Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 6 15 (2021) Laptop Review

The Lenovo Legion 5 2021 has an understated design with minimal gamer aesthetic, similar to the Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 (2021) and the HP Victus 16 (2021). It has fairly thin bezels on three sides with a thicker bottom chin, a full-size keyboard with a Numpad on the right side, and an off-center plastic touchpad. There are vents and ports on both sides of the laptop and the back. On the bottom of the laptop, you can find the speakers near the front and additional vents near the back. It's available in two color schemes: Phantom Blue with a Shadow Black bottom or Stingray with a Dove Gray bottom.

The Lenovo Legion 5 gaming laptop's build quality is great. It's mostly plastic with some metal on the back. It feels solid, with no obvious gaps in the construction, and the finish doesn't scratch or pick up fingerprints easily. There's a bit of flex in the display but almost none in the keyboard deck. The weight distribution isn't that great as it's back-heavy, making using the laptop on a lap uncomfortable as it may tip over. If you want a more premium-feeling laptop with a sturdier aluminum chassis, check out the Razer Blade 14 (2022).

The Lenovo Legion 5 15ACH6 has outstanding hinges. It feels strong but not too stiff, so you can still open the laptop with one hand, which is a nice quality-of-life feature. Opening the lid feels smooth, and there's very little wobble when typing aggressively or moving the laptop around.

The Lenovo Legion 5 and its power adapter are hard to carry around, as they're both bulky and heavy. If you want a more portable thin and light gaming laptop, check out the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2022).

The Lenovo Legion 5 15's serviceability is good. The memory, storage, wireless adapter, and battery are all user-replaceable. However, it isn't easy to access the internals. Removing the ten Philips screws isn't a problem, but prying open the bottom panel is hard. You'll need a metal pick or prying tool, and you have to be careful as the clips holding the panel break easily. Once inside, you can find the components under the metal sheaths. You can see the service manual here. Opening the laptop and changing the hardware may void the manufacturer's warranty.

• Lenovo Legion 5 laptop
• 230W power adapter and cord
• Documentation

Note: Models with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, RTX 3070, or an AMD Radeon RX 6600M GPU have a 300W power adapter.

The Lenovo Legion 5 is available with the following displays:

• 15.6" IPS 1080p 60Hz
• 15.6" IPS 1080p 120Hz
• 15.6" IPS 1080p 165Hz
• 15.6" IPS 1440p 165Hz

The 1080p panels' pixel density is decent at this screen size, so images and text still look relatively sharp. The QHD panel looks noticeably sharper, with a pixel density of 188 PPI; however, it's harder to drive, meaning you'll have to pair it with the top-end NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 GPU to get good frame rates in games. The 16:9 aspect ratio is good for gaming and media consumption, but it's a bit too short for productivity, so you have to scroll more when reading documents.

The Lenovo Legion 5's 120Hz panel displays a relatively clear image in fast-moving content and provides a responsive gaming experience. However, the response time is a little slow, causing visible blur trails behind moving objects. The 60Hz panel will display a blurrier image, and it doesn't support any variable refresh rate technology. On the other hand, the 1080p and 1440p 165Hz panels support FreeSync and G-Sync and likely perform better than the 120Hz panel.

The Lenovo Legion 5's contrast ratio is okay, but it's still low compared to other panel technologies like VA and OLED. Blacks look gray in dim settings, so it isn't ideal for viewing content in the dark. The other panel options will perform similarly. The contrast ratio can vary between individual units, but the difference is usually minor and isn't noticeable.

The Lenovo Legion gaming laptop's 120Hz panel doesn't get very bright. It's good enough for use in most indoor settings but not in a well-lit environment or outdoors in broad daylight. If you like viewing content in the dark, the screen gets very dim to help reduce eye strain.

The other three panels have an advertised brightness of 300 cd/m², which is brighter, but not significantly so, and still not enough to combat intense glare.

The Lenovo Legion 5 Gaming has great reflection handling. It has a matte anti-reflective coating that does a good job of diffusing bright, direct reflections like a lamp or open window during the day. The reflections are still distracting when viewing dark content, but not as much when viewing bright content with the screen at max brightness. Bright ambient lighting creates a slight haziness on the screen, although it isn't too bad.

The Lenovo Legion 5's black uniformity is mediocre. There's clouding throughout the screen, and some backlight bleed along the top and bottom edges. However, these uniformity issues are only visible when viewing dark content in a dim setting. Black uniformity varies due to manufacturing tolerances; you may get a unit with a little more or less backlight bleed, but you can expect the rest of the screen to be relatively similar.

The Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 6 AMD has okay horizontal viewing angles. The image dims very quickly when moving off-center. The picture quality is still good enough from the side to share text documents and other casual content, but you have to be close or directly in front of the screen if you need perfect accuracy. The other panels likely have similar viewing angles.

The Lenovo Legion 5 has mediocre vertical viewing angles. The image dims and washes out when viewed from above and below. It's fine if you're only looking at a text document, but you have to look at the screen straight on if accuracy is important, which can be hard when you don't have enough space to tilt the screen to your liking, like on a bus or airplane.

The Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 6 has poor color accuracy out of the box. The white balance is alright, but most colors look inaccurate because the panel has a narrow color gamut and can't reproduce the proper colors. The color temperature is very close to the standard 6500K target. The gamma sticks roughly to a 2.2 target instead of following the sRGB curve, making dark scenes too dark and bright scenes a bit too bright. Color accuracy varies between individual units, but the difference is usually minor and hard to notice. The other panels with full sRGB coverage likely have better accuracy out of the box.

The Lenovo Legion 5 has a poor color gamut. It doesn't even have full coverage of the commonly-used sRGB color space, resulting in washed-out colors in most content. It also has very limited coverage of the wider color spaces like Adobe RGB, DCI P3, and Rec. 2020, making it unsuitable for color-critical work or for viewing and producing HDR content. The 60Hz and 165Hz panels - including the QHD display - will look better as they have an advertised 100% sRGB coverage.

The Lenovo Legion 5 has a flicker-free backlight, which helps reduce eye strain for people sensitive to flickering.

The Lenovo Legion 5 15 has a great keyboard. The plastic used for the keycaps feels high-quality, there's sufficient spacing between the keys, and the layout is fairly standard and easy to get used to. The keys have a lot of travel, don't require much force to actuate, and provide reasonably satisfying tactile feedback. They aren't the most stable keys, but it isn't bothersome when typing. The keyboard doesn't feel tiring to type on for extended periods. Typing noise is low, so you don't have to worry about using this laptop in a quiet environment. You can toggle between two backlight brightness levels or turn it off completely using FN and the spacebar. This model has white backlighting only, but there are models with a 4-zone RGB backlight.

The Lenovo Legion 5 has a decent touchpad. It's on the smaller side, but it feels smooth and stable, with no signs of wobbling. It tracks all movements and gestures well, and there aren't any issues with palm rejection or actions like dragging and dropping. However, the click mechanism doesn't feel particularly satisfying, so it can be hard to know whether you've clicked hard enough for the laptop to register the input.

The Lenovo Legion 5's speakers are good overall. They sound relatively natural with a lot of emphasis in the vocal range, making them well suited for spoken content. However, they aren't ideal for music or movies because they have no bass whatsoever. They don't get very loud either, but the sound quality doesn't degrade much at max volume.

The Lenovo Legion 5's webcam video quality is good. There's a fair amount of fine details in the image even though it's 720p; however, it looks a little underexposed, making it hard to differentiate darker colors. There's also some noise, although it's very minor. The microphone sounds slightly boomy, but voices still come across loud and clear with no static in the background. There isn't a physical privacy cover for the webcam, although there's a switch on the right side of the laptop that disables the camera at the software level.

The Lenovo Legion 5 15 has an outstanding port selection. All four USB-A ports support USB 3.2 Gen 1 data transfer speed (up to 5Gbps). The USB-A on the side is always on, meaning you can use it to charge an external device even when the laptop is in sleep mode. Both USB-Cs support USB 3.2 Gen 2 data transfer speed (up to 10Gbps) and video output via DisplayPort 1.4; however, only the USB-C on the back of the device supports charging (up to 100W). If you want a gaming laptop with a USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 port, check out the HP OMEN 16 (2022).

The Lenovo Legion 5's wireless adapter is a Realtek RTL8852AE Wi-Fi 6. Some users have reported experiencing connection dropouts or slow internet speeds. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like there's a fix for these issues through a firmware update, but on the upside, the wireless adapter is user-replaceable.

You can configure the Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 6 with the following CPUs:

• AMD Ryzen 5 5600H (6 cores/12 threads, up to 4.2GHz, 16MB cache)
• AMD Ryzen 7 5800H (8 cores/ 16 threads, up to 4.4GHz, 16MB cache)

Both are high-power mobile processors designed to handle demanding tasks, like gaming and video editing. The Ryzen 7 5800H is faster than the Ryzen 5 5600H, especially in multi-threaded workloads due to its increase core count. The performance increase doesn't affect GPU-limited games significantly, but it's noticeable in more CPU-intensive games like Civilization VI or open-world games. For demanding production workloads like video editing or programming, it's best to go with the Ryzen 7 5800H as it can complete tasks faster and provide a smoother experience overall.

The Lenovo Legion 5 is available with the following dedicated GPUs:

• AMD Radeon RX 6600M with 8GB GDDR6 VRAM (100W TGP)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 with 4GB of GDDR6 VRAM (unknown TGP)
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 with 4GB of GDDR6 VRAM (95W TGP)
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050Ti with 4GB of GDDR6 VRAM (95W TGP)
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 with 6GB of GDDR6 VRAM (130W TGP)
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 with 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM (130W TGP)

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.

The NVIDIA RTX GPUs support DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) and ray-tracing. DLSS helps increase the frame rate by rendering the game at a lower resolution and subsequently using temporal upscaling to minimize any loss in visual quality. However, it's more effective at higher resolutions, and its performance depends heavily on each game's implementation, meaning you may see only a small increase in frame rate at 1080p or none at all when enabled. As for ray-tracing, it isn't worth enabling on an RTX 3050 and 3050Ti because it has a high performance cost and will cause the frame rate to drop too low. It may be worth it on the RTX 3060 and 3070, but only if you use DLSS to make up for the performance loss. The AMD Radeon RX 6600M has a similar DLSS-like feature called FSR and supports ray-tracing as well. If you want an NVIDIA 40-series laptop with Frame Generation support, check out the Lenovo Legion Pro 5 Gen 8 16 (2023).

There's a MUX (multiplexer) switch to allow the GPU to send information directly to the display without going through the integrated GPU, meaning you'll see dramatically better performance than on laptops that lack this feature. The performance difference can be anywhere from 10% to 25%, or more in some cases.

You can configure the Lenovo Legion 5 with 8, 16, or 32GB of memory. For the best gaming experience, it's best to get at least 16GB because 8GB isn't enough for some games and will cause stutters. The 8GB model is also in a single-channel configuration, which impacts performance, especially on AMD Ryzen systems. This laptop uses a single rank x16 memory module that doesn't perform as well as rank x8 modules due to its smaller bandwidth. However, this slower memory doesn't affect all games and applications; it's more of an issue in CPU-bound scenarios. Some users have reported getting rank x8 memory in their units, but Lenovo doesn't specify which type is in each model, so it's impossible to know what you'll get until you receive the device. On the upside, the memory is user-replaceable, meaning you can swap it out for a better one.

You can configure the Lenovo Legion 5 with a 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB PCIe NVMe SSD.

The Lenovo Legion 5 has an excellent overall score in Geekbench 5. The AMD Ryzen 5 5600H has outstanding single-thread and good multi-thread performance. However, the multi-thread performance is worse than expected due to the laptop having single-rank x16 memory in a single-channel configuration, limiting performance in memory-sensitive tasks like file compression. In short, the AMD Ryzen 5 5600H and the Ryzen 7 5800H are very capable CPUs that can handle demanding production workloads. However, you'll have to upgrade the memory to get the most out of them. If you want a similar laptop with a faster CPU, check out the ASUS TUF Dash F15 (2022).

As for the GPU compute, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 has an excellent score, making it suitable for intensive tasks like video editing and 3D animation. If you want even better performance, go with the RTX 3060, 3070, or the AMD Radeon RX 6600M. The GTX 1650 can get the job done, but you might experience some stutters and frame drops here and there, and it'll take longer to complete tasks.

The results above are scores obtained in the Balanced power profile. The Performance mode only boosts graphical performance slightly.

The Lenovo Legion 5 with an AMD Ryzen 5 5600H performs exceptionally well in Cinebench R23, making it suitable for professional-level rendering or other related workloads. The AMD Ryzen 7 5800H has even better multi-thread performance, in the same ballpark as the Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 (2021).

The Lenovo Legion 5's performance in Blender is excellent. Although the AMD Ryzen 5 5600H can render the bmw27 scene fairly quickly, it's always better to use the dedicated GPU as it's significantly faster, especially the NVIDIA RTX GPUs with Optix API hardware acceleration.

The Lenovo Legion 5's Basemark GPU score is great and within the expected range for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050. Switching to the Performance mode in the Lenovo Vantage software boosts graphical performance slightly, resulting in a score of 61,128. Every available GPU can deliver a smooth gaming experience at 1080p, though you'll have to lower some settings in demanding titles to get to 60 fps on models with a GTX 1650, an RTX 3050, or an RTX 3050Ti. The RTX 3070 is the only GPU that can deliver smooth gameplay at 1440p. The AMD Radeon RX 6600M is similar to an RTX 3060 in performance; it'll run better in an AMD title like Assassin's Creed Valhalla but worse in an NVIDIA title like Control.

The Lenovo Legion 5's SSD performance is outstanding. It has fast read and write speeds that make the system feel more responsive and snappy, shortening the time it takes to boot up, launch apps, and transfer files. Its sequential read speed is particularly impressive, which is good news for gamers as it can load large games very quickly. The speed of the SSD may vary depending on the size, as larger SSDs tend to perform better.

The Lenovo Legion 5 has poor battery life. Regardless of your usage, you'll have to plug it in at some point to get through the day. For demanding tasks like gaming or video editing, you'll have to use the laptop plugged in most of the time. Some models have a larger 80Wh battery, but it'll only add an hour or so more of light use. Battery life varies greatly depending on your usage and the laptop's configuration, as higher-end GPUs and displays with a faster refresh rate consume more power.

The Lenovo Legion 5 performs poorly in Borderlands 3. The game is very choppy at high settings. The average frame rate is much higher at low settings, but you'll still experience some stutters. It's better than the Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 (2021) because this laptop has a MUX switch; however, it's also worse than expected for a configuration with a Ryzen 5 5600H and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 due to this unit's limited amount of memory, the memory density, and the memory channel configuration. You can expect the performance to be closer to that of the HP Victus 16 (2021) if you upgrade the memory. The GTX 1650 can reach 60 fps, but only if you turn down the graphical settings to near minimum. The RTX 3060, RTX 3070, and the AMD Radeon RX 6600M can run this game smoothly, provided that you upgrade the memory.

Civilization VI runs well on the Lenovo Legion 5. The gameplay is smooth at high settings, with only some barely noticeable stutters here and there. However, the performance is worse than expected for a laptop with an AMD Ryzen 5 5600H and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050. Every CPU and GPU configuration can run this game smoothly, but you'll have to turn down some settings on a GTX 1650 model to get to 60 fps. The RTX 3060, 3070, and the AMD Radeon RX 6600M will run this game at higher frame rates without any issues. The average turn time is decent and within the expected range. It'll be shorter on models with an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H, but only slightly.

CS:GO runs very smoothly on the Lenovo Legion 5. It's worse than expected for this unit's configuration but still very playable, even for competitive gamers. Every CPU and GPU configuration of the Lenovo Legion 5 can run this game smoothly.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider runs reasonably well on the Lenovo Legion 5 with an AMD Ryzen 5 5600H and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050. The average frame rate at high settings is good, but there are frequent micro-stutters. Again, the overall performance is worse than expected due to memory issues. Upgrading the memory to 16GB in dual-channel mode will improve the 1% and 0.1% lows as well as the average frame rate, especially at lower settings. You'll have to turn down some settings to reach 60 fps with the GTX 1650. The RTX 3060, 3070, and AMD Radeon RX 6600M can run this game smoothly without any issues. The large frame time spikes are scene changes and aren't representative of the laptop's performance.

The Lenovo Legion 5 15 has decent thermal and noise handling. The keyboard deck is relatively cool when idle and only gets slightly warm under load. The fans are audible even when idle, though it isn't loud or distracting. However, they get much louder under load, producing a sound of heavy airflow and fast-spinning fans. Unfortunately, the Quiet power profile in the Lenovo Vantage software doesn't make much difference to the fan noise.

The Lenovo Legion 5's performance over time is outstanding. Neither the CPU nor the GPU gets very hot under load. The small amount of throttling on the CPU isn't noticeable, and the GPU doesn't throttle at all. All other configurations will perform similarly.

The Lenovo Legion 5 has a few pre-installed applications, including:

• Lenovo Hotkeys: Lets you create keyboard macros.
• Lenovo Vantage: Helps keep the BIOS and drivers up to date. It also lets you view the system's status and warranty information, as well as access various power profiles.
• Lenovo Welcome: Introductory app containing general information about the laptop for new users.
• McAfee Personal Security: Anti-malware application. It can also create and store complex passwords and offers identity restoration services.
• Nahimic: SteelSeries-branded audio customization and configuration utility.

The Lenovo Legion 5 doesn't have any extra features.