A minimalist notebook with decent gaming power
Not to damn with faint praise, but the Lenovo Legion 5 is kinda okay. A bit alright. Reasonably reasonable. It’s a gaming laptop with specs, price and performance that are so straight down the middle of the road that they might as well be studded with cat’s eyes. Apologies in advance if this is not the most action-packed hardware review you’ve ever read.
Does it work? Without the aid ofDLSS, I wouldn’t call the Legion 5’s gaming performance much more or less impressive than a comparably specced RTX 3060 laptop, but there’s definitely enough power here for the 1080p resolution. Together with good overall display performance and an agreeable price, and the Legion 5 might well deserve to be your next gaming laptop – even if it’s nothing to get too excited about.
This restrained approach has informed the design as much as anything. The mature styling will surely appeal to anyone who never developed a taste for RGB, though there are lighter gaming laptops, with the Legion 5 weighing 2.4kg, and its “Coldfront” dual blower system evidently isn’t sophisticated enough to prevent fan noise reaching a headset-necessitating 47db.
Still, at least it works well enough to stop the keyboard getting too toasty. More generally, typing on these backlit mechanical keys feels crisp and comfortable, even with a number pad having been squished in, and Lenovo have been wise in lining up most of the ports at the rear. These include the power, HDMI and Ethernet jacks, as well as three of the four full-size USB ports and one of the two USB-C ports – all of which will be tucked out of place and out of sight as you play, as opposed to infringing on your mouse movement space. This also leaves room on the more instantly accessible right edge for a webcam killswitch: handy from a privacy perspective, and a welcome hardware extra. Albeit a dinky one.
There is some flex to the screen, which loses the Legion 5 some points on build quality, but the display itself is the laptop’s brightest flash of greatness. It’s a 15.6in, 1920x1080 IPS panel with added gaming chops coming in two ways: a speedy 165Hz refresh rate, andAMD FreeSyncsupport within the 60-165Hz range. Besides having this built-in resistance to tearing, there’s almost no visible ghosting on the Legion 5’s display whatsoever, ensuring that it’s always lookin’ smooth.
Not every game will suit its maximum settings, asMetro Exodusdemonstrated. Using the Ultra preset, its benchmark tool averaged 51fps: slick enough to play, but not enough to hit the 60fps threshold where FreeSync kicks in. The addition of Ultra-quality ray tracing effects saw it barely keep its head above water, with 31fps. It took a drop down to High quality, without RT effects, to average 64fps.
The Legion 5 alsojustmade it over the 60fps line in Total War: Three Kingdoms, its Battle benchmark producing 61fps on Ultra quality.Final Fantasy XVwas better, flitting around the 65-80fps range on its Highest preset, while Assassin’s Creed Valhalla averaged 63fps on Ultra High and 72fps on High. Valhalla has form for extracting the most FPS value out of AMD’s SAM tech, and it looks like that’s the case here as well: those results are only just behind those of the RTX 3070-equippedAsus TUF Dash 15.
The Legion 5 also has better CPU-only performance than the TUF Dash 15 (or at the least the model Katharine tested). That said, the Ryzen 7 5800H’s Cinebench R20 scores were merely okayish: 555 in the single core test and 4757 in the multi-core test. While these are fit for purpose, it’s hard not to look at the scores of older chips and wonder if these new Ryzen 5000 laptop chips weren’t an afterthought compared to the 6000 series. Even the humbleGigabyte G5, with its Intel Core i5-11400H, scored ten points higher in the single core test. Previous-gen Intel Core i9 and AMD Ryzen 9 CPUs also consistently beat it on multi-core performance, so the Ryzen 7 5800H isn’t a generational leap.
Then again, maybe it doesn’t need to be. For£999/$1255, the Legion 5 feels as though it performs as it should, both in games and in wider desktop duties. Maybe not much more than that, but never any less.
You could say the same of it’s 512GB SSD as well, as its sequential read and write speeds - 2642MB/s and 1552MB/s, according to AS SSD - are adequate even if they’re not the best of the best. Random 4K results are a little better by comparison, averaging 44MB/s for reads and 120MB/s for writes.
The Legion 5’s only outright failure is battery life. Sadly this is the second AMD-based laptop in a row (after the ROG Zephyrus G14) that failed to last a single hour when running Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Here, the Legion 5 emptied a full charge in just 52 minutes. Its primary use, then, should be a kind of all-in-one desktop alternative, rather than a truly portable system. For actually ambulatory purposes, you’re probably better off with aSteam Deckat this point; gaming laptops that can last for hours at a time seem to be an endangered breed, if not yet a dying one.
I still think the display and GPU do enough keep the Legion 5 in favour, with or without anything else that could have made it a tad more – let’s be honest here – interesting. That 60-100fps performance range is fine for the money and will take advantage of the higher refresh rate, the latter also being just one quality of many possessed by the display. Quieter cooling, a more ambitious CPU and/or better endurance would have elevated it, but the dedication to simplicity has also left the Legion 5 with a nicely sensible design and no unnecessary, price-inflating tassles. So, yeah. Kinda okay.
