Lenovo Legion 5 82JU000LGE Review: Powerful Gaming Notebook At a Fair Price | Tech Reviews
Lenovo offers the Legion 5 with a wide range of configurations. After the variant with an Intel Core i7 and a GeForce RTX 3050 Ti, we now tested the more powerful model with a Ryzen 7 5800H and RTX 3070 for our tech reviews.
Lenovo has been doing a lot right with the Legion series for a number of years. The gaming notebooks convince with good workmanship, stable materials, a pleasantly simple design and above all a lot of performance at fair prices. My colleague had already looked at the Legion 5 82NL000RGE with an Intel processor, entry-level graphics card in the form of the RTX 3050 Ti and 120 Hz display in May 2022.
Thanks to the AMD Ryzen 7 5800H and RTX 3070, my test sample has a little more power under the hood. It also relies on a Full HD display with 165 Hz and G-Sync, but currently costs 1699 euros* (1786 USD) but also 450 euros* more than the Legion 5 82NL000RGE.
Design and Processing
The Legion 5 is pleasantly understated for a gaming notebook. There is no RGB lighting, large logos or conspicuous beads and edges. In return, the notebook relies on a matte dark blue, narrow display frames and a hinge that can be folded almost 180° and is slightly offset to the front. This allows most of the connections to be made on the back. The hinge itself has a surface that changes color slightly depending on the viewing angle. But it doesn’t step out of line in an uncomfortable way.
Although it is mostly made of plastic, it still looks very robust. The surface is described by Lenovo as “stain-resistant polymer talc”. In fact, it is relatively resistant to fingerprints and dust is hardly visible. But even so, the Legion 5 does everything right when it comes to processing. Nothing rattles, creaks or wobbles, and the display can also be opened with a finger. The keyboard can also only be depressed with a lot of force.
Keyboard and Touchpad
A white backlight appears on the keyboard, which also has a crisp pressure point. Long texts actually work surprisingly well, because the key travel is large and the resistance is pleasantly high. Furthermore, there is enough space between the keys. Lenovo does without unnecessary special keys or particularly small arrow keys. However, there is also no fingerprint sensor and the power button is located in the middle below the display.
The multi-touch capable touchpad is on the inside and is slightly offset to the left. It recognizes all inputs reliably and sits firmly in the case. The button function is not too smooth, I like that. It could be a bit bigger, but you’re likely to be using a mouse most of the time on a gaming notebook anyway.
Ports
The connections are well divided due to the offset display hinge. On the left are USB-C 3.2 Gen1 and a 3.5mm combo jack. On the right there is a USB-A 3.2 Gen1 port, a status LED and a slider that can be used to (de)activate the webcam.
Accordingly, most of the connections are on the back. 1x Ethernet RJ-45, 1x USB-C incl. DisplayPort 1.2, 2x USB-A 3.2 Gen1, 1x USB-A incl. PowerDelivery, 1x HDMI 2.0 and the power connection. The connections are marked on the top, so you can easily use them without having to look at the back.
In addition to the physical connections, the Legion 5 also has a WLAN chip from Intel with a WiFi 6 dual antenna and Bluetooth 5.1. The only thing missing is an SD card reader, otherwise everything is there and also up to date. Okay, HDMI 2.1 would have been nice.
SSD and software
An SSD with 1 TB of storage is installed in our test sample. 904 GB are still available ex works. The PCIe 4.0 SSD comes from SKHynix and places itself in the midfield in terms of speed in our benchmarks. The reading and writing speeds are around 3 GB/s, which is completely sufficient for everyday use. Games and programs start without delay.
Unfortunately, Lenovo doesn’t stop at a completely clean installation of Windows 11. Among other things, Disney+, Lenovo Hotkeys, Lenovo Vantage, Lenovo Vantage Service, McAfee and Spotify are installed ex works. At least the bloatware is manageable and can be uninstalled. McAfee is particularly annoying, as it seeks your attention with ever more provocative pop-ups on the desktop.
