Dragos appoints Eric Cross as Chief Revenue Officer to lead global sales and marketing efforts in operational technology cybersecurity amid rising industry risks. Read...

Dragos appoints Eric Cross as Chief Revenue Officer to lead global sales and marketing efforts in operational technology cybersecurity amid rising industry risks. Read...

DXC Technology and Boomi partner to accelerate AI-driven automation and modernise IT systems, enhancing efficiency and integration across enterprise operations. Read...

Nvidia’s GeForce Now service is offering its Ultimate tier subscribers an enormous upgrade today: GeForce RTX 5080 servers, cinematic visual upgrades, and a new “install to play” service that will “download” new games directly to the cloud, making them instantly ready to play. Nvidia is leaving the price of the GeForce Now Ultimate tier unchanged at $19.99 per month, and $99.99 for six months, Nvidia said at the Gamescom show. Nvidia is also adding an annual GeForce Now Ultimate subscription for $199.99. A GeForce Now Ultimate daily membership will be available at launch, Nvidia said, presumably for the current price of $7.99. Session lengths will remain at eight hours for Ultimate subscribers. The point of Nvidia’s GeForce Now service has always been to deliver a cloud gaming experience that’s as close as possible to what a gamer would experience on a PC. The price of graphics cards, of course, has climbed to astronomical heights, making GeForce Now a way of partially offsetting the hundreds of dollars a gamer would need to shell out for the latest RTX 4000 or 5000 series cards. Of course, playing a game in the cloud has traditionally meant forcing certain restrictions upon the subscriber: a limited resolution and image quality to minimize the amount of data sent back and forth over a broadband connection, and some level of latency or delay between a user’s input and a corresponding response from the game running on the server. Nvidia’s GeForce Now upgrades attack all of those angles to improve the experience. Nvidia’s new GeForce Now upgrade offers an RTX 5080 performance upgrade, but only on some games. Naturally, the most high-profile upgrade is the jump from the current RTX 4080 servers to the new RTX 5080 servers powered by Nvidia’s “Blackwell” architecture. Those come with all the bells and whistles you might expect from an RTX 5080 card, including DLSS 4 multi-frame generation that enables 5K resolution at 120 fps, and Nvidia Reflex technology with support for 360 fps at 1080p resolutions. Nvidia’s saying that if you’re in a GeForce Now-supported region, the “majority” of gamers will experience sub-30-millisecond latency. There’s a catch, however. Nvidia isn’t saying that all of its games will be playable on its Nvidia 5080 “Blackwell” servers, just that “you’ll be able to play select games with RTX 5080 performance.” Additional 5080-supported games will roll out weekly, Nvidia said. Nvidia isn’t saying exactly which CPUs will be used to power its new GeForce Now servers, but did say that they’ll be driven by AMD’s “Zen 5 CPUs” and Nvidia’s own ConnectX-7 SmartNICs. Currently, the Ultimate tier offers 16 virtual CPUs, and presumably that will remain the same. All told, there are 62 teraflops of gaming performance and 48GB of frame buffer available, with up to 100Mbps of data streamed down to your PC. That will boost performance on the Steam Deck from 60 to 90 fps, Nvidia said, and to 120 fps on the Lenovo Legion Go S. LG TVs will be able to game at 5120×2880 when connected to Windows or a macOS device — yes, macOS. The GeForce Now client on macOS will receive the same upgrades as the Windows app, finally turning Cupertino’s hardware into a gaming machine. Nvidia is also thinking about how games will actually look on your screen, too. If you game on a laptop, Nvidia will auto-detect what resolution it can game at, and will deliver you the best visual quality it thinks you can stand. GeForce Now will use YUV color with 4:4:4 chroma sampling to make games look great, tapping into AI where necessary to smooth graphical overlays. You’re going to like Nvidia’s new “install to play” One of the most exciting upgrades, however, is a not-so-obvious one: install-to-play. The legacy GeForce Now service required you to own a game, then “load” it onto one of Nvidia’s cloud servers. After you finished playing, however, those server resources would be reassigned to other users, instead of maintaining a persistent server dedicated to your gameplay alone. That meant a small delay while your game once again “loaded” onto a GeForce Now server. Now, that’s changed. Nvidia is assigning 100GB of dedicated cloud storage to each GeForce Now Ultimate subscriber, meaning that one or a few games will always be instantly available to play, including saved data. You’ll also be able to buy additional storage for 200GB for $2.99 per month, 500GB for $4.99 per month, and 1TB for $7.99 per month. Users who subscribe to the cheaper performance tier will also receive the install-to-play storage options, too. All told, the upgrade adds about 2,200 install-to-play games to the existing GeForce Now streaming library, for a total of about 4,500 or slightly more. They will include games like Obsidian’s The Outer Worlds 2, the Paradox sequel Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines 2, or Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 from Activision. Nvidia believes that you’ll get better performance streaming its games than with a PlayStation 5 Pro. Finally, Nvidia is offering more click-to-play options to try out GeForce Now. For example, if your buddy wants you to drop in and play Fortnite, they’ll be able to drop a “link” right in Discord. As long as you have an Epic gamertag set up, you’ll be able to jump right in — even if you’re on your ancient office desktop without a GPU installed. Nvidia also said that it’s “lightening” its Project G-Assist AI app, allowing it to be played on all RTX-equipped PCs with more than 6GB of VRAM. Read...

The Marsden Fund, which backs fundamental research is among three contestable funds to lose millions to help set up the new Institute for Advanced Technology. Read...

At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Optional solar panel is effective at keeping the battery topped up Pre-recording option ensures you don’t miss the start of any motion events Responsive and quick to load videos, thanks in part to its 5GHz Wi-Fi 6 support Cons No infrared night vision Only 2K resolution (although the images look good) Confusing and poorly organized app Our Verdict Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Best Prices Today: Reolink Altas Retailer Price Check Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket Best Prices Today: Check today’s prices To clarify from the start: The Reolink Altas is an entirely new security camera, even though there is already another Altas-branded product in existence; namely, the Altas PT Ultra (and it is “Altas,” by the way. We haven’t misspelled “Atlas.”) Anyway, while that other Altas is a chunky pan/tilt/zoom camera, this Altas is a bullet-style camera with a fixed lens. Thanks to its 20,000mAh battery and the 6-watt solar panel bundled with this SKU, Reolink says one hour of direct sunlight daily can power 24/7 continuous recording without the battery ever draining completely. You can also buy the camera without the panel for about $50 less ($149.99 vs. $199.99). In many ways, the Altas is the svelte, simpler younger sibling of the Altas PT Ultra we reviewed in Septenber 2024, ditching the pan/tilt motor and some of its other luxe features to make for a simpler and more affordable product. Credit to Reolink for taking a hard look at their industrial design with this camera, as the company is not known for always having the most forward-looking hardware. This one, measuring about 5 x 3 x 2.5 inches in size, is only slightly bigger than the palm of my hand, leaving only the oversized antenna to draw attention to itself. Battery life one of the Reolink Altas’ major selling points. The 20,000 mAh cell can be charged via a standard USB-C cable or the rugged 6-watt solar panel. Most people will use the provided ball-and-socket mount to attach the camera to a wall or ceiling, but the pole/tree-strap system included with the PT Ultra is also present here; and again, it’s too short to be useful for strapping the camera to anything more than a few inches in diameter. Specifications Reolink sent its 6-watt Solan Panel 2 with the Altas for this review. It costs $39.99 if purchased separately.Christopher Null/Foundry The Altas is rated IP66 (better than the IP65 rating on the PT Ultra) for weatherproofing, which our guide to IP codes tells us means it can withstand exposure to powerful jets of water. And like its sibling, it’s impervious to the ingress of particulate matter. It has a dual-band Wi-Fi 6 adapter onboard, along with a mic and speaker for two-way audio, an integrated siren, and both black-and-white and color night vision, thanks to Reolink’s ColorX technology. The camera is a 2K model with resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels and a 110-degree diagonal viewing angle. Images looked surprisingly good in my testing, and I was able to pick out relatively far-off details, even though its actual resolution is a big step down from the PT Ultra’s 4K resolution. As with the PT Ultra, battery life is a major selling point. The 20,000 mAh cell can be charged via a standard USB-C cable or the rugged solar panel. The system is so power-conscious that Reolink says it can record continuously for 336 hours (that’s 14 days) without a recharge, or record 5 minutes per day for 540 days. The Reolink Altas captures video in 2K resolution, which is a step back from the 4K Altas PT Ultra, but the image quality was more than adequate for my purposes, especially at this price.Christopher Null/Foundry Those claims didn’t exactly pan out in my testing: I got only about 5 days of uninterrupted recording (without the solar panel, that is) before the battery petered out. Again, Reolink says that even modest sunlight hitting the solar panel will keep it running indefinitely, and that indeed was accurate. With the panel connected I rarely saw the battery at anything below 99 percent. The Reolink Alta can record to an internal microSD card—capacities up to 512GB are supported—although none is included (Amazon was bundling a 128GB card and a solar panel with the camera at the time of this review). Your other alternative for local storage is to buy a Reolink Home Hub, a $100 mass storage device that you connect to your home network. It supports up to eight Reolink cameras, and it comes with a 64GB microSD card, with slots for two more cards with capacities up to 512GB each. You can read our positive review at the preceding link. The terms of the optional Reolink Cloud service have not changed, except for support for more cameras and increased storage at the topmost tier. Pricing for the cloud service is $7/month (30 days, 5 cameras, 30GB storage), $11/month (30 days, 10 cameras, 80GB storage), or $16/month (60 days, 30 cameras, 250GB storage). As with the PT Ultra, onboard storage will be perfectly fine for most users, unless you absolutely need the only significant bonus feature the service includes: thumbnail photos delivered with push notifications when motion is detected. Installation and setup Reolink has paid less attention to set-up and app-based management. Initial configuration requires scanning a QR code and lots of waiting while loud verbal instructions in multiple languages erupt from the camera’s speaker. The process failed twice when I first tried to set it up, which is frustrating. Certain features in the Reolink app remain obtuse or, at best, horribly translated. Again, “Clear” is the app’s term high-resolution video. “Fluent” is the option for low-res recording. The Reolink could use a rethink in terms of its layout. All the features you’ll need are there, they can just a bit difficult to find.Christopher Null/Foundry As before, continuously recorded video is saved in 5-minute chunks, one right after another, on Reolink’s playback timeline. This is easy to scrub through, and if you’re only recording based on motion detection, the job is even easier thanks to the chronological thumbnails. The Altas also includes a new prerecording option that lets you capture 2 to 10 seconds of video before motion triggers a clip, though this is captured at a user-specified framerate of 1, 3 or 5 frames per second. It’s essentially a low-speed continuous recording system, though Reolink notes that using it will impact the battery considerably if you don’t have a steady sun source (up to 2 extra hours per day). The prerecording system worked perfectly in my testing, capturing the time just before a person entered the frame, exactly as specified. You won’t notice the lower frame rate for the prerecording because nothing is moving. The spotlights ringing the front of the camera are brighter than I expected, though their luminosity is not specified. I was able to light up the area for at least 30 feet at full brightness with the spotlights on, and to record in full color. That’s a good thing, because you’ll probably need the lights: Like the PT Ultra, there is no infrared night vision mode on the Altas, and in conditions of true darkness, the image was garbled and unusable, based on my testing with the spotlights turned off. Reolink’s pre-recording feature captures subjects that trigger the camera’s motion sensor before the camera actually starts to record.Christopher Null/Foundry The only way to get any workable image at night is with the spotlights turned on. Fortunately, their brightness is adjustable (and they can adjust automatically), so you don’t blast out the neighborhood. In my testing, clips lasted as long as motion occurred, with no cooldown between clips. Five minutes appears to be the maximum clip length. Clip thumbnails are also accurately tagged with a type of motion detected in them: person, animal, vehicle, or “others.” All told, the camera works really well, with the lack of infrared night vision the only major downside. Should you buy the Reolink Altas? If you don’t need pan/tilt features, the Reolink Altas is an excellent alternative to the Altas PT Ultra, which is bulky and awkward. This camera keeps most of the other features of the PT Ultra and trims about $80 off its suggested retail price. You’ll find cheaper outdoor cameras on the market—including ones bundled with solar panels—but the overall performance of the Reolink Altas might sway you to shell out a few extra bucks for it. If you are shopping for even less expensive, we’ll tell you which key security camera features you shouldn’t give up in the name of price. This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best home security cameras. Read...

At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Editing is faster with AI and automation Easy-to-use wizards Cons Limited control in some AI-generated graphics Our Verdict The new AI in CyberLink Photo Director 365 helps achieve results faster, with tools and wizards supporting design drafts. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Best Prices Today: Cyberlink PhotoDirector 365 Retailer Price PhotoDirector 365 Free Trial Free View Deal Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket Best Prices Today: Check today’s prices CyberLink‘s photo editing software has already impressed users in the past with its ease of use and strong results. The manufacturer offers many wizards, straightforward functions, and the option to edit images manually in an editor. Various special functions and templates support the user in their work. The development team has now added extensive artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to the feature list. To access these, you must choose the subscription version of the program, as several functions are not available in the free version. One advantage of the subscription is that new features are added on a fairly regular basis. CyberLink Photo Director 365: Faster, easier editing with AI Various AI functions make it easier to customize and enhance images. Expanding image content, removing people or objects, and optimizing photos are much easier with the current Photo Director 365. Image analysis and built-in suggestions for improvement assist with editing and speed up workflow. This is where users clearly benefit from the new technology. AI also supports editing of all types of portrait shots. The software uses a portrait as its base and can automatically add office attire to the subject. This means you can easily prepare your own photos for job applications or online profiles. The Business Outfit function works in a similar way, generating professional-looking photos of people in suits or elegant dresses. The CyberLink program offers numerous tools for editing portraits and creating professional business photos.Cyberlink Photo Director 365 can also add a suitable background or setting, making the images ideal for company websites or brochures, for example. For print products, the photos can be scaled up with AI to maintain the best possible quality, with the user guided through every step of the process. The built-in image tips are also very useful: the program shows examples of ideal results, along with motifs or elements that should be avoided. These innovations further extend the capabilities of classic image editing. CyberLink Photo Director 365: Creative designs that produce great results The GenAI Studio offers many options for creating a wide variety of documents and designs. Many ideas can be brought to life quickly by using its features. These include style transfer of all kinds–for example, creatively converting an image into manga-style graphics or generating templates with the help of AI prompts. The layout function, which lets you define the result with just a few clicks, is another strong point. The AI feature helps with complex designs, ensuring that objects, people, and animals appear correctly in their designated areas. The mood of a landscape shot can be changed in just a few steps with Remodel Scenes, which offers options such as sunrise or winter. The AI in Photo Director 365 enables creative landscape editing with style presets.Cyberlink CyberLink Photo Director 365: Where it falls short The results are often surprisingly good, but sometimes the software overshoots the mark, leaving images looking overly manipulated. There’s no option to adjust the balance between the original and the edited version. This also applies to the templates for creating videos with stylized collectible figures. All control is handed over to the AI, allowing users to choose captions, colors, and themes would help produce better clips. The templates for special occasions or holidays are impressive, making it easy to create digital greetings cards right on the screen. Read...

Chinese company Biwin has unveiled a new type of storage drive called the Mini SSD—also referred to as “1517”—that combines an extremely compact form factor with high data transfer speeds. The Verge writes that the Mini SSD measures 15mm x 17mm x 1.4mm, only slightly larger than a microSD card yet delivering up to 3,700 MB/s read speeds and 3,400 MB/s write speeds via a PCIe 4×2 connection. The Mini SSD is IP68-rated so it’s resistant to both water and dust, plus it can withstand drops from a height of 3 meters, and it uses a SIM-like slot with a slide-out tray, designed for laptops, mobiles, cameras, and more. The price and launch date are not yet known, but two Chinese handheld gaming computers—the GPD Win 5 and the OneXPlayer Super X—are already reportedly incorporating the technology. Read...

Civil liberty groups say in a letter to Sir Mark Rowley the technology`s deployment is `disappointing`. Read...

At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Respectable 1080p performance Excellent OLED display Fans aren’t very loud Not wildly heavy Cons Lenovo’s pricing is all over the place Short battery life Our Verdict The Lenovo Legion 5i 15IRX10 pairs an excellent display with solid internals for a great gaming experience. With a $1,199 price tag on a configuration close to our test unit, the value looks good. Just avoid Lenovo’s unnavigable first-party pricing. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Best Prices Today: Lenovo Legion 5i Retailer Price $1,599.99 View Deal Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket Best Prices Today: Check today’s prices Lenovo has a new generation of gaming laptops out, and Legion 5i 15IRX10 sits at the affordable end of the stack without cutting down too much. It features powerful processor options and a few RTX 50-series GPUs to power your games. Though Lenovo makes finding a good value hard with a chaotic pricing system, this Walmart configuration comes closest to our test unit and pegs the system at a solid bargain of $1,199. At that price, things look real peachy for the potent Legion 5i 15IRX10. Lenovo Legion 5i: Specs and features Model number: 15IRX10 CPU: Intel Core i7-14700HX Memory: 32GB DDR5 Graphics/GPU: Nvidia RTX 5060 (40-watt TGP) Display: 15.1-inch 1600p OLED,165Hz, Dolby Vision, VESA Trueblack 600 Storage: 1TB PCIe Gen4 SSD Webcam: 5MP Connectivity: 1x USB-C 10Gbps with Power Delivery and DisplayPort 2.1, 1x USB-C 10Gbps with DisplayPort 1.4, 3x USB-A 5Gbps, 1x RJ45, 1x HDMI 2.1, 1x 3.5mm combo audio Networking: WiFi 7, Bluetooth 5.4 Biometrics: Windows facial recognition Battery capacity: 80 watt-hours Dimensions: 13.58 x 10.05 x 0.85 inches Weight: 4.3 pounds MSRP: Approximately $1,199 as-tested ($1,299 base) Though our test unit has the above configuration, Lenovo does not appear to offer this exact setup to consumers. There is plenty of customization available though. The Legion 5i 15IRX10 can come with 13th or 14th Gen Intel Core processors in this configurator, or even bump up to 2nd Gen Intel Core Ultra processors in a separate configurator. At the low end, you can get an Intel Core i7-13650HX with 16GB of memory, 512GB of storage, and an RTX 5050 for an “Est Value” of $1,634 (but an actual price of $1,299 at the time of writing) using the custom configuration tool. Bumping up to a Core i7-14700HX or Core i9-14900HX is also possible, but entails a swap to the RTX 5070 as well. Arrow Lake configurations have the same memory and storage options, but they start out with an Intel Core Ultra 7 255HX and RTX 5060 for an “Est Value” of $1,704 and actual pricing at $1,309. This can be upgraded to an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX, which also comes with an RTX 5070 instead, and brings the price to $1,559 (though the “Est Value” shows as $1,954). One notable difference of the Core Ultra models is that they upgrade one of the USB-C ports to Thunderbolt 4.  Using Lenovo’s custom configurations, there’s not a huge delta between the Raptor Lake and Arrow Lake options, and the Core Ultra models are likely to have superior single-core performance and battery life. That said, the configurator tends to have significantly higher prices than pre-configured models and therefore doesn’t offer a great value.  For those seeking the best price, Walmart offers the closest configuration to what we’re testing here. It’s available for $1,199 at the time of writing, and includes all of the above specifications except only 16GB of memory. Thankfully, that DDR5 is user-upgradeable, so you can cheaply bump it up to this system’s 32GB if needed. The Lenovo Legion 5i has an excellent display for gaming and entertainment, a sturdy build, solid performance, and surprisingly quiet fans. Lenovo Legion 5i: Design and build quality IDG / Mark Knapp The Legion 5i 15IRX10 isn’t remarkable in its design, but it’s not disappointing either. The system is completely blacked out aside from its Legion logo power button, the white keyboard legend and their RGB lighting, and a little gray Lenovo branding on the rear thermal shelf. All that black looks fine briefly, but it starts to show finger oils quickly.  The looks are largely clean with rounded corners and chamfered edges around the base that may not be super ergonomic but are at least more comfortable than sharp 90-degree angles. The base is all plastic with a smooth polycarbonate upper and rougher ABS plastic bottom. The base is fairly sturdy, not exhibiting much flex. The display is surrounded by modest plastic bezels. The back of the display gets the one premium aspect: an aluminum lid with Lenovo’s Legion branding embossed with a smoky mirror finish. The construction is similar to many of Lenovo’s other Legion laptops. The top of the display has an extra-large section to both house the camera and provide a lip for opening the lid easily. The display attaches to the base with two hinges slightly shifted forward from the back edge of the laptop. This creates a little butt (thermal shelf) at the back with extra room for heat sinks. That back edge is largely occupied by exhaust vents. No exhaust goes out the sides.  Underneath, the Legion 5i 15IRX10 sits on three large rubber feet that hold it firmly in place and lift it up a good ways to provide airflow into the two bottom fans. There’s a large grille underneath, though only a small percentage of this is actually grille — mostly right under the fans. In this case, this at least allows sufficient air intake and doesn’t provide any extra opportunity for dust to get in.  All told, the Legion 5i 15IRX10 isn’t particularly inspired or exciting, but it feels decent and is a sturdily built laptop. The choice of a 15.1-inch display provides decent screen space while keeping the laptop small enough to fit into even some tight laptop sleeves. It’s not so heavy either at just 4.3 pounds. And thanks to the very thin display and modest base, the build isn’t very thick for a gaming laptop.  Lenovo Legion 5i: Keyboard, trackpad IDG / Mark Knapp My experience with the Legion 5i 15IRX10’s keyboard has been somewhat mixed. On one hand, the keys are surprisingly well stabilized, and they have a decent dish to help feel out the center and edges. But their travel is kind of rubbery, giving them a somewhat odd feel, like they also push my fingers back when resetting. With some adjustment, I could see this actually turning into a positive, as a quick-resetting key is ready to press that much sooner, but as it stands, it sort of throws my fingers into a funk. I was ultimately able to get up to a typing speed of 114 words-per-minute with a decent 97 percent accuracy, but this still isn’t quite exceptional.  I still love that Lenovo accommodates a full-size set of arrow keys on many of its gaming laptops. This makes navigation so much easier. There’s also a full number pad on the right side of the keyboard, though this has slim keys that end up feeling a little cramped.  Lenovo packed in 24 RGB lighting zones, which ultimately kind of feels like overkill for any system that’s not just going to buckle down and give you per-key lighting. The 24 zones do allow for a slightly smoother wave or lighting that responds to audio playing from the computer. But the zones are all vertical columns, not functionally useful zones. Customization options are rather limited. And the edges of zones blend together when displaying different colors, so you won’t get an impactful and precise customization no matter how you shake it. The keyboard will let you cycle through backlighting presets by pressing Fn+Space, but there’s no key for adjusting backlighting brightness. That must be done through Lenovo’s Legion Space software. On the bright side, the lighting effectively illuminates the key legends.  The trackpad is nothing special. It’s fairly small for a laptop this size, but still spacious enough for four-finger gestures and general navigation. It’s far over to the left side of the computer, though, which can make it awkward to use for right-handed users. It’s mylar surface is also not as smooth as it could be. Lenovo Legion 5i: Display, audio IDG / Mark Knapp The Legion 5i 15IRX10 offers an excellent display. Just about every aspect of it delivers quality, and that’s great to see from a gaming laptop that skews toward the budget side of things. The 2560×1600 panel is plenty sharp at the size. It has the perfect contrast of OLED, not to mention the ultra-fast pixel response times. And with a 165Hz refresh rate, you’ll get smooth visuals both in and out of games. OLEDs weren’t always very bright, but this panel happily hits 523 nits. And to top it off, the panel is accurate. I measured its color accuracy at an average dE1976 of 0.51 with a max dE1976 of just 1.33. If you’ve got to do serious color work or just want to see your games the way they’re meant to look, this screen is up to the task. The audio isn’t quite as impressive, but it’s not bad. The speakers rely on the Nahimic app to provide sufficient sound, and it thankfully helps deliver on that. Playing games and watching movies, it provides plenty of audio generally, though I did find some spoken videos surprisingly quiet while listening with the app set to its default Music mode. There’s not much stereo separation from the little bottom-firing speakers even though they sit at the outer edges of the laptop, so they don’t make for the most engrossing game audio.  Lenovo Legion 5i: Webcam, microphone, biometrics IDG / Mark Knapp You’ll get a decent camera from the Legion 5i 15IRX10. Even though it’s sharp, it will appear a bit soft in modestly lit spaces. Even with several lights on in my small office, footage appeared soft and grainy. That said, it managed a very natural exposure. Though the camera offers a high resolution, it doesn’t have the infrared tech to enable facial recognition. The laptop also lacks a fingerprint scanner, so you’re out of luck for biometrics. The mic array on the Legion 5i 15IRX10 fails to impress. In a busy environment, it struggles thoroughly to capture my voice clearly. It does successfully eliminate background noise to a degree, but fully at the expense of its ability to pick me up. As soon as I talk in that loud environment, the background noise merges with my voice and makes anything I say unintelligible. Even in a quiet environment, my voice sounds rather distant with some room echo noticeable.  Lenovo Legion 5i: Connectivity IDG / Mark Knapp There’s little to get excited about from the Legion 5i 15IRX10’s various connections. It’s not making the most of its size, offering just two USB-C ports on the left side along with a USB-A port and Ethernet. The right side includes two USB-A ports, a 3.5mm jack, and a camera kill switch. The laptop’s charging port is located on the rear along with an HDMI port. The ports on the sides are rather awkwardly spaced with gaps of varying sizes between them. For instance, the USB-A ports on the right have the entire height of the keyboard dividing them. None of the ports are terribly fast either, with the USB-A ports topping out at 5Gbps and the USB-C ports hitting just 10Gbps — no 20 or 40Gbps ports. At least the HDMI port is up to the 2.1 spec. Both USB-C ports can also handle video output with one offering DisplayPort 2.1 and the other DisplayPort 1.4. The wireless connections are managed by a MediaTek card that offers Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. It’s been fast and reliable in my testing, though as with many MediaTek cards I’ve used over the years, there is often a small delay when waking up the laptop from sleep before it will reconnect to known networks.  Lenovo Legion 5i: Performance The Legion 5i 15IRX10 is built with high-performance in mind, even if it isn’t aiming for the highest levels possible on modern hardware. This kind of horsepower generally makes everyday operation and even light creative workloads a breeze. We can see that quite clearly in PCMark 10, which measures holistic performance of the system. The Legion 5i 15IRX10 performs wonderfully. It’s not exceptional in this category, though. Most gaming laptops have plenty to offer in this area, and the Legion 5i 15IRX10 actually ends up looking less impressive next to even older machines. The Dell G15 and Gigabyte G6X both ran on a lower-tier CPU and a prior-gen RTX 4060 GPU, and yet they came out ahead in this test. The previous generation Lenovo Legion 5i also came out well ahead thanks in part to a more potent CPU and faster storage.   IDG / Mark Knapp On the bright side, the Legion 5i 15IRX10 lagging behind those systems in PCMark isn’t the biggest deal, since all of the systems are offering smooth and responsive operation. And when it comes to raw horsepower, the Legion 5i 15IRX10 claws back some ground. Its processor offered substantially higher performance in Cinebench’s multi-core testing, dramatically outstripping all but the earlier Legion 5i’s Core i9-14900HX. This also helps us see why Lenovo opted for an older CPU. The newer Intel Core 7 240H falls well shy of the Core i7-14700HX’s performance, even failing to match its single-core speeds. It means little that the Core 7 240H is newer, though, as it’s actually a Raptor Lake CPU in disguise and not one of the newer Lunar Lake or Arrow Lake architectures.  IDG / Mark Knapp The combination of a potent CPU and newer RTX 5060 GPU works in the Legion 5i 15IRX10’s favor when it comes to graphics performance. Where it had fallen behind the prior-gen Legion in some cases, it turned the tides back into its favor in 3DMark’s Port Royal test, where it pulled well ahead of the Legion 5i. It also demonstrates how a strong CPU can avoid bottlenecks by thoroughly outpacing the Alienware 16 Aurora despite this machine running the same GPU. IDG / Mark Knapp Its performance in synthetic benchmarks translated well to actual games, too. It churned out an average of 153 fps in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Here again, it shows the difference a CPU can make, as the RTX 5060-powered Alienware fell behind all the RTX 4060-powered machines because its CPU was holding the GPU back. The Legion 5i 15IRX10 doesn’t have the same issue, and that lets its RTX 5060 show the generational uptick in performance it’s capable of.  IDG / Mark Knapp This performance checks out in Metro Exodus as well, where the Legion 5i 15IRX10 again leads the pack by a decent margin. The balance of a strong CPU and GPU help it stay ahead of these other systems, which appear largely held back by the limitations of the RTX 4060 (or Intel Core 7 240H in Alienware’s case). Of course, this does also highlight the limitations of the Legion 5i 15IRX10. In very demanding games, like Metro Exodus, it can struggle to meet the 60 fps threshold. That said, the system could hit an 82 fps average in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p Ultra.  IDG / Mark Knapp Performance is consistent, too. Running a string of Steel Nomad benchmarks, the Legion 5i 15IRX10 maintained nearly the same average framerate between runs. CPU and GPU temps also settled in and stopped increasing after just a couple minutes. The fans aren’t even terribly loud to manage the thermals.  Since the Legion 5i 15IRX10 has a 2560×1600 display, you might be tempted to play games at this resolution. In some lighter games, that will be readily doable. The Legion 5i 15IRX10 managed a 98 fps average in Shadow of the Tomb Raider at its native resolution. But in Cyberpunk 2077, it only hit 48 fps. For native resolution gaming, you’ll likely want to tap into DLSS and potentially frame generation technology.  Lenovo Legion 5i: Battery life As we see all too often, performance advantages tend to come at the peril of battery life. And sure enough, the Legion 5i 15IRX10 struggles to offer much longevity where runtime is concerned. In our local video playback test, it fell a little bit shy of four hours. That’s not only a bad result for a gaming PC, but it’s bad among this group, especially compared to the Alienware 16 Aurora’s surprisingly strong 10-hour runtime IDG / Mark Knapp In normal use, the battery life isn’t any better. I was able to stream a two-hour movie with the display at about 50 percent brightness and still have an hour of battery left. Web browsing, research, and writing consumed the battery at a similar rate, with it just scraping by at over three hours. Lenovo Legion 5i: Conclusion The Legion 5i 15IRX10 has plenty going for it as an affordable gaming laptop, assuming you steer clear of Lenovo’s inscrutable pricing and just go with the Walmart model closest to our test configuration. For $1,199, the Legion 5i 15IRX10 is offering a lot. It has an excellent display for gaming and entertainment, a sturdy build, solid performance, and surprisingly quiet fans. Though the design is decently portable, the battery doesn’t last long. So you’ll want to bring the charger if you plan to do much on the go. A lot of the value here hinges on the low price though. With upgraded internals, the price of different configurations can truly soar, and the quality of this laptop doesn’t quite feel like it stacks up against $2,000 systems. But as a low-cost option, it’s great. Read...