Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 Review: Mid-budget AMD Gaming Laptop

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 affordable price. So today, we will see Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 review, which is a new AMD gaming laptop from the Legion 2022 series.

Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 Review: Mid-budget AMD Gaming Laptop

Before the rise of the IdeaPad Gaming 3 laptop line, as well as the increasingly powerful performance of products from Intel, AMD, and Nvidia, through each generation, the Legion 5 is slowly poised to rise higher. Legion 5 Gen 7 is a mid-range gaming laptop aimed at new user groups and competitors.

Legion 5 Gen 7 (2022) comes with the latest AMD Ryzen 6000 series processor and Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 series graphics card. Prices will vary depending on the option you choose, but our Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 review unit is powered by AMD Ryzen 7 6800H processor, 16GB DDR5 RAM, 512GB SSD, and GeForce RTX 3050Ti GPU, which currently costs $1,169.99.

The Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 2022 rivals in this price range could include names like the Acer Nitro 5 or the Asus TUF Gaming F15. In this Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 review, we’ll refer to this laptop as the “Legion 5 Gen 7” for your convenience.

Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 Review

Design

Gone are the days when every gaming laptop used to be as big and heavy as a desktop computer. Advanced technology has made gaming laptops thinner and lighter, and that trend inadvertently pushed aggressive design styles back into the past. The design of gaming laptops was never a concern before but is now more important than ever.

Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 Review: Mid-budget AMD Gaming Laptop

The Legion 5 Gen 7 has been redesigned in a new way this year by Lenovo, with a thinner and lighter chassis – notably, only 19.9mm thick and weighing around 2.4kg, all of which are great for full-sized 15.6-inch gaming. There are “desirable” figures. Laptop with discrete graphics card.

The A side of the device is now made of anode aluminum material, something never before seen on the Legion 5 series, virtually eliminating the flex phenomenon even when subjected to force. The Legion logo is also refreshed, combined with Storm Gray color to give the Legion 5 Gen 7 an elegant look that is no different from a business laptop.

However, as a “veteran member”, Legion 5 Gen 7 still has features from the Legion gaming line. Most of the laptop’s connection ports are located at the rear so that the front operation area is as open as possible, deeper than the heat sinkholes, so the Legion 5 Gen 7 looks like a supercar from behind. With a total of 4 heat sinks on the back and sides, you can trust that the Legion 5 Gen 7 will dissipate heat very effectively, ensuring that internal components operate cool and optimizing machine performance.

The Legion 5 Gen 7’s efficiency in heat dissipation comes from both the hardware and the software and how they work together. Lenovo equips Legion 5 Gen 7 with Coldfront 4.0 cooling system, including two 12V cooling fans with 40% thinner blades, maximum speed increased to 4600rpm to help optimize air circulation while limiting noise generation with four heat pipes to the copper CPU heatsink block. In terms of software, the Lenovo Legion AI Engine optimizes gaming performance by predicting fan performance, as well as balancing GPU and CPU resources that are output in real-time for each game.

On the left side of the device are two USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 ports that support 135W Power Delivery charging and DisplayPort 1.4 output. Unlike the Intel version, the Legion 5 Gen 7 does not support Thunderbolt 4. The right side has a 3.5mm combo jack, a USB-A port, and a quick toggle for the webcam.

The number of ports on the Legion 5 Gen 7 is the same as that of the Legion 5i we recently reviewed. The only difference of Legion 5 Gen 7 is that it will not support Thunderbolt 4 because it uses AMD Ryzen processors.

Display

Our Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 review unit comes with a 15-inch Full HD (1920 x 1080) resolution screen, a traditional IPS LCD panel with a 16:9 aspect ratio, 165Hz refresh rate, and 300 nits brightness. In more advanced configuration versions, you can also choose a screen with QHD (2560 x 1440) resolution.

Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 Review: Mid-budget AMD Gaming Laptop

Some gaming laptops now switch to 16:10 aspect ratio screens to increase the vertical display area, but we still find 16:9 to be popular due to the better compatibility when playing games. And then it’s still the main requirement that Legion 5 Gen 7 fulfills.

In actual use, the Legion 5 Gen 7 has better display quality than typical gaming laptops 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 animations extremely smooth.

The sides of the screen are thin for a wide viewing experience, with only the bottom edge being thick enough to balance the device’s full-size chassis. Plus, with 100% sRGB color coverage and Dolby Vision support. The Legion 5 Gen 7 can also meet photo/video editing needs, or more broadly, “work in the morning, play games at night” as gamers often call it.

Features

The “look” part is impressive, but the “hearing” part isn’t the highlight of Legion 5 Gen 7. The 2W down-firing speaker pair has plenty of volumes, but while the sound quality isn’t excellent, that’s also a permanent weakness owned by many laptops. The Nahimic Audio app doesn’t do much to make it better. If you are a serious gamer, you should invest in a better headset or speaker for the best gaming experience.

The Legion 5’s webcam has also been upgraded to Full HD resolution, so anyone who dreams of being a streamer can use this webcam and still be confident about the picture quality.

Keyboard and touchpad

Speaking of the keyboard, it’s hard for any brand to beat the ThinkPad’s old reputation, but what if Lenovo brings those experiences to its gaming products? Called the Legion TrueStrike, the Legion 5’s keyboard offers a very nice typing experience, there aren’t mechanical keys, but all the buttons have clear tactile feedback and deep key travel.

Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 Review: Mid-budget AMD Gaming Laptop

The full-size layout means that the device has enough rows of Numpad keys, but on the Legion 5 Gen 7, 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 typing feeling of the user.

Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 Review: Mid-budget AMD Gaming Laptop

For gamers who have a habit of playing games at night or want to increase aesthetics, Legion 5 Gen 7 has a 4-zone RGB LED system under the keyboard, which can customize the display mode through Lenovo Vantage software.

With Legion gaming laptops, the Lenovo Vantage application interface will have more customizations related to the laptop’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 the settings inside the Lenovo Vantage are intuitive and easy to grasp.

Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 Review: Mid-budget AMD Gaming Laptop

For gamers, we guess 99% of them will use an external mouse, but Lenovo still decided to bring the large-sized touchpad to the Legion 5 Gen 7. With the need for web surfing and daily use, this touchpad responds quite fast thanks to a smooth swipe, even though the click is a bit shallow.

Performance

The Legion 5 Gen 7 is powered by AMD’s Ryzen 6000 series processors. Manufactured on TSMC’s advanced 6nm production line under the Zen 3+ architecture, the Ryzen 6000 series delivers superior performance while reducing power consumption compared to the older 7nm process Zen 3 architecture.

The Ryzen 7 6800H processor on the Legion 5 Gen 7 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 Gen 7 promises to run every AAA game at present at Full HD resolution, as well as allow you experience new technologies such as Ray Tracing, DLSS. In addition, the Legion 5 Gen 7 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 pressing the Fn+Q shortcut, the color of the indicator light on the power button will let you know which profile is currently selected. In benchmark tests, we always set them to the performance profile to get the best results.

Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 Review: Mid-budget AMD Gaming Laptop

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

Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 Review: Mid-budget AMD Gaming Laptop

Legion 5 Gen 7 scored 1,455 single-core and 9,369 multi-core on GeekBench 5.

Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 Review: Mid-budget AMD Gaming Laptop

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

Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 Review: Mid-budget AMD Gaming Laptop

PCMark 10 simulates everyday multitasking tasks. Legion 5 Gen 7 2022 reached 6,218 points.

3DMark is the leading popular performance evaluation and gaming emulator today. With the configuration of Legion 5 Gen 7, we choose 2 tests, FireStrike and Time Spy.

Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 Review: Mid-budget AMD Gaming Laptop

3DMark FireStrike simulates gaming with Full HD resolution, DX11 graphics library. Legion 5 Gen 7’s score is 14,328.

Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 Review: Mid-budget AMD Gaming Laptop

3DMark Time Spy emulator 2K resolution gaming, DX12 graphics library. Legion 5 Gen 7 scored 6,486 points.

In terms of gaming performance, we use the available benchmarks of games including Far Cry: New Dawn, Final Fantasy XV, and Guardians of the Galaxy. The games are 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 that game supports it.

Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 Review: Mid-budget AMD Gaming Laptop

Benchmark results for the game Far Cry: New Dawn.

Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 Review: Mid-budget AMD Gaming Laptop

Benchmark results of the Guardians of the Galaxy game.

Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 Review: Mid-budget AMD Gaming Laptop

The score above was obtained on the Final Fantasy XV benchmark toolkit.

512GB NVMe Gen 4 SSD is an option on your Legion 5 Gen 7, 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.

Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 Review: Mid-budget AMD Gaming Laptop

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 quickly compressing or copying data are performed by Legion 5.

PCIe 4.0 protocol provides better speed and bandwidth than its predecessor PCIe 3.0, and it should come as no surprise that tasks like starting Windows, opening and closing heavy applications, and compressing or copying data are performed quickly by the Legion 5 Gen 7.

Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 Review: Mid-budget AMD Gaming Laptop

Ryzen 7 6800H CPU temperature after running Cinebench R23 continuously for 10 minutes.

Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 Review: Mid-budget AMD Gaming Laptop

RTX 3050Ti GPU temperature after the stress test.

Thanks to the “terrible” Coldfront 4.0 cooling system, the Legion 5 Gen 7 doesn’t hesitate to push the CPU and GPU to higher temperatures and maintain performance when benchmarking and performing heavy tasks. Running the Cinebench R23 for 10 consecutive minutes, the highest temperature recorded by the Ryzen 7 6800H CPU was 99 °C, while the average temperature was 84 °C. Meanwhile, the RTX 3050 Ti did quite a good job, when the maximum temperature after the heat stress test is only 78 degrees Celsius at the hotspot.

Battery life

Despite having the same 80 WHr battery, this Legion 5 Gen 7 will have significantly better usage times than the previous Legion 5i as the Legion 5 Gen 7 has a Full HD screen and an RTX 3050Ti GPU instead of a 2K screen and RTX 3050. In fact, without playing games, Legion 5 Gen 7 can run for more than 5 hours with its regular daily tasks. If you play games, the usage time will decrease very quickly, so it is better to plug in the charger while playing the game to ensure the best performance.

Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 Review: Mid-budget AMD Gaming Laptop

Our Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 7 review unit comes with a 230W fast charger. With higher configuration versions, the included charger will have a capacity of 300W. The 230W charger also has very fast charging speeds. In addition, you can also charge with third-party chargers, while the Legion 5 Gen 7 supports 135W charging via the USB-C Power Delivery port.

Final line

Lenovo continues to keep pace with the Legion 5 Gen 7 2022, bringing us laptops with a more trendy design, a screen that meets all needs and delivers strong performance with the help of AMD and Nvidia.

A selling price of $1,169.99 on Newegg.com suggests that the Legion 5 Gen 7 is no longer a “budget gaming laptop” – it’s been assigned a new mission by Lenovo, and from what’s shown we think the Legion 5 Gen 7 will accomplish this.

About Ankeet Solanki

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