Lenovo Legion 5 Review By Dave2D

All right, so this is the Lenovo legion 5 review. This is actually the 5i, but there are two variants: a 5 and a 5i and the difference being one is AMD. One is intel. I have the intel version, but the experience and the hardware is going to be vastly similar between the two. Now this has to be one of the most anticipated gaming laptops for 2020 because of its original price point that they announced it's supposed to be, like, I think, 800 or 900 bucks at the base price. So it's a very interesting device and the predecessor to this.

The y 540 was a very well reviewed device, and this is just like the 2020 version. They've tweaked a bunch of stuff, but there is's stuff you should be aware of going into this particular purchase. Okay. So, let's start with the design. This has been changed ever so slightly in terms of its design, aesthetic, it's very clean and mature, looking like it doesn't have any kind of gamer accents.

This is probably the least gamer. Looking gaming laptop on the market. I really like it's even cleaner than like a racer blade, because there's no snake logos and stuff like that, it's just a very simple uh top lid and a very simple inside which we'll get to in a second now on the top they've changed the legion logo. It doesn't light up anymore, it's also in a different position from last year, if I remember correctly and there's also a new badge of just like a metal insert that just says Lenovo now the whole laptop feels well-built it's plastic, but it feels durable. There is this weird thing: I got a bunch of emails from you guys in regard to the hinge.

I can't see any issues with it. In fact, I think it's the same hinge design as the 540 and 570 from last year, which were great, so I just imagine these would be good as well. Watch me eat my words in a few years when these things explode in people's faces, I think they're they're good though okay, I didn't mention earlier, but the legion logo has like a bit of an iridescent shimmer to it. It's faint, but it's there all right the display. So here we have a 144 hertz 1080p panel.

It's pretty fast for gaming, it's bright! It's color, accurate! I like the screen a lot. It is, however, an upgraded panel. The base panel is a 60 hertz screen, which you know if you're getting a gaming laptop like this I'd, go for a higher refresh screen, but there's also this third option of a 120 hertz, lower brightness screen, which I personally do not recommend. I haven't seen the one specifically from Lenovo, but it's listed at 250 nits and from my experience, 250 nits is perfectly fine for just like browsing the web and doing stuff, but if you're playing games it just doesn't feel bright enough, don't get that 250 nit screen. If you can avoid it, I just spend that extra money to get the 144 hertz option.

The webcam this year has been moved up from the bottom of the screen to the top, which is awesome, and they have a privacy filter this year. So you can hit this switch, and it'll cover up the webcam physically. So technically you would be more secure if you're worried about that- and I like this feature, I feel like more laptops in general- should have a physical cover over the lens, like an optional slide like that, it's simple, but it's like it's just a thing. I think it's pretty cool, okay, the keyboard. I like the keyboard uh in general.

Furthermore, I think most people will like this keyboard. There is a number pad, so everything's got shifted over to the left. If you know symmetry bothers you, but I think Lenovo does this often with their kind of mid-tier devices, they just include a number pad, but the actual keyboard experience is on point, and it's got white backlighting, which looks spotless. The trackpad is nice. It doesn't have the dedicated physical buttons, like it did last year.

It's like a actual click is built right into the trackpad like a lot of other gaming laptops, but it's still a good trackpad and oh my favorite part about this keyboard, the actual deck itself. Furthermore, it's this really nice soft touch material and from what I've seen from last year's material as well. This stuff holds up like I have a friend that has a y530 and I used to be concerned about Lenovo's materials kind of becoming gummier over time, but last year's model held up, and this feels exactly the same to me. So I think it's going to be a durable soft touch material. The performance on this machine is quite good.

I'm running the six core intel processor with a RTX 2060, and it's the regular 2016, not the max q version. So it's just a little more powerful than other competitors that are pushed max q devices. This is an appropriately cooled system, it's nice to see, and the fans don't get super loud, and they also have that keyboard shortcuts. You can switch between the performance modes, so you can go between like balanced and high performance and quiet mode, but this year they have this colored led in the power button which lets you know visually. What mode you're in just by looking at the power button.

Now this year they still don't have manual, fan control, it's something I talked about last year. I wish that on a device like this, you could just control the fans by yourself. So if you're doing something that requires better performance, you can just crank it up uh, but you can't, it does a pretty good job just through those three settings, but I, like my manual all right so inside you have, you can see the do big fans they exhaust at the back and the sides with a nice heat pipe array. Good thermal system, the SSD Wi-Fi card and the two ram slots are behind two shrouds, but remove those, and you have access to them and the battery is not particularly big. It's a 60 watt hour battery very similar battery life to last year's, I'm getting three and a half hours on this, which is to be expected.

It's a smaller battery. I do think that there is an option for a larger battery, but then it just removes the uh, the SATA cage. So you just get a slightly bigger battery, but no hard drive. I did notice that there seems to be room for a second NVMe like if you remove the hard drive cage. There just seems to be this perfect amount of space for a secondary NVMe, which is I've, never actually seen.

Something like this, where the space seems like so well engineered that if you remove the hard drive, cage, there's now room for the NVMe to slot in its pretty cool all right, so that is the internal of this system. Uh, there are speakers on the left and right. They sound like gaming laptop speakers not terrible, but they're, not great uh ports on this device. So the vast majority of ports on these Lenovo legion devices are on the back of the machine, which I really like keeps the whole thing clean. The USB-C porch does not support thunderbolt 3.

So if you need it, you don't have access to that, but there's four USB-C's, so there's two on the back and one on each side. So it's got this healthy dose of USB-C on the system all right, so this is a pretty solid system. Overall. Now, if you remember in the beginning of this video, I mentioned that the starting price of this thing was supposed to be like 850 or 900. It is but there's a bit of um, there's a bit of a twist to that.

That pricing only applies to the dozen AMD versions, and once you spec this thing out with an intel chip, it's quite expensive, it's actually more expensive than I thought it would be. This feels like it's a don't know 150 200 bucks more than it should be now. Here's the thing Lenovo stuff goes on sale very frequently we're not talking like special Black Friday and back-to-school stuff. It's just constantly on sale, so you just need to be diligent and look at the pricing of this stuff and catch it when it is on sale, because if you buy this thing at full retail price, I don't think it's really worth the money like it's. Okay, it's just not great value.

If you do get it on sale, though I think this is a great get um. So yeah you just make sure you purchase this thing on sale. If you can now, there is a second device that I want to talk about, because, if you're interested in the legion 5 you're- probably interested in this thing as well, this is the Lenovo IdeaPad gaming 3. , it's a bit of a weird name. This had like a different moniker last year, but this is the 2020 version, and this is also like an 8 900 devices.

I was going to do a review on this, but I decided to wait for this thing to come in before I even talked about this because here's the thing- I don't think this is worth getting because of the existence of this machine. This is an inferior product in basically every manner it's not as well-built. It has worse performance, it has worse thermals, it's got a smaller battery, a dimmer screen. The list goes on. The idea.

Gaming pad 3 is an inferior product to the legion 5. It is cheaper by like 150 bucks, but if you're on the market for something like this- and you just can't afford this one, but you can't afford the idea pad save up until you can pick this one up, because just a better product that I think will even last longer because of the improved thermal performance over this guy. Okay, hope you guys enjoyed this video thumbs. If you liked it subs, if you loved it I'll see you guys next time.

Source : Dave2D