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Competitors to the Legion 5 15 include other mid-range 15.6-inch gaming laptops like the Razer Blade 15 Base Edition, Asus TUF Gaming F15, MSI Bravo 15, or Acer Aspire Nitro 5. The Legion 5 15 should not be confused with the Legion 5 Pro which is a larger 16-inch design.
The new Legion 5 15 Gen.6 is once again a good gaming laptop with a comparatively low price and powerful components. The new AMD processor Ryzen 7 5800H offers plenty of performance and it is also very efficient. The combination with the fast 130W version of the GeForce RTX 3060 ensures high gaming performance. We also like the fast 165 Hz display with the 1080p resolution.As for external temperatures, there were no surprises with this laptop. I took some FLIR readings so you can get a look at what to expect with normal tasks on battery and again with a heavy gaming session. And here’s how this 2021 Legion 5 fares in the Cinebench R15 loop test on the Performance, Balanced and Quiet profiles. The screen is ok on this model. It’s bright enough and has decent contrast. The viewing angles are also good, although there is a little bit of light shift when you hit the moderate angles. It’s not distracting at all when looking at it head-on. This Legion 5 has an 80Whr battery, which is a pretty decent size. I’m sure it’s to be consistent with the other Legion models, but it would have been nicer to utilize that extra space and beef it up to 99Whr. The keyboard on the 17” version is almost identical to the keyboard on the 15” Legion 5. I had zero trouble typing on it, as I’ve adapted pretty well to typing on Legion keyboards for the past several months.
The 2022 Legion 5 15 is a major update over the 2021 Legion 5 15. It utilizes the same GPU albeit at a higher TGP target (140 W vs. 130 W) while upgrading the CPU to the latest 12th gen Alder Lake-H series. The external chassis has also been updated for a newer and sleeker look. UL's PCMark 10 primarily simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage. Pretty good results and it’s exactly what I was expecting, considering the plethora of Legion laptops I have reviewed in the past couple of months. On paper, this looks very similar to the Legion 5 I reviewed a few months ago. But in reality, there are some subtle differences that need to be pointed out, especially if you’re on the fence about choosing between the two sizes. On the right is a small mechanical switch I'll have to look up at some point. It has an icon of what looks like a camera with a line through it, so it might be a physical override for the webcam. Next to that is a power LED which seems redundant to me, as there is also one built into the power button above the keyboard. There's also a USB A port.
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According to the spec sheet, the Legion 5 should have a 60Wh battery but the battery in my review unit was most definitely an 80Wh (5,210mAh) unit. Had it been the former, that would more easily explain the rather poor performance in our video rundown test. The synthetic tests above are helpful for measuring general 3D aptitude, but it's hard to beat full retail video games for judging gaming performance. Far Cry 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider are both modern, high-fidelity titles with built-in benchmarks that illustrate how a system handles real-world video games at various settings. We run them at the games' moderate and maximum graphics quality presets (Normal and Ultra for Far Cry 5, Medium and Very High for Rise of the Tomb Raider) at 1080p resolution. Far Cry 5 is DirectX 11-based, while we flip Rise of the Tomb Raider to DX12. The Lenovo Legion 5 is an impressive gaming laptop on paper, with high-end components throughout, but it’s going to have to work hard when lined up against some strong rivals.
These graphics cards are able to play the latest and most demanding games in high resolutions and full detail settings with enabled Anti-Aliasing. The eight-core AMD processor is brilliant. Its PCMark 10 result of 7038 is more than 600 points ahead of the Asus, which used the same chip to lesser affect. Lenovo’s laptop scored 1404 and 7197 in the Geekbench tests, with both results also outpacing Asus. This chip is even further ahead of the Intel Core i7-11800H used in the MSI.
Verdict — Big Size, Big Performance
It is a 15" gaming laptop, not designed to be thin or light. This is my chosen form factor as I don't gain by paying more for going smaller. Experience the joys of high-end gaming anywhere you want with the Lenovo Legion 5 Intel Core i7 8GB RAM 512GB SSD NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Graphics 15.6" WQHD Display Gaming Laptop. Powered by an Intel Core i7-12700H 14 Core processor enjoy a consistent performance, whilst the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Graphics card brings a spectacular visual performance. Keep the high level of performance with Legion Coldfront 4.0 keeping everything cool and performing to the highest level. The Legion 5 15 Gen.6 focuses on the core components of a gaming laptops and offers plenty of performance with a fast 165 Hz display. The problems with the automatic graphics switching are annoying though and should be fixed as soon as possible. The Ryzen 7 5800H is a familiarly great CPU from AMD. It’s got eight multi-threaded cores alongside base and boost speeds of 3.2GHz and 4.4GHz. The rest of the specification is entirely normal: the Lenovo has 16GB of dual-channel memory and a 512GB SSD alongside dual-band Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5 and Gigabit Ethernet.
Running Witcher 3 on Performance mode to represent typical gaming loads would cause the Nvidia GPU to stabilize at 1972 MHz, 134 W board power draw, and 76 C. If on Balanced mode, the GPU would instead stabilize at 1665 MHz, 95 W, and 70 C for a 10 percent performance deficit as detailed in our GPU Performance section above. Users must therefore enable Performance mode through the Vantage software if they want to exploit the GPU to its fullest. The fans are also exactly the same. They are pretty large in size and identical to the other Legion laptops. The only disappointment I have is the right fan on the GPU side could have been larger, but Lenovo chose not to. Could be for sourcing concerns for consistency, but I hate to see such a large empty space in a laptop. Seems like a wasted opportunity.And how it compares against other 2021 laptops in its class. Competitive, within 5-7% of the higher-tier Ryzen 9 implementations such as the Legion 7 or ROG G15 Advantage. The Legion 5 replaces the Legion 5P in Lenovo’s lineup and benefits from a Ryzen 7 5800H CPU, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 GPU, a 165Hz display and an RGB-laden keyboard. It’s available in both 15.6in and 17in flavours and comes with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. Granted, the Zephyrus G15 isn't getting blown away here, but in our Total War: Three Kingdoms and Metro: Exodus benchmarks, the Legion 5 Pro consistently gets between five and 10 more fps than the Asus Zephyrus G15, regardless of graphics settings.
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