Lenovo gaming laptop buyer’s guide

The Lenovo Legion 5 is possibly the best performing RTX 3060 laptop on the market in terms of in-game FPS, which makes it the most powerful true ‘mid-range’ option from Nvidia. If you don’t mind opting for an AMD GPU with their inferior Ray-Tracing, then the unusually good value ASUS G15 Advantage Edition will admittedly get you significantly more FPS performance for around the same price, but for the Nvidia machines you’ll struggle to find a better deal. The inclusion of an easily activated MUX switch in the onboard software is very nice and helps boost performance further.

The Legion 5 comes with a powerful AMD Ryzen 7 5800H CPU that also gives great multi-core performance for creative workflows and rendering. The Legion 5i is the Intel model, powered by an Intel Core i7-10750H which will get you slightly better gaming performance, but at the expense of an hour or so battery life and reduced workstation performance.

As has plagued many laptop releases in 2021, the Lenovo Legion 5 comes with fairly slow stock RAM, which can cause a degree of FPS bottlenecking in some games, though not as much as we’ve seen elsewhere. The difference in performance when you upgrade the RAM ranges between no difference at all in some titles, up to around 10% difference in a few, with the average being around 3%: so for many it’s probably not worth the upgrade overall and it’s not enough to dissuade you from buying this machine.

Onto the 1080p 165Hz display, this is good enough for the majority of gamers, unless you want the best competitive performance in which case you’d need to buy a higher-end machine anyway. The 7ms grey-to-grey response time is decent if not amazing, but the G-Sync/FreeSync is a welcome edition.

In terms of color gamut, the Lenovo Legion 5 covers 98% sRGB, 70% Adobe RGB, and 72% DCI-P3, which is all well above the minimum needed for gaming and even makes it capable of color accurate design work in the sRGB space. The screen has a great contrast ratio, and a respectable peak brightness, though ideally, this could have been better.

The webcam and microphone are middling quality for a gaming laptop at this price point. The same can be said for the speakers, in so far as, like much of the competition, they are fairly poor and lack much bass replication. The membrane keyboard and trackpad are both decent, and above average compared to the competition, though not the best out there either. Build quality is okay, though the plastic build doesn’t compare to the more metal designs of more premium laptops. There is some screen wobble when typing and a bit of flex when you press down around the keyboard, though this latter point isn’t really something that you’ll notice.

If you turn off Optimus using the mUX switch, the battery life of the Legion 5 with AMD CPU is quite impressive: expect to get around 8 hours of general, non-gaming usage. You can expect the Intel-powered Legion 5i to run at least an hour or so shorter than this, which is still pretty decent for an Intel machine.

Ultimately the Lenovo Legion 5 doesn’t have many flaws. If you want an improved response time or a 16-inch, 1440p screen then the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro might be worth considering, though this will cost you more money. The 17-inch version of the Lenovo Legion 5 is also an option, but this has a slower response time than the 15-inch and doesn’t have G-Sync. All-in-all, we think this model is the best value choice for gamers.