Lenovo - Legion 5 15" Gaming Laptop - Intel Core i7 - 8GB Memory - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti - 512GB SSD - Phantom Black

I have had this bad boy for an entire day now. yes 1 day! and so far I do not regret my purchase. I am a 15yr veteran computer tech that has been building and working on computers since I was a little child. My parents fostered my interest in x86 hardware before I even got out of elementary school. I have owned and built many systems the last 25 yrs including custom gaming desktops and custom configured gaming laptops. With that said, I got out of the industry almost 10 yrs ago. Not long after Windows 8 came around. The last system I custom configured for myself was a Lenovo Y series laptop about 6 yrs ago. I have not used anything since then. (around the time I got out of the industry) so my comparisons are a bit dated but I will say this...… I am a bit disappointed. But in all honesty I can't blame Lenovo or this model I purchased as my complaints are not truly with either. Performance. A word I know very well when it comes to PC hardware. This laptop does in many ways far exceed my expectations and in others it falls almost a decade short of what I expected. On paper and indeed in the flesh, This little laptop packs a punch. I was not compared in anyway for the extreme performance difference between a SATA SSD and the M.2 PCIE SSD found in this system. Boot time. Load time, Game time, Install time, It doesn't matter. This drive is blistering fast! sustained write speeds are 1000mbs. Sustained read speeds are nearly 1200mbs. Peak reads come in around 1300mbs. That is fast! especially for a laptop in the mid range. The CPU in this system is a little slower than I expected. On paper it is capable of 5ghz when boosting. With little or no activity, It chimes in around 4.6-4.8ghz. This makes common task super fast. But this is a gaming laptop and sustained clock rates after an hour of gaming was around 3ghz. Honestly that isn't bad considering the base clock is 2.6ghz. I will be honest though, I do not have any games that can truly stress the CPU. As far as graphics go, This is probably the systems weakest component. Well, It comes in second behind the ram. On paper this should be comparable to a desktop GTX 1060 or right around the performance of a GTX 1070m. It has all the specs you need for presentable 1080P gaming. Sort of..... The truth is, There is no doubt a bottleneck here. I am going to guess heat related throttling. Do not get me wrong. Most my games can maintain 60 FPS or higher. Some get upwards of 120-150fps. These are good numbers. But you have to back off to mid or low settings even with many 5 yr old games in 1080P. I guess this is to be expected in a mid range laptop. And honestly even with high settings, Most my games run at a very playable 40+ fps. But as I will discuss in the next paragraph, It is a little disappointing. Probably the biggest surprise with this laptop is the awesome and stunningly beautiful built in display. Best buy gives a very vague description of it so let me set the record straight. THIS IS A FULL 120hz 1080P Display! The brightness is close to 300n. as anyone knows, That is well above average for a laptop in every way. Viewing angles are much better than I imagined and color accuracy is almost spot on. I would guess at least 90% accurate. The refresh late is high enough to make silky smooth 120fps scenes come to life in full HD glory. But sadly this graphics card is not equipped with enough umph to push it to its max in most games. That is the biggest let down of all. System ram is 8gb DDR4 @ 2933 or so MHz,. Intel always has strange memory speeds due in part to system bus and CPU interactions and clock rates. Nothing new here. The memory is recognized by my diagnostic utilities as DDR4 3200. It is 1x 8gb module running in single channel. I plan to immediately upgrade to 16gb and enabling dual channel. That will probably have a good performance increase. The touch pad is annoying however the keyboard is clean, responsive, and very colorful. I however can not get the Lenovo utility that changes the back light colors to work so I am stuck with the 3 default settings. Windows 10 isn't as bad as I expected it to be but windows updates (as usual) are slow and problematic. It appears for every 1 thing they fix, 2 things break. I only purchased this as a portable desktop replacement for gaming so that has not had much of an impact yet...… yet! Build quality is impressive and the touch and feel of the system is sturdy. The cooling systems appears to be good enough to hold its own most of the time. I played for 6 hours last night and the laptop never felt hot. indeed a little warm in areas of the keyboard and underside, But not hot. Aside from the disappointing frame rates and lack of ability to keep pace with the 120hz in most games is a let down. But honestly this system is barely over $1000 bucks at the time of my purchase. For the money It is a heck of a unit. I shopped around and compared many of last years systems and new systems for this year before I decided on this one. There was only 1 other laptop I found with a better price to performance ratio but it is by order from the manufacturer only (Dell G5 SE Ryzen) and I did not want to wait 2-3 weeks to get my new laptop. Best buy had this in stock. The sales kid was friendly and I was shocked at how much tech knowledge he had. He ultimately pointed out a few details I had not seen that made this the system to get. Lenovo extended warranty and accidental damage is cheap and a great value compared to other manufacturers and you can always back that up with Geek Squad support and protection if you feel you need it. I am glad I purchased this laptop and I am glad I got it at Best Buy. Thanks from a happy Customer!

All around probably the best mid range gaming laptop. Stays very cool under load and the laptop doesn't overheat during graphic intensive games. Keyboard and trackpad have a great feel. Running it through a USB dock enables a three monitor setup all at max resolution. I've upgraded the ram to dual channel 32GB and added an additional 1TB Samsung SSD making the machine lightning fast. This is a gaming laptop that is more than worth the money and has great bang for the buck.

set up very easy, runs very fast. It has backlit and can change the color, the screen is very clear. There are enough ports to satisfy daily jobs requirement. The battery has almost 5 hours by doing general works. the only cons is that if it has numeric keyboard a little bit stronger like the letter keys that will be better.

I purchased one of these Friday 8/28 and exchanged it for a different of the same model on 8/30 and will be returning it and buying a different machine on 9/1. I needed a new laptop for college after my hard drive crashed 2 days after moving to college. This is a sweet machine, good deal if you can find a cheap stick of RAM to upgrade it. No big complaints. EXCEPT The display absolutely spazzes out after you let it dim and then wake it back up. Doesn't matter what program is open or anything else is going on. Plugged in, not, ethernet, not anything. Beyond frustrating. When it happened to the first one, I exchanged it (Denver West Best Buy customer service rocks) and was glad they had another in stock. Then it happened again. Disappointed. Lenovo customer support is great but wanted to send a technician out to "fix" it. I don't have a flexible schedule to leave a day wide open for them to come fix it, and I can't deal with a laptop that barely works for a week while I wait on them to figure out what to do. If this happened to two models in a row - this is a documented issue with this machine.

The Legion 5 is awesome just like other reviewers mentioned. That is the reason I bought it replacing the Dell G7.

So I’ve researched and considered other brands like ASUS and MSI. But they didn’t have the screen moved slightly forward like this Lenovo model you are looking at, for better cooling. This allows for the heat to escape out of the back and not roll up the back of the screen. Much more efficient this way. The fans are super quite compared to my previous ASUS I got for around $800 a couple months ago, And it had less performance than this one. The GTX 1660ti here combined with the latest 10th gen i7 processor is just about the best combo you can have for a cpu and gpu for gaming as far as thermal efficiency goes in a laptop. The i7 could certainly handle a RTX 2070 if it wanted to, but it will definitely help on more cpu heavy games. I decided to not go with a better RTX 2060 Gpu because that card is so under clocked for the Laptop version of it. And this 1660ti is capable of running Red dead redemption 2 very comfortably on high settings and it can do ultra settings too, but not as well. Temperatures stay cool and the graphics are more than I need for my level of gaming. I would only recommend something with a higher graphics card if you plan on having a desktop, in my opinion. This is a quality build and worth the extra $100 difference over the MSI, Dell, and ASUS with similar specs. Just buy it

I've been building desktop computers since 1998. Never purchased a laptop prior to this because I felt like what you get hardware wise, and what you pay in the laptop world is very very skewed. The Legion series is the first laptop in 2 decades really caught my eyes. When I added in my student discount, and other my rewards that Best Buy offered this was a no brainer...... This thing is fast out of the box, I haven't gamed on it yet. The first thing I noticed was how cool temp wise this laptop stays. Great air circulation! The keyboard is just about as close to perfect as you can get, as well as the keyboard layout. The display is crisp and bright. This laptop made it easy to install and partition another SSD drive. No problems at all thus far. Keep in mind when you go to upgrade the RAM on this laptop that it can handle 32gb!! (forgot what frequency). Honestly, I can't even imagine what this laptop will do with 32gb of RAM lol but I will definitely post an update when it arrives! Hands down best laptop for the price!

I'm comparing this Lenovo laptop with 2 other gaming laptops. All three are year 2020 products with original prices between $999 and $1099. These are features only this Lenovo offers: 1. Two USB ports and an audio jack are on two sides of the laptop. The rest of USB ports, power, Ethernet, etc, are on the back. What a clean placement. 2. Best sound - it's powered by Harmon Kardon speakers and audio. Volume is not only louder, but also fuller/richer and more crisp. You can feel the surround sound. 3. Best display - it's brightness does not hurt my eyes and it is 120 Hz. The other laptops are 60 hz unless you pay an extra $100 for 120hz. 4. Most quiet fan compared to the other two laptops. But don't expect it to be as quiet as a non-gaming laptop, mind you. It doesn't overheat like one of the other two laptops. 5. Thermal (fan & temperature) profile is more intelligent. It has an option that can detect when you go into gaming mode and automatically switch thermal profile to Performance mode and automatically reset back to balance mode when you exit a game. All three laptops offer 3 to 4 profiles. But only this laptop has an extra option like this. All of these five unique attributes increase the quality of experience by a magnitude. One other laptop has a better GPU (RTX 2060). But the so so audio coupled with loud fan noise and overheat ruin the overall experience, especially the gaming experience. The actual gaming experience feels more immense with this Lenovo laptop!