Lenovo Legion 5 (15-inch, 2022) hands-on review | Laptop Mag

Our Verdict

The Lenovo Legion 5 is a stylish gaming laptop for an affordable price, and if it tin can hold up on our benchmarks, then it might even exist one of the best cheap gaming laptops out in that location.

For

Fashionable design
Decent projected battery life
Encouraging specs
Affordable

Against

120Hz brandish choice is merely 250 nits
Could be lighter and thinner

Laptop Magazine Verdict

The Lenovo Legion 5 is a fashionable gaming laptop for an affordable toll, and if it tin hold upward on our benchmarks, then it might even be one of the best cheap gaming laptops out there.

Pros

+
Fashionable design
+
Decent projected battery life
+
Encouraging specs
+
Affordable

Cons

-
120Hz display option is but 250 nits
-
Could exist lighter and thinner

CES 2022 is off to the races, and despite existence all virtual, we got our easily on a few laptops, including the Lenovo Legion 5 (fifteen-inch).

From what we can tell so far, it has a stylish design, specs up to par with its competitors, and decent projected bombardment life, all at an affordable price. And while there's a lot information technology needs to do to be one of the best cheap gaming laptops around, the Legion five looks promising.

Lenovo Legion five price and configuration options

The Lenovo Legion 5 can be configured in a 15-inch or 17-inch model, only both start at $769, which is a dandy price point for a budget gaming notebook. The Legion v laptops are slated to launch erstwhile in March 2022.

You tin can outfit the Lenovo Legion 5 with upward to an AMD Ryzen 7 CPU, 32GB of RAM, a 2TB SSD and the latest Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics carte du jour.

Lenovo Legion v design

The Legion 5 has a similar chassis to its predecessors, only it looks a lot more than fashionable thank you to the Phantom Blue hood combined with the prismatic Legion logo in the summit-left corner of the lid.

Lenovo Legion 5 15-inch 2022 review — (Paradigm credit: Rami Tabari)

The interior sports the aforementioned Phantom Blue deck and a four-zone RGB-lit keyboard flowing from left to right similar a rainbow body of water crashing against the shore. There'southward a minor touchpad below and a power button just above the keyboard. The bezels on the display are relatively slim, as the webcam sits on a notch where the elevation bezel is.

At fourteen.iii x 10.ii x one inches and v.3 pounds, the Legion 5 is a picayune on the thicker and heavier side for a gaming laptop. We've seen gaming laptops shrink down to 0.seven-inches and counterbalance beneath five pounds.

Lenovo Legion 5 ports

You don't really have to worry about ports with this automobile, equally the Legion 5 benefits from a large behind with plenty of room.

The left side features ane USB Type-C port and a headphone jack, while the correct holds room for a USB Blazon-A port and a webcam kill-switch push button.

Meanwhile, the backside sports three additional USB Type-A ports, an HDMI port, 1 USB Type-C port and an RJ45 Ethernet port. Unfortunately, the laptop does non come with a Mini DisplayPort, so y'all can't equally easily connect a VR headset.

If you're looking for more than ports, check out our best laptop docking stations and best USB Type-C hubs pages.

Lenovo Legion 5 brandish

The Legion 5'south fifteen.6-inch brandish comes with iii panel options, all of which are 1080p. The nigh premium features a 165Hz refresh rate, 3ms response time and covers 100% of the sRGB range with 300 nits and Dolby Vision support. The center tier one drops to 120Hz, 45% NTSC and 250 nits. Meanwhile, the bottom one drops to 60Hz, but is bumped upward to 100% sRGB and 300 nits. It's frustrating that the middle tier is dimmer than the cheapest display available.

The pre-production unit I went hands-on with has the top-tier panel. In The Marksman trailer, Liam Neeson'southward grapheme was driving through desert-esque terrain, and the xanthous-dark-green colors that popped on screen seemed relatively authentic. It wasn't necessarily vivid, but it didn't seem terribly slow, either. Cheers to the matte blanket, the panel seemed bright enough for most situations, only during a night scene, the panel did battle it out with some glare from my window. However, the screen is pretty sharp, detailing the stitching in Neeson'southward hat.

Lenovo Legion 5 keyboard and touchpad

I was pleasantly surprised with the Legion 5's keyboard. It not just had deep travel but it also felt punchy to type on. The keys even have a decent layout likewise. Information technology almost feels like a ThinkPad keyboard, but it's non quite at that place withal.

I nailed 76 words per minute on the 10fastfingers.com typing test, which is below my current 78-wpm average. Notwithstanding, the keyboard is incredibly comfortable to employ, more than so than the previous Legions I've tested.

The keyboard features four-zone RGB lighting that tin be customized via the Lenovo Vantage app.

When I tested the touchpad, information technology felt a chip sticky at first, so the material used isn't actually the best, but at the very to the lowest degree, information technology had a decent click to it. I did find that Windows ten gestures like two-finger scrolling were a bit choosy, but that may only exist because this is a pre-production model.

Lenovo Legion 5 audio

The Legion five's bottom-firing speakers were surprisingly loud, just had a weird balancing consequence. The volume was loud at 10% and barely got louder when I turned it up to 100% -- that may be a pre-production outcome, however.

I listened to Icon For Rent's "Demons," and the intro to the electronic beats was loud and assuming, only the electric guitar and drums sounded a footling muddy. The vocals, notwithstanding, were crisp and took center-stage. Unfortunately, the bass wasn't well-rounded plenty to brand the percussion popular.

You can customize the sound via the Nahimic app to tune the audio to your liking. It features settings like Surround Sound, Volume Stabilizer, voices, bass and treble. There are also four presets: Music, Movie, Communication and Gaming.

Lenovo Legion 5 battery life

Manifestly, we can't examination the battery on the pre-product unit, but Lenovo claims that the Legion can survive 7 to eight hours on a unmarried accuse, which is impressive if that's authentic.

However, nosotros won't know for sure until we get a postal service-production unit through our lab.

Outlook

We're excited to get a more official look at the Lenovo Legion five when it comes through our lab and is able to hit all of our benchmarks. One time it does, then it comes downward to where it actually belongs among its competitors.

Having an AMD CPU definitely bodes well for the bombardment life also as operation, but we won't know for sure until nosotros get to actually put pressure on it. Stay tuned for our official review of this production coming sometime closer to its official launch in March 2022.

Rami Tabari is an Editor for Laptop Magazine. He reviews every shape and form of a laptop every bit well as all sorts of cool tech. You can find him sitting at his desk surrounded past a hoarder's dream of laptops, and when he navigates his mode out to civilization, you can grab him watching actually bad anime or playing some kind of painfully difficult game. He's the best at every game and he just doesn't lose. That's why you'll occasionally catch his byline attached to the latest Souls-like challenge.