8.4 Score
Pros
- Monstrous Build Quality and Superb Finish
- There's Room for Upgradability which is nice
- Decent Specification for an Entry Level Gaming Machine
- Thermals were pretty impressive and Fans ran really quiet than expected
- Good buy for the offered Price tag
Cons
- Competitors offer similar-or-same specs for less price
- Limited Choice of Variants to choose from
- The display is so-so
It’s been a while since we looked at a Gaming machine from Lenovo. In fact, this is literally the first time we are even reviewing one from them. After a long and winding road, we finally got our hands on the Legion 5 which initially we wanted to review hand in hand with the TUF Gaming laptop since it falls in the same category of sorts. Even if that can’t happen anymore, worry not, this review of the Lenovo Legion 5 is worth your time.
Look and Feel
For a budget friendly price tag, the Lenovo Legion 5 has far superior build than any manufacturers we have seen in the market that was released this year alongside with this laptop. Everything about this laptop is just a perfect example on what a good build should be, and Lenovo didn’t disappoint. What is very interesting and pleasant to the eye sight is how simple and clean it looks – there’s none of that gamer design language going on but a plain and simple Legion Logo on the outside placed at the corner and the Lenovo logo once you lift open the display below the keyboard in this slate Grey finish.
It does have some ThinkPad hint in the design going for it – especially the display bezel and hinge. The camera has a Privacy Eye Shutter which – again we’ve seen in other Lenovo Laptop recently. The feel of the laptop is quite alright with a polycarbonate finish and a solid construction. It feels like a well put together laptop. The display hinge is sturdy and nice to use. For the most part, if you do get your hands on the Legion 5, you will love the build entirely. It isn’t just one that’s nice to look at but to hold too.
Specification and Performance
Specification in gaming laptop has gotten a lot exciting, especially with the drop of the Ryzen 4000 Series processor not too long ago. That said, the Legion 5 gets the same treatment under the hood and it has the following specification:
- AMD Ryzen 5 4600H Processor 6 Core 12 Thread
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 with 4GB GDDR6 VRAM
- 8GB Single Channel DDR4 RAM
- Samsung 512GB M.2 SSD
The specs you see above is quite the entry level Gaming laptop territory so to speak. That said, it basically goes against the Acer Nitro 5 we reviewed and the ASUS TUF Gaming Laptop lineup. But thing is, we didn’t review the base variants of either laptop. But this is just to give users an idea on which competitors its pitting against.
The ports on the laptop is really decent and ever since coming across laptops that has ports positioned at the back, I’ve always wanted to see more laptops to do this. Legion has been doing that for a while and I have to say, it’s also a cable management friendly laptop as you will be running most of the wires on the back rather than the sides. Although on the side, the laptop has two USB A Ports on either side and a Headphone jack. On the back, the laptop houses an Ethernet Port, USB-C Port, 2x USB-A Ports, HDMI, DC IN, and a Kensington Lock.
Now that the ports are out of the way, let’s talk about the performance. As always, we benchmarked the laptop with the tools that we do to give an idea on how it performs. In CrystalDiskMark, the performance of the SSD and the speed excels really well with a Sequential Read Speed of 3596MB/s and a write speed of 2988MB/s respectively.
In CPU Centric tasks, the Ryzen 5 4600H processor can put up a good show in both Blender and Cinebench R20 – with scores of 3393 points in multicore performance and 455 points in single core performance. As for Blender the laptop can finish the whole render in 4 minutes+ which is way more impressive – given that this isn’t even the Ryzen 7 processor which we have reviewed in the past and it performs as impressive as the 5 and even if you settle for the 5, you’d be more than happy and will be enjoying CPU intensive tasks. Finally, we do have the other benchmarks for the laptops to give you an idea on how good it would perform. We benched with PCMARK10, 3DMARK, Geekbench 5 and V-RAY.
As for gaming, since it is a gaming laptop – we have to test some games to give you an idea on how well it performs. That said, we selected Far Cry New Dawn, Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order and Metro Exodus. The scores are as what you’d get on an entry level GPU with quite okay frame rates and for the most part you will be playing some of these aforementioned AAA titles under low settings or medium at best. You can look at the benchmark scores below. But one thing is that the thermal fans ran quiet even on maximum loads and the thermals were pretty acceptable with a peak temperature of 87-93 degrees at max load or when gaming for the CPU and 73-78 degrees for the GPU.
Display
The Legion 5 we received came with a 15.6” FHD IPS Anti-Glare display with a 120Hz Refresh rate. The Laptop doesn’t cover an 100% sRGB Color space, but they do have a variant where you can opt in for one. Ours, does a 45% estimated NTSC color coverage which makes it an okay display to just do your usual task like watching a movie or show on Netflix, getting some work done and playing some games. But if you do plan to use this display for some editing work or color correction, you might want to think again because it doesn’t offer the best colors one could ask for. That said, if you do want a much more color accurate display then you can configure the laptop with the better display as we mentioned earlier. But if you aren’t too worried about that and you just want to play some games and use it purely for entertainment, the 120Hz display would suffice.
Keyboard & Trackpad
What I do enjoy using in this laptop is the keyboard as they are properly and thoughtfully laid out. It comes with a 4 Zone RGB lighting and you can configure it with the help of Lenovo Vantage App which comes pre-installed with the laptop. It’s a chiclet style keyboard with a decent key travel and I actually enjoyed typing in this keyboard. For starters, all the key size is normal, and they didn’t alter the size for an odd shaped which we have seen other manufacturers do in the past. The arrow keys on the laptop are decent sized and can be actually used and the number pad, which isn’t necessary has an exact layout as what you’d see in a proper keyboard.
The trackpad on the Legion 5 is decent and nice to use. There isn’t dedicated Left and Right button, but they have gone for the modern under-the-trackpad approach. Other than that, it works well, thanks to Windows Precision driver and the palm rejection works just as well you’d think.
Battery Life and Charging
Battery life on this laptop is surprisingly alright – we did test the Modern Office test to see how long it would last and the laptop can last about approx. 5 hours 30 minutes if you plan to just use the laptop for productivity and nothing else. If you do plan to game on the laptop using the battery power, chances are the laptop would only last for about 1 hour 30 minutes and maybe you could get an extra 10-15 minutes with the help of the battery saver mode. During our time, we did test the laptop using for productivity – which involves me using my browser, Word for writing content, a little bit of Netflix and Spotify playing in the background.
Conclusion
Concluding, the Lenovo Legion 5 is a robust laptop overall and the build quality alone is more than enough to convince anyone to purchase the laptop. But in reality, performance matter too and the laptop gives what an entry level or a budget conscious user would want. That said the laptop is configurable if you were to get yours via Lenovo Online Store and the base variant starts at RM 3749 which is the one, we reviewed here.
It is quite steep if you were to compare with the other contenders in the market but again, if you do buy via Online, you can get some extra discounts to save some money as well. But for what its worth, if you do plan to get a laptop and you want something robust and doesn’t break the bank, then look no further. 😊
But if you do want something a little more powerful of sorts, then you may want to resort to the ASUS TUF Gaming Laptop or even the Zephyrus G14.