Provided By: Lenovo
Recommended Model: $1099.99
Closer Look:
The Legion 5 is entirely built out of plastic, and it hasn’t changed much in terms of design language from the previous Legion generation. The color is called Phantom Black, which is strange, because I really don’t think that it’s black at all. It actually seems a lot more like a dark gray.
You’ll notice the Legion branding in the corner, . It’s a very clean design, in my opinion.
The Lenovo Legion 5 packs a 15.6-inch FHD display with options of 60Hz, 120Hz, and 144Hz for the refresh rate. Lenovo sent me the 144Hz one, which is obviously the best for gaming. The higher the refresh rate, the smoother motions are and the faster you can react to things. It’s not just about pleasing animations; you’ll find real improvements to your gameplay.
It’s relatively bright, measuring more than 300 nits. I found the Dolby HDR panel offers reasonably crisp text, and at an 300 nits of rated brightness, it’s viewable even in a room flooded with sunlight. The display supports Dolby Vision, a dynamic HDR format that allows for vivid color and deep, dark black levels when you’re watching supported content.
Keyboard, Touchpad:
The Legion is equipped with an illuminated chiclet keyboard. The concave keys offer a short stroke and clear pressure point. The keyboard illumination (two brightness levels) which is controlled by a function key. Overall, Lenovo is delivering a keyboard suitable for everyday tasks here.
The multitouch capable trackpad has a footprint it does not lack space for using gesture controls. The pad also responds to inputs in the corners, and the smooth surface does not prevent fingers from sliding easily. The pad offers a short stroke and clearly audible and noticeable pressure point.
Ports:
The left and right sides of the laptop each host one USB 3.1 Type-A port, and the left also includes the headset jack. The rear is where you’ll find two more USB 3.1 ports, a USB Type-C port, an HDMI output, an Ethernet jack, and the Lenovo specific power jack.
The ports on the left and right are positioned in the middle, which leaves sufficient free space around the wrist rests.
The laptop comes with a compact and fairly light 170W charger that plugs in via their proprietary rectangular plug. A full charge takes about 2 hours if you enable Quick charging from the Vantage app, or 2+ hours otherwise. USB-C charging is not supported.
Internals:
To get inside this machine, you need to undo 11 Phillips-head screws. After you do so, pry the bottom panel with a plastic tool, starting from the front.
As we can see, our review unit came with 16 GB of DDR4 3200 MHz RAM out of the box, with two sticks in dual-channel, and a SSD, which is fast enough for everyday use.
This configuration gets the 60Wh battery, HDD cage with the screws for a SSD or Standard Hard Drive, two M.2 SSD slots, two memory slots and the WiFi module. Most of these are hidden behind aluminum shrouds that just pull right off.
Performance:
The Legion 5 that Lenovo sent me includes an AMD Ryzen 7 4800H, and it’s the main difference between this and the Legion 5i, which has Intel Comet Lake H processors. The Ryzen 7 4800H has a 45W TDP, just like the Intel options, and it has eight cores and 16 threads. A big difference with Ryzen 4000 is that it’s built on a 7nm process, while Intel is still on 14nm.
The Legion 5’s AMD Ryzen 7 4800H CPU and 16GB of RAM will handle most of your productivity tasks with ease.
Cinebench R20:
The results display that the AMD Ryzen 7 4800H processor’s single-core score is 475cb and its multi-core score is 4137cb.
Cinebench R23:
The results display that the AMD Ryzen 7 4800H processor’s single-core score is 1233cb and its multi-core score is 11503cb.
Gaming:
The Legion 5 performance mostly on par with other similarly spec’d laptops, though you don’t expect the Nvidia GeForce 1660 Ti graphics card to deliver the same level of detail as its high end siblings.
- Rise of the Tomb Raider benchmark (Very High, 1080p) with 54 fps.
- Grand Theft Auto V (Very High, 1080p), the Legion 5 hits 67 fps.
- Battlefield V (Ultra, 1080p), the Legion 5 hits 79 fps.
- Far Cry 5 (Ultra, 1080p), the Legion 5 hits 88 fps.
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Very High, 1080p), the Legion 5 hits 77 fps.
- Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (Very High, 1080p), the Legion 5 hits 88 fps.
- Apex Legends (Very High, 1080p), the Legion 5 hits 105 fps.
SSD Speeds:
The OEM Samsung PM991 M.2 NVMe drive does quite well but, it’s not the fastest drive for Read and Write.
Battery:
The Legion 5 sports a 60Wh battery, gaming laptops are never good when it comes to battery life, of course, with a few exceptions. You’re getting at least 6 hours 13 minutes of sustained use, which includes continuous web browsing, and video streams over Wi-fi at 50% brightness. When gaming, you’ll get just over three hours of life, which would be normal for a more expensive gaming laptop, but less than what we’d expect from a mid-range machine.
I’m fully confident that you can easily put in the 80wH battery. The link for the battery itself is Here, you will have to remove the hard drive cage. That will easy improve your battery life if your always on the go.
The Legion 5 performs well for someone who is not a hardcore gamer but still wants a gaming laptop that doesn't break the bank.
The Legion 5 is clearly a budget gaming laptop, and Lenovo knows the audience who might want a machine like this. The good news is that the Legion 5 performs well for someone who is not a hardcore gamer but still wants a gaming laptop. The AMD Ryzen platform is an excellent performer in CPU heavy tasks and efficient in everyday use. I definitely recommend getting the model with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060, But other than that, this is a really solid machine. I love Lenovo's more subtle design, and I appreciate that most of the ports are in the back..
