Test Lenovo Legion 5: Portable gaming performance for PC and Radeon RX 6600M
The Lenovo Legion 5 body is dressed in midnight blue plastic, which is located around the keyboard. The edges of the slab are in black grained plastic, as is the bottom casing. The hinge is slightly developed on the chassis or, depending on the point of view, the chassis protrudes 3 cm behind the screen.
When opened, the computer reveals a keyboard with a numeric keypad. The placement of the keys turned out to be relatively dense, but Lenovo made sure to turn the arrow keys down. The keyboard is backlit on two levels and Fn-Space hotkeys between each mode. Typing is fun and the keyboard doesn’t suffer from any noticeable flaw. The touchpad, which is a bit wider than the space bar, provides good sliding and good feedback from left and right clicks. Relatively hard, the middle click does not allow for drag and drop while maintaining pressure.
The Legion 5’s connectivity is particularly rich, on the left, with a USB Type-C port and a headphone/microphone combo jack. On the right is a USB 3.0 port, a switch for the webcam, and a computer power light. The latter is also duplicated with the start button above the keyboard and accompanied by an LED. Finally, between the two slots on the back of the chassis, there are also three USB 3.0 ports, a proprietary charging socket, an HDMI 2.1 port, an RJ45 port, as well as a USB Type-C compatible power delivery port. and DisplayPort.
The connectors are, for the most part, located behind the screen. © The Digital
Wireless connectivity is provided by the Intel AX201 chip that offers wifi 6 (2400 MB/s) and Bluetooth 5.2. The 720p webcam appears above the screen again in mediocre quality, with a somewhat noticeable blur effect in the details.
Cooling is done by two fans blowing on four radiators located in the corners under the screen hinge. Lenovo allows you to change the power profile without going through software thanks to the keyboard shortcut FN-Q. Then the color of the start button changes according to the selected mode: blue for silent, white for automatic, red for turbo mode.
In turbo mode, we observed a maximum temperature of 42.3 ° C between the arrow keys. The Z, Q, S, and D keys remain relatively cool with a measurement of 37.6 °C. Thus, the right part of the keyboard is the hottest part of the chassis, on top of the Radeon RX 6600M and 100W TDP. The RTX 3060 slots are warmer (55.7 °C and 49.6 °C) than those of the Ryzen 7 5800H (50.5 °C and 46.6 °C).
Noise pollution is contained in silent mode, with 38.1 decibels registered in the game. In automatic mode, the Legion 5 is heard more with 44.6 decibels. However, we are still average about what laptops offer the games. In Turbo mode, on the other hand, the computer is noisy at 49.3 dB, causing it to write Digital Comments from the neighbor’s office.
with the game Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, we also noticed a noticeable difference in performance depending on the profile: 57 fps in silent mode, 72 fps in automatic mode and 78 fps in turbo mode.
Components are accessed by removing ten Phillips screws. But it is difficult to disassemble the structure. We recommend that you start from the front with an old bank card or a specific tool. The hardest part is the level of ventilation, tightly cut. All you have to do is lift the casing to release all the back connectors.
Once opened, there is a free M.2 slot on the left, under an aluminum plate that is secured with three screws. Under the square aluminum plate are two DDR4 slots. Under the right aluminum plate is an SSD in M.2 format and a wifi card. The battery is not attached and comes free after removing four screws. In our model, Lenovo chose an 80Wh battery that occupies the entire width of the chassis.
The Lenovo Legion 5 features an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H processor with 8 multi-threaded cores, accompanied by 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. In fact, the processor reaches a maximum of 4.4GHz while encoding under HandBrake, With an average of 3.9 GHz.
Ryzen 7 5800H delivers high performance. On our practical test panel, you get a performance index of 126, in line with that expected. It’s slightly more efficient than the Intel Core i7-11800H (123), and it makes sense that it’s a successor to the Ryzen 9 5900HX and Intel Core i9-11980HK.
For its part, the NVMe SSD reaches 3.6 GB / s in reading and 2.3 GB / s in writing. We didn’t see a cache overflow, even when moving our test footage to Adobe Premiere editing software.
So the graphics part is provided by the AMD Radeon RX 6600M. The TGP can reach 100W thanks to the SmartShift function, which allows unused power to be switched from the processor to the GPU and vice versa depending on the situation. Since Lenovo Legion 5 does not have a MUX chip, it is necessary Disable mixed mode in Lenovo Vantage to get the best performance out of your graphics card.
The Radeon RX 6600M gets a benchmark of 131, hampered by its Raytracing performance. For comparison, it is behind the GeForce RTX 3060 and far behind the Radeon RX 6800M (147).
The number of frames per second depending on the games (the higher the better). © The Digital
In the game, the Lenovo Legion 5 and RX 6600M achieve convincing results at over 60 frames per second, in which all graphic details are pushed to the limit; except Cyberpunk, whose psychological settings strain the frame rate. In Raytracing, the RX 6600M only performs well in GoodvaleThe rest of our board is not playable with this offer.
In competitive and less demanding games, the Radeon RX 6600M should easily reach the 165Hz panel, or 165fps, limits.
As mentioned earlier, Lenovo replaced the 120 Hz Full HD IPS panel with a Full HD model as well but it benefits from a 165 Hz refresh, which is a point to check when purchasing, especially since this new screen is much better.
The clip under our investigation confirms that Lenovo was well inspired to outfit the Legion 5 with this BOE-signed display. Colorimetry is ideal with a delta E of less than 3 (2.3), and color differences are imperceptible to the human eye. Just like responding with 10ms of measured latency. Contrast is rather poor at 1112:1, far from the best IPS panels which recently peaked at around 1400:1. When in use, blacks will be greyish. The color temperature is 6253K, just below the 6500K video standard. Meanwhile, the brightness exceeds 300 cd / m², which is an acceptable value for a computer intended for stable use. Note, however, that thanks to the matte panel, the reflectance is relatively low (17.6%). So you don’t have to orient your screen according to surrounding lighting or windows.
fortress points
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Responsive, color-accurate display.
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Provided connectors.
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Access to components and battery.
Weak points
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Autonomy.
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No MUX chip: Mixed mode needs to be activated or deactivated according to the activity.
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Very impressive and heavy loader.
conclusion
Lenovo corrects the main flaw in the Legion 5 by providing it with a new 165Hz panel that is more responsive and, above all, with more faithful colors. In terms of performance, the Ryzen 7 5800H processor works wonders; The AMD Radeon RX 6600M graphics card offers interesting performance, but it lacks versatility compared to the competition.
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