Lenovo’s Legion series of gaming laptops have been some of the most no-nonsense and practical choices that you could go with, and today we have the Legion 5 model with an 11th Gen Intel CPU and an Nvidia RTX 3050, and it is also available in other variants.
I had really praised the AMD Models of the Legion series, so let’s check out if this Intel version is similarly good or not.
UNBOXING
Inside its box, you get a slim 230 watt power adapter, some manuals and warranty papers, a legion sticker, and we of course get the laptop.
DESIGN
Visually speaking, this new Legion laptop looks identical to their earlier models, but that is not a bad thing. It offers a simple design with some gamery elements, so you can take it to the office and your boss won’t suspect that you’re playing games instead of working.
The overall build quality feels nice, it is completely plastic, but it is a good kind of plastic, and there aren’t any unusual creaks or flexing on its body or the keyboard.
The keyboard itself has large keys with decent travel that makes it comfortable to type on, and we even have a full number pad with full sized arrow keys. The keys are also backlit, and you can switch between 3 levels of brightness. (1st level being ‘off’)
The touchpad is decently sized, and I didn’t have any issues with it. All the gestures work well, and it was able to reject my palm while scrolling.
The laptop weighs 2.4 KGs, which is reasonable for the kind of power it has.
CONNECTIVITY
The Legion 5 has really extensive connectivity for a laptop.
We have a USB 3.2 port on its right
Then at the back we have an ethernet port, a Thunderbolt 4 port, 2 USB 3.2, an HDMI 2.1, and a USB 3.2 Gen2 Port.
We also have another Thunderbolt 4 port on its left, alongside the headphone and microphone combo jack.
Having Thunderbolt here means you can also get display out and power delivery out of these ports, and both of these ports were able to fast charge my phone, even when the laptop is off, which is awesome. The 3.2 Gen2 Port at the rear is also always on, but it wasn’t as fast as the Thunderbolt ports in charging my phone.
DISPLAY
The lid mechanism allows you to open it with one hand and tilt it all the way back.
For the display, we have a 15.6 inch full HD IPS panel that runs at 120Hz. This is a great resolution for this size, and the high refresh rate makes scrolling and the general navigation on Windows very smooth. It covers 45% of NTSC color space, which must translate very well to sRGB, so you should also be able to do color sensitive work on it. The viewing angles are great, and this panel goes up to 250 nits, which is bright enough for indoors, but I do have to keep the screen from 60 to 80% brightness, even indoors.
WEBCAM
We have a 720p camera on this and this is what that looks like, of course it doesn’t look amazing but there are reasons why laptop cameras are like this in general, and it will be good enough for zoom calls and understanding that there is a human behind the laptop.
It features a switch on the side that will disable the camera on a hardware level for privacy, and the camera LED lights up whenever it is in use.
SPEAKERS / WIRELESS
The 2 2 watt speakers at bottom sound loud and clear, and they also don’t get blocked easily because of their placement.
We also have 2 x 2 Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1, and even at a distance I was getting gigabit speeds from my router.
PERFORMANCE
Now the Intel Core i7 11800H inside this laptop is actually a very impressive 8 core 16 thread processor. It is based on Intel’s new 10nm SuperFin process, so it’s not the old 14nm thing that wasn’t competitive with Ryzen CPUs, but it is more like their 12th Gen Desktop CPU.
In fact this actually performs better than a Ryzen 5800H in most tasks and gaming given that you don’t limit its power, and Jarrod’s tech has made an excellent video on comparing these two processors which you can check out.
But we of course have to talk about its performance on this specific laptop, and the gaming performance of the Legion 5i is surprisingly good. I hadn’t checked out what the RTX 3050 in laptops performs like, but I was quite surprised to see that it can even run demanding games like Horizon Zero Dawn in high quality mode at almost 70 FPS, and esports games like Rainbow Six Siege can go well over 200 FPS, so you can really take advantage of the 120 Hz screen on this. Even ray tracing performance was decent with us being able to get over 40fps in Control with DLSS & RTX on High. Our CPU benchmarks also showed us how powerful this CPU is.
You will have to enable the high performance mode to get this best level of performance, so you will have to keep the laptop plugged in.
We have 16 GB of memory on this running at 3200 MT/s, and this combination with the RTX 3050 means that you can also use this to edit even 4K videos in programs like Adobe
Premiere. In addition to having good timeline performance on a complicated 4K project, this was also able to render an 8 minute video project of mine in less than 5 minutes. (Thanks to nvidia NVENC Encoding) which is so amazing to see in a laptop.
The cooling system performs very well, and even though the CPU does go to 90 degrees when you push it hard, it was able to maintain its boost clock of 4.2 GHz on all cores with multiple rendering sessions, which I think is an amazing result.
The fans do make some noise when it is on full load, which is typical for laptops.
STORAGE
For storage, this laptop comes with a 512 GB Gen4 SSD, and this is obviously extremely fast, and it makes the laptop boot up very quickly. You can also expand the storage by adding another SSD as you can have a total of 2 SSDs inside, and you can see that we also have some nice heatsinks to keep them cool.
BATTERY LIFE
Lenovo claims up to 8 hours of battery life with its 60 Wh battery. In my video playback test, this was able to deliver around 3 and a half hours of Youtube streaming with its screen on 80% brightness (this was quite high) on its ‘Balanced’ mode. For general work I think that you should be able to go beyond 6 hours if you keep the screen dimmer and use the power saving mode.
The battery is of course going to drain much faster while gaming but that is just how life is.
CONCLUSION
The Legion 5 15ITH6 is a really solid gaming laptop that is versatile and excels in all areas, and it’s asking price of around 1 lakh rs. Or 1350 US Dollars is also quite justifiable.
I really cannot point to anything in particular that I feel is a negative with this, except for the battery life being a bit shorter than what I was expecting, but that is also still good enough.
Now again, you can get the specs according to your liking, maybe you want to get the 3050 Ti model, or even get the pro model with a 3060, but this particular model is really offering a lot of value for gamers, and especially for video editors as the more expensive models also have the same CPU.
⭐Lenovo Legion 5 11800H, RTX 3050: https://amzn.to/3nb2ZHT
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