Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7

amazon Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 reviews

The Legion 5 is one of the best-selling laptops in Lenovo’s Legion gaming line. Since its launch, Legion 5 has always been considered by the gaming community as the “national laptop” because it meets what they need at an accessible price.

But before the “rise” of the IdeaPad Gaming 3 laptop line (also from Lenovo) and at the same time the increasingly powerful performance of products from both Intel, AMD, and Nvidia, through each generation, Legion 5 gradually is positioned to be a high-end to a mid-range gaming laptop, aimed at new user groups and of course with new competitors.

Legion 5 Gen 7 (2022) is equipped with the latest AMD Ryzen 6000 series processor and GeForce RTX 30 series graphics card from Nvidia. The price will vary depending on the option you choose, and the version I experience includes AMD Ryzen 7 6800H processor, 16GB DDR5 RAM, 512GB SSD, and GeForce RTX 3050Ti GPU. In particular, buyers of Legion Gen 7 (2022) will receive a specialized premium warranty service package for Lenovo’s Legion Ultimate Support (LUS) gaming laptop with a team of technical engineers providing 24/7 support for hardware, software, and accessories in any form from a phone, email or chat.

Opponents of Legion 5 Gen 7 (2022) in this price range can include names like Acer Nitro 5 or Asus TUF Gaming F15. In the article, I will call the laptop name “Legion 5” for your convenience.

More neutral design, more trendy

Gone are the days when every gaming laptop was as big and bulky as a desktop computer. The development of technology has made gaming laptops thinner and lighter, and that trend also inadvertently pushed the aggressive design style back into the past. The “elegant” in design lines, which was once less of a concern, is now more important than ever.

Legion 5 has been redesigned by Lenovo in a fresher style this year, with a thinner and lighter chassis – specifically, only 19.9 mm thick and weighing about 2.4 kg, these are all the “desirable” figures of a full-size 15.6-inch gaming laptop with a discrete graphics card. The A side of the device is now made of anode aluminum material, something that has never been seen on the Legion 5 before, almost eliminating the flex phenomenon even when subjected to force. The Legion logo is also refreshed, combined with Storm Gray to give the Legion 5 an elegant look that is no different from a business laptop.

However, as a “veteran member”, Legion 5 still has the characteristics of the Legion gaming series. Most of the machine’s connection ports are located at the back so that the front operation area is as open as possible, they are deeper than the heat sinkholes, so the Legion 5 looks like a supercar from the back. With a total of 4 heatsinks on the rear and side, you can trust that the Legion 5 will dissipate heat very effectively, ensuring that the internal components work cool and optimize the performance of the machine.

The Legion 5’s efficiency in heat dissipation comes from both the hardware and the software and how they work together. Lenovo equips Legion 5 with Coldfront 4.0 cooling system, including 2 12V cooling fans with 40% thinner blades, maximum speed increased to 4600rpm to help optimize air circulation while still limiting noise generation, with 4 heat pipes to the copper CPU heatsink block. In terms of software, the Lenovo Legion AI Engine adjusts gaming performance by predicting fan performance, as well as balancing the GPU and CPU resources that are output in real-time for each game being played.

The number of ports of the Legion 5 is the same as the Legion 5i that I have recently experienced, including from USB-C, USB-A to HDMI, RJ45 Ethernet network and a quick on/off button webcam. The only difference of Legion 5 is that the machine will not support Thunderbolt 4 because it uses AMD Ryzen processors.

The screen meets the needs of “working in the morning, playing games at night”

The Legion 5 version I experienced is equipped with a Full HD (1920 x 1080) resolution screen, a traditional 16: 9 aspect ratio IPS LCD panel, 165Hz refresh rate, and 300 nit brightness. In the more advanced configuration versions, you can even choose a screen with a resolution of QHD (2560 x 1440).

Some gaming laptops now tend to switch to 16:10 aspect ratio screens to increase the vertical display area, but I find 16: 9 still popular because of better compatibility when playing games, and nonetheless, this is still the main need that Legion 5 meets.

In actual use, Legion 5 has better display quality than the common gaming laptop in this price range, with vivid display colors, wide viewing angles with less color distortion at diagonal corners. The 165Hz refresh rate makes scrolling, swiping, and animation extremely smooth.

The screen edges are thin for an airy viewing experience, only the bottom edge is thicker to balance the Legion 5’s full-size chassis. In addition, with 100% sRGB color coverage and Dolby Vision support, Legion 5 can also meet the needs of light photo/video editing, or more broadly, “work in the morning, play the game at night” as gamers often say.

The “look” is impressive, but the “hearing” part is not the highlight of Legion 5. The 2W down-firing speaker duo has a fairly large volume, but the sound quality is not outstanding, this is also a permanent weakness owned by many laptops in general. The Nahimic Audio app doesn’t do much to improve this. If you are a serious gamer, you should invest in a more “genuine” headset or speaker for the best gaming experience.

Legion 5’s webcam has also been upgraded to Full HD resolution, anyone who pursues the dream of being a streamer can use this webcam and still be assured of the display quality.

TrueStrike keyboard, 4-zone RGB LED

Speaking of laptop keyboards, it’s hard for any brand to beat the longstanding reputation of ThinkPad, but what if Lenovo brings that experience to its gaming products? Called Legion TrueStrike, Legion 5’s keyboard offers a very good typing experience, and no mechanical keys, but the buttons all have clear tactile feedback and deep key journeys.

The full-size layout means that the machine has enough rows of Numpad keys, but on the Legion 5, even the navigation keys have a full size. The keycap cross-section and the distance between the keys have been balanced by Lenovo to achieve this without affecting the user’s typing feeling.

For gamers who have a habit of “fighting games” at night or simply want to increase aesthetics, Legion 5 has a 4-zone RGB LED system under the keyboard, which can customize the display mode through Lenovo Vantage software.

With Legion gaming machines, the Lenovo Vantage application interface will have more customizations related to the machine’s performance, such as GPU overclocking, performance mode, … and the ability to monitor health and check warranty status. Advanced customizations will require a bit of user skill, but basically, the settings inside the Lenovo Vantage are intuitive and easy to grasp.

For gamers, I guess 99% of them will use an external mouse, but Lenovo still decided to bring the large-sized touchpad to the Legion 5. With the need for web surfing and daily use, this touchpad responds quite well thanks to the feel smooth swipe even though the click is a bit shallow.

where can you get a Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 online

2021 Lenovo Legion 5 17.3″ FHD IPS 144Hz Premium Gaming Laptop, AMD Ryzen 7 5800H, GeForce RTX 3060(130W), HDMI, Webcam, Backlit KB, USB-C, Win 11 (16GB RAM | 1TB PCIe SSD): Buy it now

Lenovo – Legion 5 – Gaming Laptop – AMD Ryzen 5 5600H – 8GB DDR4 RAM – 512GB NVMe TLC SSD – NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Graphics – 15.6″ FHD 120 Hz – Windows 11 Home – Phantom Blue: Buy it now

Lenovo – Legion 5 – Gaming Laptop – AMD Ryzen 7 5800H – 16GB RAM – 512GB Storage – NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050Ti – 15.6″ FHD Display – Windows 11 Home – Phantom Blue: Buy it now

AMD Ryzen 6000 Series Chips Deliver Powerful Performance

Legion 5 is one of the first laptops equipped with AMD’s Ryzen 6000 series processors. Produced under the Zen 3+ architecture on TSMC’s advanced 6nm production line, the Ryzen 6000 series offers better performance while significantly reducing power consumption compared to the old 7nm process Zen 3 architecture.

The Ryzen 7 6800H processor on the Legion 5 has 8 cores/16 threads with a maximum clock speed of up to 4.7 GHz and a default TDP of 45W. Combined with a GeForce RTX 3050Ti graphics card from Nvidia, 16GB of DDR5 RAM, and a high-speed NVMe SSD, Legion 5 promises to “stand” well every game at present at Full HD resolution, as well as allowing you experience new technologies such as Ray Tracing, DLSS. In addition, Legion 5 also features a superfast Wi-Fi 6 11ax wireless connection, 3 times faster than Wi-Fi 5, and 75% reduced latency.

You can quickly switch between performance profiles including Performance, Intelligent Cooling, and Silent with the Fn+Q shortcut, the color of the indicator light on the power button will let you know which profile is currently selected. In benchmarks, I always do them on the Performance profile to get the best results.

Here are the results of Legion 5 in familiar benchmark tests:

Cinebench R23, which measures CPU performance for rendering tasks, single-core, and multi-core. Legion 5’s Ryzen 7 6800H scored 1,405 single-core and 13,744 multi-core.

Legion 5 scored 1,455 single-core and 9,369 multi-core on GeekBench 5.

Meanwhile, the RTX 3050Ti GPU scored 71,237 OpenGL performance points.

PCMark 10 simulates everyday multitasking tasks. Legion 5 2022 reached 6,218 points.

3DMark is the leading popular performance evaluation and gaming emulator today. With the configuration of Legion 5, I choose 2 tests, FireStrike and Time Spy.

3DMark FireStrike simulates gaming with Full HD resolution, DX11 graphics library. Legion 5’s score is 14,328.

3DMark Time Spy emulator 2K resolution gaming, DX12 graphics library. Legion 5 scored 6,486 points.

In terms of gaming performance, I use the available benchmarks of games including Far Cry: New Dawn, Final Fantasy XV, and Guardians of the Galaxy. The games are all configured at High graphics settings, Full HD screen resolution. The results show that Legion 5 can achieve an average FPS in the range of 90-100, if you want to be even smoother, you can consider reducing the graphics setting to Medium or take advantage of the DLSS feature if the game supports it.

512GB NVMe Gen 4 SSD is an option on your Legion 5, with higher storage needs, you can upgrade to a maximum of 1TB. This SSD model is Samsung’s PM9A1, when measured with Crystal Disk Mark software, it gives sequential read/write speeds of 6,761 MB/s and 4,803 MB/s, respectively.

The PCIe 4.0 protocol offers superior speed and bandwidth compared to its predecessor PCIe 3.0, and it is not surprising that tasks such as starting Windows, opening and closing heavy applications, and compressing or copying data are performed by Legion 5. quickly.

Due to the “terrible” Coldfront 4.0 cooling system, the Legion 5 does not hesitate to push the CPU and GPU to high temperatures and maintain performance when benchmarking and performing heavy tasks. Running Cinebench R23 continuously for 10 minutes, the highest temperature that the Ryzen 7 6800H CPU recorded was 99 degrees Celsius, while the average temperature was 84 degrees Celsius. Meanwhile, the RTX 3050Ti worked quite cool, when the heat The maximum temperature after the stress test is only 78 degrees Celsius at the hotspot.

Despite having the same 80 WHr battery, this Legion 5 will have a significantly better usage time than the Legion 5i in the previous article because the Legion 5 has a Full HD screen and an RTX 3050Ti GPU instead of a 2K and RTX 3060 screen. In fact, without playing games, with its usual daily tasks, Legion 5 can last for more than 5 hours. If you play games, the usage time will decrease very quickly, not to mention when the battery is low, it will lead to reduced brightness and reduced clock speed, so it is better to plug in the charger when playing games to ensure the best performance.

Comes with my Legion 5 is a 230W fast charger, with higher configuration versions, the included charger will have a capacity of 300W. The 230W charger still has a very fast charging speed, just look back and forth if the battery is full. In addition, you can also charge with a third-party charger, while the Legion 5 supports up to 135W charging via the USB-C Power Delivery port.

Summary

Lenovo continues to keep pace with the Legion 5, bringing us a laptop with a more trendy design, a screen that meets all needs, and strong performance with the help of AMD and Nvidia. Legion 5 is no longer a “budget gaming laptop” – it has been entrusted by Lenovo to a new mission, and with what has been shown, I think Legion 5 will still be completed well at its task as it has always been.