Lenovo’s Legion lineup is common with customers in each skilled and informal gaming circles. I used the Legion 7i (assessment) for a substantial a part of final yr and it had develop into one among my staple suggestions within the premium class of gaming laptops. Now, Lenovo has despatched its much less highly effective however extra reasonably priced Legion 5i laptop computer. Its pricing of Rs 1,19,990 makes it value a search for informal avid gamers to partake whereas the design is interesting sufficient to entice customers with extra typical necessities. On this assessment, let’s check how good the Legion 5i’s graphical capabilities are together with different facets like show high quality, normal efficiency, and battery life.
Desk of Contents
Construct, design and show
The Legion 5i’s design stays largely unchanged from the final iterations of the system. A unibody plastic chassis with its navy blue-like color feels fairly clean. There’s little or no flex throughout the keyboard, and the hinge, like so many Legion units, is positioned barely in entrance of the laptop computer’s again edge. There are fairly just a few ports and vents on the again and on each side of the laptop computer, whereas the ability button sits on the prime of the keyboard. I wasn’t very impressed with the hinge’s capacity to maintain the lid from wobbling whereas typing although. The webcam is positioned on the highest with a slight indentation and a toggle swap on the proper fringe of the laptop computer covers the shutter to alleviate privateness considerations. When it comes to thickness, the Legion 5i matches into my backpack with out quite a lot of problem though the two.4kgs it weighs may make portability a slight subject.
Lenovo is kind of beneficiant normally with the ports it affords on Legion units. On the again, the Legion 5i has three USB 3.2 Gen A ports, an HDMI 2.1, Ethernet, and a Thunderbolt 4.0 port. The precise aspect of the system affords one more USB 3.2 Gen A port, whereas on the left there’s a Headphone/microphone combo jack together with one other Thunderbolt 4.0 port. Sadly, not one of the USB C slots can be utilized to cost the system. As for wi-fi connectivity, you will have the same old Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1 choices.
On the show aspect of issues, I do really feel that Lenovo may do with just a little brushing up on the options. You get a 120Hz FHD LCD panel measured 15-inch diagonally, however the expertise is definitely missing by way of color accuracy. The panel affords a boring look with excessive contrasts which aren’t helped by the sub-par viewing angles. The sleek refresh fee does present a way of visible aid however the 250nits of peak brightness is simply not adequate for outside viewing. Textures on a number of AAA titles like Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Cyberpunk 2077 regarded fairly washed out which soured the expertise a bit.
Keyboard and trackpad
One factor I can say for sure is that Lenovo merely makes a few of the greatest keyboards on laptops. The Legion 5i takes cues from Lenovo’s business-focused Thinkpad lineup, and affords a full-sized keyboard full with a numpad and regular-sized arrow keys. The chiclet-style scissor-switch keys on the Legion 5i are very comfy to kind on with good journey and minimal noise whereas typing. My solely gripe is that utilizing a single white backlight as an alternative of an RGB combo diminishes the gamer-vibe that Legion laptops normally go for. The trackpad on the underside is form of small for the laptop computer’s dimension however I’m glad with the responsiveness and haptics. Any gamer will naturally use an exterior mouse so the trackpad’s utility is restricted in any case.
Efficiency and battery
As for the efficiency of the system, the Intel Eleventh-gen i7 11800H CPU primarily based on the Tiger Lake structure is greater than adequate to fulfill most of your processing wants and not using a hitch. There’s an AMD model of the laptop computer for the Legion 5 too, which makes use of the Ryzen 7 5800H. The vents positioned on all sides of the chassis give thermal benefit to the 5i and I by no means felt the system getting too sizzling even beneath sustained load. My workflow is as primary as it will possibly get with most utilisation of Google Chrome and a few different apps like Spotify or Microsoft’s Workplace suite. I did hog down quite a lot of the 16GB DDR4 RAM, clocked at 3,200MHz, with a dozen Chrome home windows open on the identical time however the system dealt with all of it like a champ. Even switching between these home windows and a heavy-duty recreation within the background was fairly clean. Benchmarks are a considerably dependable indicator of a laptop computer’s efficiency and on Cinebench R23.2, the Legion 5i acquired an excellent multi-core rating of 12,605 which is in regards to the highest I’ve seen on Intel laptops. On Geekbench the rating was 8,105 which is once more extraordinarily spectacular. For normal workload, PCMark’s benchmark returned a wholesome 5,610 rating. I used to be notably impressed with the 512GB of NVMe SSD which noticed a 6,694MB/s and 4,4410MB/s learn and write speeds respectively.
On the graphics entrance, the NVIDIA RTX 3050 is a succesful GPU to get by a few of the extra common FPS titles with its 95W energy draw. Apex Legends and Valorant handle a simple 100fps at excessive settings. A few of the extra graphically-demanding titles like Shadow of the Tomb Raider run at a 77fps depend at Excessive graphics settings and Ray tracing turned off. In fact, the 4GB VRAM signifies that ray tracing is unavailable, and in case you are searching for that added visible enhance, the Legion 5i additionally affords an RTX 3060 variant for a better value. With Cyberpunk 2077 and Far Cry 5, the fps depend at medium and excessive settings was about 60-65fps respectively. The followers can rev up fairly loudly so I like to recommend pair of noise-cancelling headphones whereas gaming. I believe that the Legion 5i is a strong machine that may maintain respectably excessive body charges, however primarily with much less graphically demanding titles. The speaker system on the system just isn’t too shabby both and might be customised utilizing Lenovo’s Vantage app. There are not any biometric authentication strategies although, which definitely is a bummer.
A gaming laptop computer isn’t actually related to nice battery life and within the case of the Legion 5i, it’s doubly true. The laptop computer boasts of a pretty big 60Whr battery which Lenovo claims can present as much as 5 hours of steady utilization. In my expertise, the quantity was about 2 hours, 3 if I saved the brightness to 50 p.c. It doesn’t assist that the one option to cost the Legion 5i is with the large 230W charging brick that hardly matches alongside the laptop computer in my bag.
Ultimate verdict
The general usability of the Legion 5i may undoubtedly be made higher by enhancing the show and the battery life. For the worth of Rs 1,19,990 nevertheless, the Legion 5i seems to be a reasonably whole lot by way of the uncooked efficiency output you may get together with respectable graphical capabilities. The keyboard expertise on the system meets Lenovo’s requirements of fantastic typing and the audio system are literally fairly good for watching motion pictures and listening to songs with out bothering about headphones. Value a glance, particularly for informal gaming.
Editor’s ranking: 3.5 / 5
Professionals
- Glorious thermals
- Nice efficiency
- A great deal of connectivity choices
Cons
- Show high quality could possibly be improved
- Hinge not sturdy sufficient
- Sub-par battery life
