Or is gaming just market talk for workstation? That's what I've talked myself into anyway.
Want to listen to me talk about a computer or are you normal? This is my first time writing up a review in such a way if memory doesn't fail, so do go easy!
After much debate over how to replace my ailing, bottlenecked machine from 6 years ago, a couple power cuts later I convinced myself to get a laptop. Of course, this wouldn't be my only reason to go for a laptop—besides a simple autistic itch to get a new mobility scooter, the lower power consumption and physical footprint are heavily favourable advantages for me. Although grimaced at the thought of typing such keywords, I pursued the "gaming laptop" market for a little while as these are supplied with high-performance flavours of hardware and discrete GPUs often not found in the general consumer notebook market. I settled for the popular Lenovo Legion 5 series as it seems to offer the best combination of performance at its price point.
Please note, if you happen to stumble upon this review from outside our house, that this is not a comprehensive review—I'm not benchmarking games here as I'm not even really a gamer. I'll be talking about the laptop as it runs in my use case, which is as an always-on, multitasky workstationy desktop replacement thingy.
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We'll start with what's inside. This is the latest generation of Lenovo Legion with latest generation hardware, which I believe was released to consumers mere days before I ended up buying it. Not something I'd normally recommend, but seeing as I had a price reduction which brought it in line with what I'd buy from the previous years' generation, I figured it worth a shot. Key interior hardware is as follows:
CPU: Intel Core i7-12700H | 14-core (6 performance cores, 8 efficiency cores) | up to 4.7GHz on P-cores
GPU (discrete): NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070ti Laptop GPU | up to 150W TGP (I believe) | 8GB GDDR6
GPU (integrated): Intel Iris Xe Graphics
RAM: 16GB DDR5-4800 SODIMM (2x8GB), upgradeable to 64GB of the same species
SSD: 1TB Samsung MZVL21T0HCLR-00BL2 NVMe (1GB crystaldiskmark result)
Battery Life: No
This is, well it just goes without saying, this would curbstomp my old computer and make soup out of its jaw. Even the iGPU is roughly on par with my 750ti. It does have less RAM, however. That brings to my first drawback, which is that DDR5 RAM is still pretty expensive. I'd be down about an extra £220 to make the jump back to 32GB, seeing as I would need a whole 2x16 kit to do so. That isn't tremendously more than DDR4 depending on what you do or don't consider tremendous, but to me it's not so appealing. I'm hoping as since it's still pretty bleeding-edge, it'll become a little more appealing soon on.
Performance-wise, it just doesn't choke in workstation usage. This is doubly impressive considering it's actually running a modern version of Windows at the time of writing. The RAM is somewhat of a bottleneck in the sense that I actually have to monitor my usage—something I needn't bother with at 32GB—but it's usable, I guess. Whether this is down to my use case that necessitates at least one virtual machine powered on at all times, or an indictment of ever-decreasing software optimizations, (remember when 8GB was fine like, 3 years ago?) I'm not sure. Just kidding it's totally the latter lol. But I digress. The battery life is non-existent. It's basically a UPS. I'm fine with that, though! You probably don't expect stellar battery life from a gaming laptop, anyway. Maybe I'm being a little harsh seeing as I can get around 2 hours of standard usage out of it on the balanced power plan, but it's certainly nut to brag about.
NVIDIA Optimus is still dookie btw.
This thing is hot!! Hot hot hot hot!!! Just for lulz I tried to run Cinebench but pulled the plug after realising about 40 seconds in that one of the CPU cores had already pushed the 100°C mark. When pushed to the limit, the laptop can consume close to 300W, and has a matching behemoth of an AC adapter to boot! You'd definitely want to invest in extra cooling of sorts if you're expecting to push the laptop on a regular basis. Idle/standard temperatures are completely fine, though—as I write on this very laptop, the CPU is hovering around 30.
--
I'll move on to what we've got on the outside now. After all, nothing you do matters if you're ugly!
The build quality feels pretty, well, quality to me so far. It's a hefty machine, but I like hefty. It's staying on my desk for the most part, after all. The hinge feels sturdy and I'm confident in opening and closing it, which isn't something I can say for every laptop I've owned. Overall, not much to say. It's yet to have stood the test of time, though, so if I can, I will keep updated.
Our window into this laptop is a 16 inch 2560x1600 (16:10, or 8:5 if you simplify your fractions like a clever 8 year old) IPS 165hz panel that purports up to 500nits of brightness. The display is vibrant and crisp; I have no issue whatsoever with it. Viewing angles are fine and you can tilt your head around without any impactful distortion to the image. The refresh rate is very welcome coming from 60/74Hz—it's not the highest you can get, even in a laptop, but even so, it adds a much nicer feeling to every day desktop usage. In my specimen there's a mild case of blacklight bleed at the bottom if the display is completely black, though this is totally unnoticeable in real world usage. I've opted to use 150% scaling on Windows, which does come with bumps, but things are pretty tiny if you use 100%. This photo is the best I can do to put that into perspective.
The keyboard is perfectly satisfactory. I don't fuss with the technical aspects, having only owned one mechanical desktop keyboard in my life, but this feels easy to type on and provides enough feedback from each keystroke. No problems delivering avid, high-level, world-class TETR.IO gameplay (lol kidding I'm SS) either. I still think older, pre-2009-ish laptops provided nicer keyboards, but I have nothing to complain about here either. The layout is nice and featureful, bearing full-size arrow keys and a numpad—both of which my last laptop lacked. There's also RGB backlighting, but I don't use it.
Trackpads have never been my favourite input device, but this is one of the better I've used. It's pretty sizey and supports all the common gestures you'd expect. I don't have much else to write as I've used the laptop with a wireless mouse instead, though I can safely say wouldn't be the end of the world if it came to using the trackpad.
--
As for I/O, we have a fair selection for a laptop of its size. One thing I immediately noted however is a lack of an SD card slot, something of which I had come to expect on laptops—though maybe SD cards are passé now or something? I don't know—most of my hardware is obsolete and knows it.
There are 3 regular USB 3.2 ports—two on the back, one on the right-hand side. These are followed by two USB-C 3.2 ports—one on the back, one on the left-hand side. Completing the back end are Ethernet, HDMI 2.1, and the power connector. Completing the sides are a Thunderbolt 4 port on the left, and a single combo 3.5mm jack on the right—this is right next to a USB port, though, so you may experience audible static interference if said port is in use. Right now I only make use of the standard USB, though the options are nice and Thunderbolt in particular can be pretty powerful so I've heard.
While not strictly I/O, the laptop does feature an extra NVMe slot inside, and seeing as I have an extra NVMe SSD currently residing in my tower, I'll be able to move it here, which is definitely a nice bonus.
The laptop sports your standardwiretap mobility webcam with microphone above the screen. I don't fuss over these. There's a switch on the side of the laptop to turn the webcam off which seemingly does so at a hardware level as it disappears totally from Device Manager. Nice little privacy bonus, but I think I'll still pay it compliment with a bit of tape.
--
I guess that's all I really have to write about it so far!
In conclusion, I've gotten very comfortable with this laptop and I've enjoyed its use, even if it did cost an amount of money. It's serving its purpose even if the hardware is a little overkill for what I do. A RAM upgrade would definitely make it feel complete!
If anything pops up or into mind throughout my use, I'll add on to this thread. Pretend I proofread this btw!
Want to listen to me talk about a computer or are you normal? This is my first time writing up a review in such a way if memory doesn't fail, so do go easy!
After much debate over how to replace my ailing, bottlenecked machine from 6 years ago, a couple power cuts later I convinced myself to get a laptop. Of course, this wouldn't be my only reason to go for a laptop—besides a simple autistic itch to get a new mobility scooter, the lower power consumption and physical footprint are heavily favourable advantages for me. Although grimaced at the thought of typing such keywords, I pursued the "gaming laptop" market for a little while as these are supplied with high-performance flavours of hardware and discrete GPUs often not found in the general consumer notebook market. I settled for the popular Lenovo Legion 5 series as it seems to offer the best combination of performance at its price point.
Please note, if you happen to stumble upon this review from outside our house, that this is not a comprehensive review—I'm not benchmarking games here as I'm not even really a gamer. I'll be talking about the laptop as it runs in my use case, which is as an always-on, multitasky workstationy desktop replacement thingy.
--
We'll start with what's inside. This is the latest generation of Lenovo Legion with latest generation hardware, which I believe was released to consumers mere days before I ended up buying it. Not something I'd normally recommend, but seeing as I had a price reduction which brought it in line with what I'd buy from the previous years' generation, I figured it worth a shot. Key interior hardware is as follows:
CPU: Intel Core i7-12700H | 14-core (6 performance cores, 8 efficiency cores) | up to 4.7GHz on P-cores
GPU (discrete): NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070ti Laptop GPU | up to 150W TGP (I believe) | 8GB GDDR6
GPU (integrated): Intel Iris Xe Graphics
RAM: 16GB DDR5-4800 SODIMM (2x8GB), upgradeable to 64GB of the same species
SSD: 1TB Samsung MZVL21T0HCLR-00BL2 NVMe (1GB crystaldiskmark result)
Battery Life: No
This is, well it just goes without saying, this would curbstomp my old computer and make soup out of its jaw. Even the iGPU is roughly on par with my 750ti. It does have less RAM, however. That brings to my first drawback, which is that DDR5 RAM is still pretty expensive. I'd be down about an extra £220 to make the jump back to 32GB, seeing as I would need a whole 2x16 kit to do so. That isn't tremendously more than DDR4 depending on what you do or don't consider tremendous, but to me it's not so appealing. I'm hoping as since it's still pretty bleeding-edge, it'll become a little more appealing soon on.
Performance-wise, it just doesn't choke in workstation usage. This is doubly impressive considering it's actually running a modern version of Windows at the time of writing. The RAM is somewhat of a bottleneck in the sense that I actually have to monitor my usage—something I needn't bother with at 32GB—but it's usable, I guess. Whether this is down to my use case that necessitates at least one virtual machine powered on at all times, or an indictment of ever-decreasing software optimizations, (remember when 8GB was fine like, 3 years ago?) I'm not sure. Just kidding it's totally the latter lol. But I digress. The battery life is non-existent. It's basically a UPS. I'm fine with that, though! You probably don't expect stellar battery life from a gaming laptop, anyway. Maybe I'm being a little harsh seeing as I can get around 2 hours of standard usage out of it on the balanced power plan, but it's certainly nut to brag about.
NVIDIA Optimus is still dookie btw.
This thing is hot!! Hot hot hot hot!!! Just for lulz I tried to run Cinebench but pulled the plug after realising about 40 seconds in that one of the CPU cores had already pushed the 100°C mark. When pushed to the limit, the laptop can consume close to 300W, and has a matching behemoth of an AC adapter to boot! You'd definitely want to invest in extra cooling of sorts if you're expecting to push the laptop on a regular basis. Idle/standard temperatures are completely fine, though—as I write on this very laptop, the CPU is hovering around 30.
--
I'll move on to what we've got on the outside now. After all, nothing you do matters if you're ugly!
The build quality feels pretty, well, quality to me so far. It's a hefty machine, but I like hefty. It's staying on my desk for the most part, after all. The hinge feels sturdy and I'm confident in opening and closing it, which isn't something I can say for every laptop I've owned. Overall, not much to say. It's yet to have stood the test of time, though, so if I can, I will keep updated.
Our window into this laptop is a 16 inch 2560x1600 (16:10, or 8:5 if you simplify your fractions like a clever 8 year old) IPS 165hz panel that purports up to 500nits of brightness. The display is vibrant and crisp; I have no issue whatsoever with it. Viewing angles are fine and you can tilt your head around without any impactful distortion to the image. The refresh rate is very welcome coming from 60/74Hz—it's not the highest you can get, even in a laptop, but even so, it adds a much nicer feeling to every day desktop usage. In my specimen there's a mild case of blacklight bleed at the bottom if the display is completely black, though this is totally unnoticeable in real world usage. I've opted to use 150% scaling on Windows, which does come with bumps, but things are pretty tiny if you use 100%. This photo is the best I can do to put that into perspective.
The keyboard is perfectly satisfactory. I don't fuss with the technical aspects, having only owned one mechanical desktop keyboard in my life, but this feels easy to type on and provides enough feedback from each keystroke. No problems delivering avid, high-level, world-class TETR.IO gameplay (lol kidding I'm SS) either. I still think older, pre-2009-ish laptops provided nicer keyboards, but I have nothing to complain about here either. The layout is nice and featureful, bearing full-size arrow keys and a numpad—both of which my last laptop lacked. There's also RGB backlighting, but I don't use it.
Trackpads have never been my favourite input device, but this is one of the better I've used. It's pretty sizey and supports all the common gestures you'd expect. I don't have much else to write as I've used the laptop with a wireless mouse instead, though I can safely say wouldn't be the end of the world if it came to using the trackpad.
--
As for I/O, we have a fair selection for a laptop of its size. One thing I immediately noted however is a lack of an SD card slot, something of which I had come to expect on laptops—though maybe SD cards are passé now or something? I don't know—most of my hardware is obsolete and knows it.
There are 3 regular USB 3.2 ports—two on the back, one on the right-hand side. These are followed by two USB-C 3.2 ports—one on the back, one on the left-hand side. Completing the back end are Ethernet, HDMI 2.1, and the power connector. Completing the sides are a Thunderbolt 4 port on the left, and a single combo 3.5mm jack on the right—this is right next to a USB port, though, so you may experience audible static interference if said port is in use. Right now I only make use of the standard USB, though the options are nice and Thunderbolt in particular can be pretty powerful so I've heard.
While not strictly I/O, the laptop does feature an extra NVMe slot inside, and seeing as I have an extra NVMe SSD currently residing in my tower, I'll be able to move it here, which is definitely a nice bonus.
The laptop sports your standard
--
I guess that's all I really have to write about it so far!
In conclusion, I've gotten very comfortable with this laptop and I've enjoyed its use, even if it did cost an amount of money. It's serving its purpose even if the hardware is a little overkill for what I do. A RAM upgrade would definitely make it feel complete!
If anything pops up or into mind throughout my use, I'll add on to this thread. Pretend I proofread this btw!
Deleted User
what's the refresh rate of the monitor?
i may be attempting l*nux on this device soon so stay chuned ! ! ! ! ! ! ! like fr i've used longhorn builds more stable than windows 11, and if i'm gonna have to install a whole new os anyway i may as well get funky . . heaven knows what i've signed up for
