Like we do in all our reviews, here’s the Lenovo legion 5 review and everything you need to know about this mind blowing budget laptop. From the design, to the display and performance, down to the battery and price of this machine, we have critically outlined everything for you from my personal experience with the laptop for over three months.
Contrary to one of the most common misconceptions people have about gaming on a PC or laptop is that you need to spend a lot of money to get anything that’s actually worth gaming on. Maybe that was the case some years back, but the absolute number of really nice, affordable gaming laptops in the market today is plenty for gamers on a budget. The Lenovo Legion 5 is one of those machines. Designed to play most games you’ll throw at it, while also suiting in at a workplace, the Legion 5 intends to fully satisfy people who are into gaming, but also want their laptops to pull double duty for work.
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KEY SPECIFICATIONS
Display: 15.6″ FHD 250nits Anti-glare, 120Hz, 45% NTSC
RAM: 32GB SO-DIMM DDR4
Storage: 1TB PCIe SSD
Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 4600H (6C / 12T, 3.0 / 4.0GHz, 3MB L2 / 8MB L3)
Operating System: Windows 10 Home 64 Battery: Integrated 60Wh Dimensions (WxDxH): 14.3 x 10.22 x 0.93-1.03 inches
Weight: 2.46 kg (5.42 lbs)
Lenovo Legion 5 review: Design
From the very 1st look, the Legion five doesn’t recede from what Lenovo designed it to be — a laptop computer designed to suit into 2 classes of machines at once. It all starts off from the clean and minimal A-panel with the small ‘Lenovo’ badge on one edge, and also the ‘Legion’ branding on the opposite. There aren’t any unnecessary design flairs here, and closed, the only reason to assume this can be a recreation laptop is that the proven fact that it’s branded ‘Legion’.
Inside too, Lenovo has gone with an unostentatious style — a display with slim bezels around it, and a keyboard with an evident white backlight. All of this is wrapped in a comparatively sleek, all matte-black chassis that makes this laptop computer a rather pleasant sight.
Since this is a laptop computer making an attempt to be the best of each world, Lenovo has included some options that I appreciate more at work. The privacy shutter over the digital camera is nice, as is that the wide variety of ports that lark about the chassis of this portable computer.
The Legion 5’s keyboard looks identical to the ones found on other Lenovo laptops. It has a similar keycap layout, and the keyboard itself is nearly just as nice. The keys feel tangible and there’s adequate travel. All of which results in a pleasant encounter with the keyboard whether you’re typing for long hours (as I do), or gaming.
Port selection on the Legion 5 is also on point. The laptop’s chassis is girdled by ports, including four USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, one USB 3.2 Type-C port, an RJ-45 ethernet port, HDMI out, and of course, a power input along with a combo headphone/mic port.
Display
I have been using the Legion 5 as my daily driver for weeks now, and this 15.6-inch Full HD 120Hz display has not let me down. the skinny bezels around the screen wreak an immersive, if not entirely groundbreaking experience. The screen itself is properly bright, tho’ I feel the matte coating makes it slightly less beautiful to seem at than a shiny glass panel would. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not selling Lenovo out on this. If for nothing, I appreciate matte panels for the sheer amount of glare-reduction they are doing.
When this display goes dim, it goes extremely dim. most so it’s nearly not possible to visualize what’s on the screen. however, this has helped me with bingeing The workplace further as WandaVision while not straining my eyes way too much.
Viewing angles are fairly good here still, and also the display is nice enough for many of something you would like to try and do thereon.
We undoubtedly appreciate the higher refresh rate that makes everything on this laptop computer seems smooth and fluid, and overall, I can’t actually figure out anything important to complain about regarding this display.
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Performance
The Lenovo Legion five comes with a Ryzen 5 4600H paired with 8GB 3200MHz RAM, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650Ti GPU, 256GB PCIe SSD, and a 1TB HDD. Pretty customary specs for a laptop computer in this worth vary. I do appreciate the mix of an SSD and hard disk here which implies you get additional space for storing, however additionally the fast boot-up times that an SSD brings to the table.
Naturally, with specs like these, the laptop computer performs pretty much. both work and play are handled pretty simply by this machine and I don’t really feel it lagging behind anywhere. though I might suggest filling up that second empty SO-DIMM slot and upgrading the RAM on the laptop computer for a performance boost.
In artificial benchmarks, the laptop computer scores a good number, at par with what you’d expect from a machine of this specific caliber in this price range.
For gaming, I played one or two odd games on the portable computer. In far Cry 5, the laptop computer defaults to High graphics settings, and also the in-game benchmark showed frame rates starting from 20 to 74FPS. That 20 frames per second point happened once in the benchmark, however, it’s not a good sign. I switched graphics settings to traditional to really play the game and didn’t notice any frame drops or stutters. The in-game benchmark showed exceptional improvement additionally, starting from 52 to 84FPS, with a median of 67FPS that is ok for me.
In Horizon Zero Dawn, the laptop defaulted to Medium settings, except for some reason to 1366×768 resolution. Even so, the game was dropping frames, but dynamically the resolution to 1920×1080 appears to mend that. inline with fraps, the game was running on a median frame rate of 74FPS that is nice enough
Aside from gaming, the laptop does work really well in general. As said earlier, I have been using this laptop daily for weeks now, so I have spent a considerable amount of time doing some real work with it ranging from browsing the internet and writing articles and I have no issues with its performance in that regard.
The Legion 5 handled thirty tabs in Edge easily (which Chrome would demand more RAM and the 8GB RAM might be pushed a little bit there), simultaneously with Word and Photoshop open for writing and editing pictures.
Overall, the performance here is satisfactory. As a budget gaming laptop, the Legion 5 usually holds its own with gaming as well as work. I do wish there was more RAM here for a bit more future-proofing and better performance, but at least you get a second SO-DIMM slot to do that on your own if needed.
Battery life
Finally, the battery life. I usually tend to treat battery life on a gaming portable computer as an afterthought. However, my opinion of this laptop computer is a dual-purpose work/play laptop computer, and after you consider work, you completely would like decent battery life.
The Legion 5 comes with a 60Whr battery — not a really huge variety by any means. the company claims six hours of battery life on paper, which is almost correct if you’re going to stick with the terrible basics of what you’ll do with this portable computer. With my usual work-related tasks, the laptop computer lasts around 5 hours and charge pretty fast, which is close to smart, not to mention wonderful.
Price and availability
For the purpose of this Lenovo Legion 5 review, we used Lenovo Legion 5 AMD Ryzen 5 4600H 15.6 inches with 8GB of RAM, 1 TB 7200 RPM HDD + 256 GB PCIe SSD variant which is readily available for you to order from lenovo.com at a starting price of $959.99. you can buy from your favourite retailer if you like.
There’s an option to step up some of the features such as the RAM and SSD storage to 32GB and 512GB respectively for maximum performance but that would require you spending close to $2000 or more.
What we think about think laptop
The Lenovo Legion 5 is a budget gaming laptop that seems to want to blur the line between an absolute gaming machine and something that fits in at work. If you’re looking for a laptop that can pull both works and play duties for you and that comes in at a budget, this might be something you should check out.
| WHAT WE LIKE | WHAT WE DO NOT LIKE |
| Cheap and affordable | The battery could be better |
| Strong build | |
| Great display | |
| Wonderful processor |
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