Lenovo Legion 5 Series of Gaming Laptops Gets Latest Intel & AMD hardware

Like many PC OEMs, Lenovo has seen a surge in PC sales in the past two years, and its Legion gaming computers benefited from that lift. The new Legion 5 series of gaming laptops were greatly upgraded at CES 2020.

The four new models are the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro and Legion 5, powered by AMD Ryzen 6000 series CPUs. The Lenovo Legion 5i Pro and Legion 5i have Intel 12^th generation Core CPUs H-Series.

The Intel 12^th generation Core H-Series and the AMD Ryzen 6000 Series for laptops were launched at CES 2020, and that’s why we’re looking at the seasonal PC update cycle.

These new CPUs are excellent choices for gamers as they bring significantly higher gaming performance in situations where games are not GPU-limited. We’re talking about double-digit percentage improvements on the game’s FPS.

Thanks to these new platforms, up to 32GB of DDR5 RAM and faster PCIe 4.0 are now available to gamers, but only up to 1TB at purchase time.

The graphics options are slightly upgraded to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Laptop GPU (8GB GDDR6, up to 150W Boosted TGP, Boost Clock 1485Mhz), from the regular 3070. I expect to see an average GPU performance boost of ~10% at equal wattage, but it could be even more if Lenovo sticks to the 150W max power.

The updated cooling system called Legion Coldfront 4.0 comes with larger exhaust and quieter fans, a much-appreciated combo because gaming laptops can sometimes be extremely noisy to tame all the potential heat generated by the high-performance components.

From a design standpoint, Lenovo is still doing very well with the Legion 5 Pro and even slightly slim down the 2022 edition. The white version is agreeable and would look great in a nicely designed desk setup.

Lenovo says it has improved the Legion TrueStrike keyboard, and we’ll have to see how it feels. I like the full-size arrow keys, even for editing text or code, so that’s already a plus over many “work” laptops.

The Legion 5 Pro was a 16-inch display gaming laptop precursor, and Lenovo is pushing the envelope this year by introducing a QHD+ 240Hz 3ms panel. Gamers and Creators will be glad to learn that panel options can go as high as 500 NITs with 100% sRGB coverage, perfect for design work.

Most new Legion 5 laptops have an 80Wh battery, which is quite good in this category, except for the 15-inch Legion 5 that comes with a 60Whr battery. You can charge the laptops with a USB-C power supply, but you need to use the supplied high-Wattage power supply to use the laptop’s full performance.

The 2x2W stereo speaker system backed by the successful Nahimic Audio software seems very promising, and I’m looking forward to hearing it.

Finally, the best Legion 5 series feature might be its affordability. I helped a few people shop for gaming laptops during the holidays, and the Legion 5 series is priced very competitively and brings excellent value.

Filed in Computers >Gaming. Read more about CES, Ces 2022, Gaming Laptops and Lenovo.