Solid gaming laptop: Lenovo Legion 5Pi review

Lenovo continues to develop its gaming brand Legion, under which it not only produces gaming monitors, system units and other accessories, but of course laptops. Recently, a model came to our test Legion 5Pi on the processor Intel Core i7 10-generation and with discrete graphics from NVIDIA

The official price for our configuration with a 512 GB SSD in the official online store Lenovo is 122 290 rubles for version with Windows 10 Home and 114,890 with DOS installed.

PACKAGING AND DELIVERY

This laptop is shipped in a cardboard box with a large LEGION logo on the entire front of the box. A test model of the device came to us for testing. Inside, the Legion 5Pi is wrapped in expanded polypropylene that protects it from all sides. Below is a secret compartment where the 230 W power supply and power cable are located. Most likely, by tradition, when buying, you will also have a short instruction and a guarantee inside you, but they were not in our test sample.

APPEARANCE

Legion series notebooks are assembled in a strict minimalistic style. The Legion 5Pi case is made of plastic, or rather, three different types.

The main body on the bottom is made of hard and rough black plastic, and the area around the keyboard and touchpad, as well as the frame around the screen, are made of a pleasant velvety matte plastic. It is black around the screen, and dark gray on the keypad. On the lid there is a slightly glare soft-touch in dark gray with a corporate logo that glows in the manner of Apple laptops. In the off state, the mirror texture of the logo is visible, and in sleep mode, the star in the middle glows with a flickering effect, periodically turning on and off. It seems like a trifle, but it looks very nice. By the way, there was a little space in the design and metal. A small metal nameplate with the Lenovo inscription is recessed into the case in the area with the keyboard in the lower right corner.

The laptop is 26 mm thick at its widest, 36.5 cm long and 26.5 cm wide. The weight of the device is 2 kg and 395 g, which is quite standard for a gaming laptop with a 15-inch screen. The power supply is quite large and heavy. Together with the network cable, it weighs 874 grams.

The lid with the screen for this laptop is not installed on the edge, but with an indent from it by 22 mm. This is done in order to increase the space for a cooling system with a radiator with elongated fins and to place most of the connectors on the back of the device. The perforations of the cooling system are located here at the edges of the back and sides. The air intake is carried out from below through a massive grille with large round holes, which are similar in size to the holes on the Xbox Series X case. However, the manufacturer did not forget to make sure that no coarse dust and other foreign objects get inside; a plastic insert with small holes.

Also on the bottom of the device on the sides are the speaker holes. There are three rubberized bottom – two in front and one long in the back. Traditionally, the back leg is slightly higher to create a slight slope so that it is more comfortable for the wrists to lie on the device while using the keyboard.

On the back indent behind the screen, the manufacturer engraved the Lenovo inscription. There is also a power LED and connector designations.

On the back, the manufacturer brought out most of the Legion 5Pi interfaces: an RJ-45 port for connecting a wired Internet, an HDMI 2.0 connector for displaying images on external screens with a resolution of up to 4K and 60 Hz, a USB Type-C version 3.1 connector with DisplayPort 1.2 support, a port for connecting a branded power supply, as well as holes for a Kensington lock. In addition, there are also 2 USB Type-A connectors version 3.1 located in the back in the middle, and two more are spaced on the sides, which in total gives as many as 4 USB type A connectors. In our memory, this is the largest number of USB ports that were found in laptops.

The manufacturer did not forget about the 3.5 mm jack, which is combined here and is suitable for connecting wired headphones, microphones and headsets. The rear position is especially convenient when using the laptop in stationary mode. Thanks to this, all wires are hidden behind the screen and never get in the way, as is the case with laptops, where the interfaces are located on the sides.

The lid of the laptop can be opened effortlessly with one hand, which is quite common with a device of this weight. The maximum opening angle is 180 degrees. The bezels of the laptop are quite thin. Side and top – only 7 mm, and the bottom with the inscription Legion – the largest by 28 mm. The frame is made of plastic. We did not find a built-in camera for this model.

SCREEN

The Legion 5Pi received a screen from the Chinese manufacturer BOE Technology. This is an 8-bit IPS-matrix with Full HD resolution (1920 x 1080 pixels) and a refresh rate of 144 Hz. The response time is less than 5ms. Brightness – 300 nits. The sRGB color gamut is 100% and the NTSC color gamut is approximately 72%. The surface of the screen is matte and has an anti-reflective coating. Thanks to the latter and the brightness of the screen, the laptop can be used outdoors without any problems. The backlighting of the matrix is ​​uneven, but at the same time on black I did not notice visible highlights.

SOUND AND FUNCTIONAL

Two speakers of 2 W are responsible for the sound on this solution. Judging by the logo, the sound specialists from HARMAN were engaged in setting them next to the keyboard. They sound good for a laptop, but they still lack volume. Although the level offered by them will be enough for watching movies and games. Music without an emphasis on bass can also be played for the background while working. The laptop also supports Dolby Atmos for headphones, but, unfortunately, I didn’t have good wired headphones at hand during testing, so I couldn’t verify this point.

The power button here is of a round concave shape with an LED in the middle. It is located exactly above the keyboard and under the Legion logo on the screen frame. It took the laptop about 23 seconds to turn on, which is long enough for an M.2 SSD solution.

By tradition, most of the base is occupied by the keyboard unit, which is recessed into the body.

The keyboard, by the way, is full-fledged here, so those who like to count on the calculator how much they have left to pay the loan will be happy with the digital block.

There is also a block with arrows, and the buttons here are of full size – the arrows are located slightly protruding from the main keyboard block, but it all looks quite organic.

The buttons are made of nice soft-touch plastic. The keyboard has a long travel of 1.5 mm, and it was comfortable to type on.

There is a key backlight, which is activated using the FN + Space key combination or in the Lenovo Vantage proprietary application. In our model, it is white without brightness control – it glows along the contour and does not blind the eyes. There are also other models with 4-zone illumination.

The touch panel is not very large here, the size of the working surface is 110×75 mm. It supports multi-finger gesture control. The bottom corners are pressed through and mimic the main mouse buttons.

FILLING, BATTERY, OPERATION AND TESTS

Lenovo Legion, which came to us for testing, is based on a 14nm Intel Core i7-10750H processor, clocked at 2.6 GHz. The processor is 6-core and operates in 12 threads, and the maximum frequency is 4600 GHz. Graphics in this laptop is available only discrete from NVIDIA – GeForce GTX 1660 Ti with 6 GB of GDDR6 memory.

The laptop has 2 DDR4 memory sticks of 8 gigabytes each (operating at 1600 MHz) with a maximum frequency of 3200 MHz from Samsung. The memory can be independently expanded up to 32 gigabytes. The internal storage in the test sample was played by a 256 GB NVMe SSD from Samsung. It is also possible to install a second drive in a free M.2 slot.

In the Lenovo Vantage application, which is already installed on this laptop, you can choose between three temperature settings:

  • Performance mode – it increases the speed of fans and power consumption, but at the same time without external power this mode still does not work at the limit of possibilities.
  • Balanced Mode – The system automatically adjusts fans and overall performance at moderate power consumption.
  • Quiet Mode – In this mode, the laptop will operate at reduced performance and fan speeds while consuming less power.
  • There is also a switch for automatically changing the mode to productive when starting games and then returning after exiting them.

The laptop comes with a 6-cell 80,000 Wh Li-ion polymer battery. A full charge will last for 5-8 hours in everyday use (surfing the Internet, working with documents, watching videos and listening to music) with the maximum display brightness set. In performance mode, the laptop will last about 1.5 hours. With maximum performance, like all gaming laptops, the system only operates when the power is connected.

In standard mode (default) AIDA64 displays the following temperatures:

  • CPU – 43 ° C
  • NVIDIA GTX 1660 Ti – 41 ° C
  • SAMSUNG MZVLB256HBHQ-000L2 – 39 ° C

Under maximum load in benchmarks, the laptop CPU heats up to 85 degrees, which is quite normal. We were able to fix the maximum temperature of the GPU at around 75 degrees. The cooling system proved to be excellent and under a long load, throttling was not noticed in this model.

CrystalDisk Info tests indicate an average solid state drive temperature of 49 ° C. The disk speed in Crystal Disk Mark was 3187 MB / s for reading and 2195 MB / s for writing. The AS SDD test, as usual, shows slightly more modest results – 2946 MB / s for reading and 2176 MB / s for writing.

In graphics tests, the GTX 1660 Ti performs very well. All tests were conducted in Full HD resolution in system performance mode with power on:

  • In the Superposition benchmark test on the Unigine 2 engine at high settings, the system showed from 46 to 68 frames.
  • In the Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition benchmark, the laptop on high graphics settings was able to score 5912 points and a Fairly High score.
  • The system has also been tested in Gears 5 Ultra and Forza Horizon 4 in-game tests at maximum custom settings. In both cases, frame rate lock was disabled. In the shooter from Coalition, the average frequency was almost 70 FPS, and in the popular arcade racing 71 frames per second.
  • In Doom Eternal, in open locations in dynamic scenes, the laptop was able to produce an average frame rate of around 115 FPS.
  • The final graphics test was last year’s shooter from Remedy – Control. We tested the project at high settings and got an average of 50 frames in dynamic scenes during battles.

As a result, we can say that this card is quite enough for games in Full HD resolution at medium-high settings.

As for the noise indicators, the laptop is practically inaudible in quiet mode at a room noise level of 30-35 dB. Under heavy loads, powerful cooling starts to work and the device becomes noisy, but at the same time the case does not get very hot. The average noise level under load is 48 db, which is normal for a gaming laptop.

RESULTS

The Legion 5Pi turned out to be a very solid laptop that received enough productive hardware for games in Full HD, a screen with a good matrix and a very nice design without unnecessary details. It is especially good with the layout of the connectors, which are mostly located on the rear edge, and five USB ports are not often found in laptops. The Legion 5Pi is far from the cheapest option with such graphics on board. Although at the current rate, competitors offer solutions similar in specifications in approximately the same price segment.

Author: Sergey Dyakonenko (Madnfs)

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