The screen is ok on this model. It’s bright enough and has decent contrast. The viewing angles are also good, although there is a little bit of light shift when you hit the moderate angles. It’s not distracting at all when looking at it head-on. There’s a regular 15.6-inch 16:9 matte display on the Legion 5 series, with a fair-quality FHD panel, the same we’ve already tested in the Legion Slim 7 series.

After taking a look at the inside, I noticed a very familiar sight. The cooling system is exactly the same as what I saw on both the 15” Legion 5 and Legion 5 Pro. The only difference is the heat pipes were stretched out a little further to span the chassis. Frankly, I expected more. NVIDIA GeForce RTX™ 30 Series Laptop GPUs deliver the ultimate performance for gamers and creators. They’re powered by Ampere—NVIDIA’s 2 gen RTX architecture—with new Ray Tracing Cores, Tensor Cores, and streaming multiprocessors for a huge leap in performance. Experience the most realistic ray-traced graphics, cutting-edge new features, and the power of AI in thin and light designs. The power profiles are Quiet, Balanced, and Performance, and you can select them from Vantage or switch between them with Fn+Q. Performance is only available with the laptop plugged into the wall. These profiles apply different power settings to the CPU/GPU and different fan profiles, as well as switch the color of the LED in the power button. Here’s a table that shows what each mode does: Quiet I then took some synthetic benchmarks at the three different settings in Lenovo Vantage, all with the MUX set on dGPU. First was in Performance mode:NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 30 Series Laptop GPUs power the world's fastest laptops for gamers and creators. They're built with Ampere—NVIDIA's 2nd gen RTX architecture– to give you the most realistic ray-traced graphics and cutting-edge AI features like NVIDIA DLSS. New Max-Q technologies utilize AI to enable thin, high performance laptops that are faster and better than ever. So all in all there’s little to complain about here, but I’ll still remind you of the brighter and sharper WQHD panel available for the Legion 5 series in a few regions, as well as the WQHD+ 16:10 option on the Legion 5 Pro. I’d recommend opting for one of those if you can squeeze them within budget. WQHD+ (2560 x 1600) IPS, 500 nits, 165-240Hz refresh rate with OverDrive, 100% sRGB, up to VESA DisplayHDR™ 400 Certified, Dolby Vision® support, NVIDIA® G-SYNC™ support, 16:10 aspect ratio W (~1 h 20 min of use)– Gaming – Witcher 3, Maximum Performance Mode, 60fps, screen at 70%, Wi-Fi ON.

Compete like a pro on the Legion 5 Gen 6 (15″ Intel) gaming laptop. It’s armed with all you need to dominate opponents, from powerful 11th Gen Intel® Core processors to fast NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 30 Series graphics. Enjoy top-flight, color-accurate visuals on up to a 15.6″ QHD display with Dolby Vision™, plus Nahimic 3D audio and the Legion Truestrike keyboard.

A nearly perfect gaming laptop

Last thing to note on the gaming benchmarks is the improvement seen by switching out the RAM. Some games are better than others, but I did see a noticeable improvement in many games. Certainly not worse in any, so you might want to plan on updating your RAM if you buy one of these models and want to get the most out of it. Noise, Heat, Connectivity, speakers, and others Finally, I’ll add that gaming on battery mode is somewhat possible here, but the CPU and GPU are limited at a 50W combined power, so the performance takes a massive toll in comparison to even the Quiet plugged-in mode. Also, don’t expect more than an hour and a bit of runtime with gaming on the battery. This Legion 5 has an 80Whr battery, which is a pretty decent size. I’m sure it’s to be consistent with the other Legion models, but it would have been nicer to utilize that extra space and beef it up to 99Whr. Metro: Exodus (1080p): 132 fps (Low); 71 fps (Ultra, no ray tracing); 61 fps (ultra with ray tracing enabled) Keep an eye on the big retailers, though: prices drop all the time, and the Lenovo could easily become a bargain in the US and Europe alongside the UK. And, if that’s the case, it’ll have even more of a claim to a spot in our best gaming laptop chart.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 is an entry-level GPU that can push around 60 fps at 1080p with low settings. The RTX 3050 is faster than the GTX 1650 and will let you run graphically demanding games at high settings while still maintaining around 60 fps or slightly more. The RTX 3050Ti performs only about 10% better than the RTX 3050 on average; however, the RTX 3060 is much faster, giving you a 35% to 40% performance boost over the RTX 3050. The RTX 3070 is the top-end configuration and will give you roughly a 15% performance increase over the RTX 3060 on average, though it can be more in VRAM-heavy scenarios. Finally, the AMD Radeon RX 6600M is roughly equivalent to the RTX 3060; it'll perform a little better or worse depending on each game's optimization. When it comes to gaming performance, the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro is about as good as you're going to find in an RTX 3070 gaming laptop. Even without any hardware performance optimization courtesy of Lenovo Vantage , the Legion 5 Pro outperforms the Asus Zephyrus in terms of pure gaming performance - both in graphics benchmarks and actual gaming experience.For the following benchmarks, I once again compared the Legion 5 Pro to the Razer Blade 15 Advanced (11th gen) and Alienware m15 R4. The Razer we reviewed has an RTX 3080 and a 1080p display while the Alienware unit we tested has a 3070 like the Legion, but with a 4K display. The other thing to note is just how much better Quiet mode is on the CPU temps and the noise level. It’s so much quieter that would probably play games in this mode much of the time, if I used this laptop daily. For some games, including Horizon Zero Dawn, shifting to Quiet mode doesn’t cripple performance, but there is a noticeable impact on other titles, so you’ll have to test out the profiles yourself.