresh rate is visibly better than on an LCD running the same number. That last point is underrated. 165Hz on an OLED does not look like 165Hz on a mid-tier IPS panel, because the smearing that dominates LCD motion is largely absent. If you have been playing on a conventional laptop screen, the difference in a fast-moving scene is immediate.

It also brings OLED's known trade-offs. Static interface elements — a minimap, a health bar, a taskbar, an always-open IDE — carry a burn-in risk over long ownership that LCDs do not have. Modern panels mitigate this with pixel shifting and refresh cycles, and the risk is much lower than it was a few years ago, but it is not zero, and someone who leaves the same application open eight hours a day for three years is the person most exposed to it. OLED also typically draws more power than an LCD when displaying bright content, which has implications for battery life that we have no measured figures to quantify.

Can the GPU drive it?

This is the question that matters, and the honest answer is: at 1080p, comfortably in half the measured titles; at the panel's native resolution, we don't have the data to say.

Of the ten games measured, five exceed the panel's 165Hz refresh rate at 1080p: Strange Brigade at 403fps, Dota 2 at 190fps, Final Fantasy XV at 181fps, GTA V at 180fps and F1 25 at 172fps. In those titles the machine is producing more frames than the display can show, which means at 1080p you have surplus performance to spend — on resolution, on settings, or on nothing at all if you'd rather have the quieter fans.

Cyberpunk 2077 at 134fps, X-Plane 11 at 116fps and Baldur's Gate 3 at 108fps sit below 165Hz but comfortably above the point where a high-refresh panel stops being useful. A variable refresh display showing 108-134fps is a substantially better experience than a 60Hz panel showing the same frame rates, and these three results are the ones where the 165Hz specification earns its place.

Doom: The Dark Ages at 67fps and Assassin's Creed Shadows at 63fps are the titles where the panel is largely wasted at these settings — you are running a 165Hz display at around 60fps. That is not a criticism of the machine so much as a description of what those two games cost to render. Both would climb substantially with upscaling engaged, which is how they were designed to be played.

Moving from 1920x1080 to 2560x1600 is roughly a 1.9x increase in pixels rendered. Frame rates do not scale linearly with pixel count — CPU-bound titles barely move, GPU-bound ones fall closer to proportionally — but the direction is unambiguous and the magnitude is large. We have no measured figures at native resolution and will not estimate them. What we can say with confidence is structural: the games at the top of this list have enough surplus that they will remain fast at native resolution, the games in the middle will land somewhere considerably below their 1080p figures, and the two heaviest titles will need DLSS to be comfortable at 2560x1600. That last point isn't a criticism specific to this laptop; it's true of essentially every mobile GPU currently sold paired with a panel of this resolution.

The practical implication for a buyer: if you intend to run games at the panel's native resolution without upscaling, this machine will do it in your back catalogue and in well-optimised current releases, and will not do it in the heaviest 2025 titles at High settings. If you're comfortable with DLSS — and at 2560x1600 on a 16in panel, quality-mode upscaling is very difficult to distinguish from native — that constraint largely disappears.

Build, size and portability

We don't have confirmed chassis dimensions for this machine in our data, only the weight: 2.406kg. That figure, combined with the 16in panel, tells you most of what you need to know about how it will get used.

2.4kg is a properly heavy laptop by 2025 standards. It is not a machine you sling into a bag without noticing, and by the time you've added a gaming laptop's power brick — which for a machine driving a GPU at this power level will be a substantial object in its own right, though we have no wattage or weight figure for it — you are carrying something in the region of three kilograms all in. That is a train journey, not a daily commute with a bike at either end.

What that weight buys is the performance discussed above. The comparison against the Razer Blade 16 makes the trade-off unusually explicit: a 5090 in a thin chassis and a 5070 Ti in a thicker one produce, across eight shared games, the same average frame rate. The Blade is the machine you'd rather carry. This is the machine you'd rather play on, and it is not close on price either — the Razer is £5,000, and this configuration, whatever it eventually costs, is not going to be that.

The 16in 16:10 form factor is currently the sweet spot for gaming laptops and this machine sits squarely in it. It gives you a screen large enough that native resolution is worth having and small enough that the machine fits on a desk without dominating it, and it fits in the great majority of laptop bags that a 17in or 18in machine will not. Against the MSI Katana 17 HX and the MSI Crosshair 18 HX AI in the comparison set, both physically larger classes of machine, the Legion's footprint advantage is real even before you get to the frame rates.

The battery is 80Wh. That is at the upper end of what's practical in this class — regulatory limits on what you can carry onto an aircraft cap laptop batteries not far above it — and it means Lenovo has not skimped on capacity. What it translates to in hours, we cannot tell you, because we have no measured runtime figure and won't guess at one. The relevant variables are all pushing in the same direction, though: a top-tier HX-class processor, a discrete GPU, and an OLED panel at 2560x1600 are collectively not a recipe for long unplugged use. Treat the battery as enough for a meeting, a flight's worth of light work with the display turned down, or a plausible evening of browsing — and treat any expectation of gaming unplugged for more than a short session as unrealistic on any machine of this type.

One structural point that follows from the weight and the power draw: this is a laptop in the sense that it folds shut and runs off a battery in an emergency, but its natural habitat is a desk with a power outlet. If you're buying it, buy it as a desktop replacement that can be moved, not as a portable that happens to game. Everything about the specification — the OLED panel that rewards a controlled lighting environment, the sustained GPU power that produces heat and noise, the 2.4kg mass — points the same way.

How it compares

Every comparison below is drawn only from games both machines have measured, so the sample size differs from rival to rival. That's stated in each case, and it matters: a six-game average and an eight-game average are not the same quality of evidence, and the composition of the shared set affects the result. A comparison weighted towards CPU-bound titles will flatter a machine with a strong processor; one weighted towards heavy ray-traced titles will flatter a machine with more GPU.

Razer Blade 16 Core Ultra 9 — RTX 5090, £5,000

Across eight shared games, this Legion averages level with the Blade. No advantage either way.

This is the comparison that most clearly demonstrates why GPU tier alone is a poor buying guide. The Blade carries the fastest mobile GPU Nvidia sells and costs £5,000. The Legion carries a part two tiers down. On the games they share, the measured figures are indistinguishable in aggregate. The Blade's justification has to come from somewhere other than frame rate — and it does have a case, because it is a dramatically thinner and lighter machine with a build quality reputation the Legion line does not chase, and there are people for whom that is worth real money.

But if what you want is frames per second, spending £5,000 to match a machine that will cost a fraction of it is not a defensible decision on this evidence. The Blade's 5090 is doing far less than a 5090 is capable of, because there is nowhere in that chassis to put the heat. This is not a criticism unique to Razer; every very thin laptop with a very fast GPU has the same problem. It's a criticism of buying by model number.

Asus ROG Strix Scar 16 — RTX 5090, no confirmed UK price

Across seven shared games, this Legion averages 15fps behind the Strix Scar.

Here is what a 5090 looks like when it is properly fed. The Scar is a 16in machine like the Legion, built by a manufacturer that competes directly on sustained power, and the result is a real and consistent advantage of 15fps on average. That is a gap you would notice in the heavier titles — in a game running around 63fps, 15fps is a substantial proportional improvement — and a gap you would not notice at all in the titles already running above the refresh rate.

We have no confirmed UK price for the Scar either, so we cannot tell you whether that 15fps is worth what it costs. What we can tell you is that the two-tier GPU gap between these machines produces a 15fps average difference on shared games, which is a much smaller return than the marketing hierarchy implies, and that the Legion's OLED panel is a specification the buyer should weigh against it.

Alienware 16X Aurora, RTX — RTX 5070, £2,569

Across six shared games, this Legion averages 10fps ahead.

The Alienware is the most directly comparable machine in the set: same screen size class, one GPU tier down, £2,569 confirmed. A 10fps average advantage over six games is a genuine but not transformative lead — it's roughly the difference between 63fps and 73fps in a heavy title, or between 108 and 118 in Baldur's Gate 3. Meaningful at the bottom of the range, invisible at the top.

Whether the Legion is worth more than £2,569 depends on the price we don't have, and on how much you value the OLED panel and the 32GB of memory relative to whatever the Alienware brings. The measured performance gap alone does not justify a large premium; the panel might.

MSI Katana 17 HX — RTX 5070, £2,312

Across six shared games, this Legion averages 9fps ahead.

The Katana is the value argument in this comparison set. At £2,312 with an RTX 5070, it gives up 9fps on average across the shared games — the smallest gap of any of the three 5070 machines here, which suggests MSI is running its GPU reasonably hard in that chassis. It is a 17in laptop, so it is a larger and, in all likelihood, heavier object than the Legion, and we have no data on its panel to compare against the OLED.

If your budget is the constraint and your requirement is "runs modern games well at 1080p", the Katana's measured deficit is small enough that the Legion needs to arrive at a competitive price to justify itself on frame rates alone. It has other arguments — screen, size, memory — but not an overwhelming performance one against this specific rival.

MSI Crosshair 18 HX AI — RTX 5070, £2,095

Across seven shared games, this Legion averages 26fps ahead.

This is the largest gap in the comparison set, and it comes against the cheapest machine at £2,095. 26fps across seven games is a substantial and consistently visible difference — it is the gap between a heavy title being marginal and being comfortable, and it holds across a larger shared sample than the two six-game comparisons above.

The more informative observation is what this comparison says alongside the Katana result. Both machines carry an RTX 5070. Against one, this Legion is 9fps ahead; against the other, 26fps. That 17fps spread between two laptops with the same GPU is nearly twice the entire gap between the Legion's 5070 Ti and the better of the two 5070s. If you take one thing away from this section, take that: the variation between implementations of the same GPU in this market is comparable to the variation between GPU tiers. Buying on the model number printed on the box will mislead you in both directions.

Reading the comparison set as a whole

Line the five rivals up and a clear picture emerges. This machine sits above every RTX 5070 laptop in our database by margins ranging from 9 to 26fps. It sits level with one RTX 5090 laptop and 15fps behind another. In other words, it occupies the entire space between the tiers, which is exactly where a well-implemented 5070 Ti should sit, and it does so without the exotic price tag attached to the top of the range.

The gap to the Strix Scar is the only comparison in the set that suggests you'd get materially more performance by spending more, and even that gap is worth examining game by game rather than in aggregate. In titles already running above the panel's refresh rate, 15fps is worth nothing. In Doom: The Dark Ages and Assassin's Creed Shadows, it is worth a great deal. Which of those two categories describes your library should determine whether you care.

Who it's for

The clearest case for this machine is someone who wants a 16in desktop replacement with an excellent panel and enough GPU to run everything currently released at high frame rates, and who has understood that the frame rate advantage of the tiers above is smaller than the price gap between them.

The mixed-library player. If your week contains some competitive play and some single-player releases, this specification handles both without a compromise in either direction. Dota 2 at 190fps and F1 25 at 172fps mean the competitive half of your library saturates the 165Hz panel. Cyberpunk at 134fps and Baldur's Gate 3 at 108fps mean the single-player half runs at frame rates high enough that the high-refresh panel and the OLED response time are doing real work. The two heavy 2025 releases sit around 60fps at 1080p High without upscaling, which is a workable floor with obvious room to improve via DLSS.

The person who cares about the screen. A 2560x1600 OLED at 165Hz is a better display than most people buying gaming laptops end up with, and it's the specification you look at for every hour you own the machine rather than only when a benchmark runs. If you have used an OLED and can't go back, this is a substantially stronger proposition than an equivalently priced machine with a conventional panel and a faster GPU, because the panel difference is visible constantly and the GPU difference is visible in two of ten measured games.

The simulation and strategy player. The Core Ultra 9 275HX shows up in the results where CPU-bound workloads live — X-Plane 11 at 116fps, Baldur's Gate 3 at 108fps, Dota 2 at 190fps — and those are the genres where processors age into being the constraint. A machine with this CPU will hold up better in a large campaign save or a dense scenery region than one with the same GPU and a weaker processor.

The person who wants one machine for work and games. 16:10, 2560x1600, 32GB of memory and a top-tier HX processor is a genuinely good specification for productivity as well as games, and the 16in footprint is manageable in a way that a 17in or 18in machine isn't. The caveats are the 2.4kg weight and the unmeasured battery life, both of which push this towards being a machine that lives on a desk and gets moved rather than one that gets carried.

Who should buy something else

Anyone who needs genuine portability. 2.406kg plus a large power adapter is a machine you plan around, not one you forget about. If you carry a laptop every day, this is the wrong category entirely, and the honest advice is to buy something light and use a desktop or a streaming service for games.

Anyone maximising frames per pound right now. We have no confirmed UK price, so we cannot compute value and have not published a score. If that is your primary decision criterion, you are better served by the machines in the comparison set that do have prices: the MSI Crosshair 18 HX AI at £2,095, the MSI Katana 17 HX at £2,312 and the Alienware 16X Aurora at £2,569 are all known quantities, and the Katana in particular gives up only 9fps on shared games. Come back when this configuration has a confirmed price and a score.

Anyone who plays the newest, heaviest releases at maximum settings without upscaling. The measured 67fps in Doom: The Dark Ages and 63fps in Assassin's Creed Shadows are at 1080p, and the panel is 2560x1600. If your standard is native resolution, maximum settings, ray tracing on, upscaling off, you want the tier above and you want it in a chassis that can feed it — which, on this evidence, means something like the Strix Scar rather than something like the Blade 16.

Anyone planning to keep this for five or six years at maximum texture settings. 12GB of VRAM is adequate now and will become the binding constraint before the GPU's raw throughput does. That's a manageable problem if you're willing to step textures down a notch; it's a real one if you aren't.

Anyone who needs silence. We have no measured noise figures for this machine and won't invent any, but a GPU running at the power level these results imply, in a 2.4kg chassis, is not going to be quiet under load. If you play in a shared space without a headset, treat that as an unresolved question and look for measured acoustic data before committing.

Anyone worried about OLED burn-in in a work context. If this machine will spend eight hours a day with the same interface on screen and three years in your possession, an LCD is the lower-risk choice, and there are plenty of good ones.

The bottom line

Judged purely on the benchmark data, this is a well-executed machine. The RTX 5070 Ti here is performing like a part that has been given room to work: level with a £5,000 RTX 5090 laptop across eight shared games, within 15fps of a properly cooled one across seven, and 9 to 26fps clear of every RTX 5070 machine in our database. The 146fps average across the five scoring-suite games places it exactly where a good implementation of this GPU should sit. The panel is better than the class norm. The processor shows up where processors matter.

The open questions are price, noise, thermals and battery life, and of those, price is the one that determines whether any of this is a recommendation. A machine that performs like this can be excellent value or poor value depending entirely on a number we don't have. When it's confirmed, the score will follow — and the frame rates above are what it will be computed against.

How it compares