One of the most common misconceptions people have about gaming on a PC or laptop is that you need to spend big bucks to get anything that’s actually worth gaming on. Maybe that was true some years back, but the sheer number of really nice, affordable gaming laptops in the market these days is great for gamers on a budget. The Lenovo Legion 5 (Rs. 73,490) is one such machine. Designed to handle most games you’ll throw at it, while also fitting in at a workplace, the Legion 5 aims to address people who are into gaming, but also want their laptops to pull double duty for work.
- Design and Build
- Display
- Performance
- Keyboard
- Trackpad
- Lenovo Vantage
- Speakers
- Ports and Connectivity
- Battery
Lenovo Legion 5 AR150H Specs
Design and Build
From the very first glance, the Legion 5 doesn’t shy away from what Lenovo designed it to be — a laptop built to fit into two categories of machines at once. It all starts off from the clean and minimal A-panel with the tiny ‘Lenovo’ badge on one edge, and the ‘Legion’ branding on the other. There are no unnecessary design-flairs here, and closed, the only reason to think this is a gaming laptop is the fact that it’s branded ‘Legion’.
I have been using the Legion 5 as my daily driver for weeks at this point, and this 15.6-inch Full HD 120Hz display has not let me down. The thin bezels around the screen make for an immersive, if not entirely groundbreaking experience. The screen itself is decently bright, though I think the matte coating makes it slightly less gorgeous to look at than a glossy glass panel would. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not calling Lenovo out on this. If anything, I appreciate matte panels for the sheer amount of glare-reduction they do.
Viewing angles are fairly decent here as well, and the display is good enough for most of anything you want to do on it.
The Lenovo Legion 5 comes with a Ryzen 5 4600H paired with 8GB 3200MHz RAM, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650Ti GPU, 256GB PCIe SSD and a 1TB HDD. Pretty standard specs for a laptop in this price range. I do appreciate the combination of an SSD and hard disk here which means you get more storage space, but also the fast boot-up times that an SSD brings to the table.
For gaming, I played a couple odd games on the laptop. In Far Cry 5, the laptop defaults to High graphics settings and the in-game benchmark showed frame rates ranging from 20 to 74FPS. That 20 frames per second point happened once in the benchmark, but it’s not a good sign. I switched graphics settings to Normal to actually play the game, and did not notice any frame drops or stutters. The in-game benchmark showed remarkable improvement as well, ranging from 52 to 84FPS, with an average of 67FPS which is fine for me.
Overall, the performance here is decent. It won’t blow you away with anything really, but as a budget gaming laptop, the Legion 5 usually holds its own with gaming as well as work. I do wish there was more RAM here for a bit more future-proofing and better performance, but at least you get a second SO-DIMM slot to do that on your own if needed.
The Legion 5’s keyboard looks quite similar to the ones found on other Lenovo laptops including the IdeaPad Gaming 3i. It has a similar keycap design, and the keyboard itself is nearly just as nice. The keys feel tactile and there’s ample travel. All of which results in a pleasing experience with the keyboard whether you’re typing for long hours (as I do), or gaming.
Trackpad
There’s also a decently sized trackpad on the laptop which I didn’t find myself having any considerable trouble with. It comes with support for Windows gestures so you can use three and four finger gestures to perform various actions. Most often, I had a mouse connected with the laptop, so my use of the trackpad was limited for sure, but it’s a fairly responsive touchpad so if you need to use it, you won’t be left disgruntled by the experience.
As it is with every Lenovo gaming laptop, you get the really useful Lenovo Vantage software here as well. This allows for certain controls over the Legion 5’s battery and performance settings, among other things.
There are also options for Network Boost, Hybrid Mode, Touchpad Lock, and more. The ‘Thermal Mode’ setting allows switching between three performance profiles on the laptop — Quiet, Balanced, and Performance. Those names are pretty self-explanatory in what effect they’ll have on the laptop, and for the most part you won’t need to play around with these anyway; the Legion 5 does a fairly good job of handling thermal profiles on its own.
Lenovo has put in a pair of speakers on the Legion 5 which, even though they are bottom-firing ones, are actually fairly decent. I’ve used a lot of laptops in my time here at Beebom and most budget laptops sound shamefully bad. The Legion 5’s Harman-tuned stereo speakers, on the other hand, aren’t half bad.
They get quite loud, and, to my surprise, they even manage to produce some bass. I will obviously still recommend getting a pair of headphones to truly enjoy music, but these speakers can serve the purpose in a pinch. For other things, including watching movies, these speakers are actually fairly decent.
Port selection on the Legion 5 is on point. The laptop’s chassis is surrounded by ports, including four USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, one USB 3.2 Type-C port, an RJ-45 ethernet port, HDMI out, and of course, a power input along with a combo headphone/mic port.
Other than that, the laptop packs in support for WiFi 802.11ac (no WiFi 6 here) as well as Bluetooth 5.0. Sure this isn’t Bluetooth 5.1 or Bluetooth 5.2, but it’s alright.
Lastly, the battery life. I normally tend to treat battery life on a gaming laptop as an afterthought. However, my opinion of this laptop is a dual-purpose work/play laptop, and when you think about work, you absolutely need a good battery life.
Still, this laptop screams a work/play aesthetic, and the battery life seems disappointing from that perspective.
As much as I liked the Legion 5, making this an outright recommendation is complicated. There are just way too many laptops in this price bracket that offer similar things, or various trade-offs in some aspects to get better features in others. For example, the HP Pavilion Gaming 15 (Rs. 71,990) comes with the same Ryzen 5 processor, 8GB RAM, and GTX 1650Ti. However, it brings in a better 144Hz display while only offering a standalone 512GB SSD.
