Lenovo Legion 5i Laptop Review – RTX 2060 for £999!

1. Introduction2. CPU, RAM & Storage Performance3. 3DMark & Gaming Performance4. Power, Temperatures & Battery Life5. Closing Thoughts6. View All Pages

Today we’re looking at the Lenovo Legion 5i, a range of upper-midrange gaming laptops that have a starting price of £939.99 over on Lenovo’s website. Our specific model has an RTX 2060 6GB, 8GB RAM, Intel i5 10^th Gen CPU and a 144Hz 1080p screen. Attractively priced under £1000 for this SKU, is it any good?

Specifications:

• Our review model/part number: 81Y6005TUK
• Intel Core i5-10300H Quad Core Processor (2.50GHz, up to 4.50GHz with Turbo Boost, 4 Cores, 8MB Cache)
• 6″ Full HD IPS 144Hz 100% sRGB Screen
• Microsoft Windows 10 Home 64-bit
• 8GB DDR4 RAM 2933MHz SoDIMM
• 256GB M.2 NVMe SSD M.2 2280 (half size)
• Dedicated GeForce RTX 2060 6GB GDDR6 Graphics
• White LED backlit keyboard – full size layout
• 230W AC Adapter Slim
• 80Wh battery
• 4x USB-A 3.1 Gen 1
• 1x USB-C 3.1 Gen 1
• 1x Full size HDMI
• Bluetooth
• Webcam with privacy filter
• 363.06 mm x 259.61 mm x 22 mm
• 2.3KG

With a RTX 2060 (see the GPU-Z screenshot above), a 10^th Gen i5 and an IPS 1080p screen with 144Hz this certainly looks like a gaming beast on paper, especially for the price. The 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM has us slightly concerned upon first glance but we’ll see how they hold up during out test results.

Lenovo are marketing this as a gaming laptop, which the specs portray, but we were surprised to see such an understated all black design. In our opinion it resembles a design more suited to a business user on first inspection, there’s not many contours or angles, no aggressive styling with a small Lenovo metal badge on the lid. Looking closer you see a very nice LEGION logo on the lid that is iridescent, that is a nice subtle touch that we like. From the base and sides, you get your first hints at the gaming beast hidden below, there’s four large exhaust vents and a massive drilled out intake on the base, with dust filter hiding two large intake fans.

All tests were conducted whilst the laptop was plugged in, set to performance mode and put onto the 3rd mode when cycling through the profiles with Fn + Q shortcuts, for the best results we could achieve. We compared the Legion 5i to other laptops we have reviewed in the past, where possible.

Cinebench R15 and R20 are tests that measure CPU performance.

On the charts it appears the Legion performs badly against the other models, however; you must keep in mind we are testing a 10^th Gen i5 against i7 and even Ryzen 9 CPUs.

For the synthetic gaming tests, we tested the GPUs' capabilities with 3DMark benchmarking software. We compared the Legion 5i to other laptops we have reviewed in the past, where possible.

Placing last in every test doesn’t actually make the Legion a loser! Our 2060 is up against 2070 Max-Q and Max-P GPUs, considering this the scores are very close and what we expected to see here from a 6GB RTX 2060.

Now let’s look at real gaming benchmarks. Bear in mind we put these games to the absolute highest settings that the game would let us, all games would let us set the graphics to run at maximum other than DOOM Eternal which we still ran at Nightmare settings.

Starting with Doom Eternal our results show it’s far more than playable, this ran brilliantly and it looked great on the 144Hz IPS screen. The Division 2 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider saw a slight dive in performance, while Resident Evil 2 remake did very well. We expected these results as Division 2 and Tomb Raider are always a push at maximum settings. We still think these results are great, tweak some settings, maybe drop the shadows a little etc. and you’ll get better FPS but even at 60fps lowest these ran great.

One thing to point out is the lack of drive space, we really wanted to test CoD MW but since that game is insanely huge, well over 200GB at the time of writing, it just wasn’t possible to even install it.

Power consumption wise we have an idle draw of 45w, 78w during PCMark 10 and 188.8w during our demanding game benchmarking.

We saw idle CPU temps of 43 degrees C, hitting up to 88C in Cinebench R20, but came in lower during gaming with a temperature of 75C.

GPU temps surprised us a little, especially considering this is a non-Max-Q RTX 2060. We were expecting more heat, as we only saw the GPU hit 69C as the absolute highest temperature. Those huge intakes on the bottom and quad exhausts definitely do their job.

Finally, what’s the battery like? During PCMark 10 battery benchmarks we got 248 minutes during the Modern Office test, though bear in mind this is more of a general use, opening word documents, playing some videos, using excel etc. That’s over 4 hours and we think that’s acceptable since this is a gaming laptop. For gaming we saw 91 minute battery life, so just over an hour and a half, which is not too shabby. In real word scenarios expect better performance though as these are bench-marking tools!

Charge wise there’s two ways of doing it, you have standard charging, which was good at 135 minutes but you can also enable fast charge via Lenovo Vantage and this charged it up fully in 85 minutes.

In conclusion, we think the Lenovo Legion 5i 15” gaming laptop out performed our expectations, not just in terms of its performance but with its aesthetics and design too. The understated, almost business-like looks have grown on us over our time with it, and the cooling solution is also impressive. The only setback really is that with such a simple design, it is a huge fingerprint magnet.

There’s plenty of ports and connectors for your needs, the keyboard is great to use and the test results were certainly surprising in some areas. The full-fat RTX 2060 6GB definitely piqued our interest, and combined with an i5 it is more than capable for a gaming setup, as we saw. We think Lenovo's been smart with the pairing, making sensible decisions for the targeted user and as a result it performs great with a really reasonable price too.

This is a more than capable mid-range laptop, if you’re in the market for a gaming laptop that makes a few compromises to give you great performance at a compelling price point then the Lenovo Legion 5i is worth checking out.

You can purchase the Lenovo Legion 5i, for £999.99, HERE!

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 Pros:

• Great specs for the price point.
• Good performer all round throughout our tests.
• Very good airflow.
• Great selection of IO.
• Full size keyboard is very nice to use for typing and gaming.
• Good selection of function combination keys.

Cons:

• Lid is a fingerprint magnet.
• White LED backlit keyboard only (better that than no backlight though).
• Power button feels spongey.
• 256GB SSD is too small to have multiple games installed at the same time.

KitGuru says: Despite costing under £1000, the Legion 5i is certainly no slouch and the understated design will please those who don’t want a typical ‘gamer' design.

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