Reviews of Lenovo Legion Y530 and Lenovo Yoga 720

Lenovo rebranded its midrange and loftier-end gaming laptops into the Legion line a few years back, and we've been fans of most of the Legion models. The Legion Y530 and the Legion Y740 were potent 2019 entries, and the new Legion 5i (starts at $one,099.99; $ane,599.99 as tested) evolves the line further. Besides a streamlined naming scheme, the 5i features an evolved design with an updated keyboard, a more logically placed webcam with a privacy shutter, and a tenth Generation Intel Core i7 processor. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 GPU and the 144Hz display in our review model provide a shine total HD gaming experience, and information technology's all rounded out by plenty of storage and ports. The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 edges it out as a currently unmatched value, but this is an appealing fifteen.6-inch midrange laptop that costs less than truly premium alternatives.

A Clean Await, With Refined Features

The Legion 5i shares a full general design style with the previous generation of Legion gaming laptops, with only a few visual changes. It's quite similar to the Legion Y530 and Legion Y740, which is largely positive as we rated those builds nicely. While the design may be a little tame for some, it's preferable to some garish alternatives, and the quality of the construction is stiff.

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Though the chassis is plastic, the soft touch and sturdiness of information technology is satisfying, and gives you confidence in its quality. The hat is a polymer blend that isn't quite as nice equally metallic, but has a decent feel, and the logo at present has an irised shine to it when viewed at certain angles. The Legion 5i is compact and fairly portable at 0.93 past 14.3 past 10.2 inches (HWD) and five.iv pounds. That means it's hardly the lightest around (the 14-inch Zephyrus G14 and several premium gaming laptops beat it on both thinness and weight), only it's right on the mark versus entry-level and midrange competition. (The Acer Predator Helios 300 is 0.9 inch thick and v.ane pounds, while the Dell G5 fifteen SE is 0.85 inch thick and 5.v pounds.) It's yet portable enough to throw in your bag and take on the get, though a tad heftier than you'd similar as a daily commute partner.

Careful observers will note some physical layout changes compared to past Legions, chiefly involving the keyboard and camera. The keyboard at present includes a full number pad on the correct side, absent-minded from the Legion Y740 and a welcome inclusion. The keyboard itself has also been improved, and I take to say, it'due south actually comfortable and responsive. It employs Lenovo'southward "soft landing" switches that exercise what the proper noun implies, even if you're bottoming out your keys. The keyboard is also lit across 4 customizable zones.

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With 1.5mm of travel, sculpted keycaps, and larger arrow keys, information technology's a satisfying typing experience. The presence of the number pad makes the remainder of the keyboard a picayune condensed, but you adapt to the shape pretty speedily. The touchpad is also larger than before (a 39 percent increment, to be exact), and has changed style from dedicated left and correct click buttons at its base to a single clickable piece. Information technology'due south placed slightly off center and ran upwardly confronting my left palm somewhat while typing. It didn't cause accidental presses, it merely felt a bit odd.

Equally for the photographic camera, Lenovo has improved it over past Legion laptops past making it, well, more normal. The Legion Y530 and Y740 both had their webcams under the display on the bottom bezel. Nigh of the industry has decided this is a subpar solution to getting thinner bezels, and Lenovo has followed arrange, placing it back upwardly peak. In this time of widespread remote work (and potential game streamers who may want to look amend as opposed to chin-camming it), it'due south a good modify. There's also a physical privacy shutter that yous can flip into place to block the lens with a switch along the top bezel. The camera resolution is 720p and produces average picture quality.

Now, on to what's betwixt those bezels. Our unit is equipped with a full HD 144Hz display, a perfect fit for gaming (particularly with the components in this model). We'll get into frame rates a bit later, merely the GPU tin can push higher up 60 frames per second (fps) on plenty of games, and approach the 144fps ceiling on less-demanding multiplayer titles, making this screen a practiced match. The IPS panel is adequately bright at 300 nits.

Finally, for the physical port layout: There's a strong choice here, with virtually on the rear block. The left and right sides of the laptop each host one USB 3.1 Blazon-A port, and the left also includes the headset jack. The rear is where yous'll find two more USB three.1 ports, a USB Blazon-C port, an HDMI output, an Ethernet jack, and the Lenovo-specific power jack.

Component Bank check: Midrange Intel and Nvidia Power

Most important for a gaming laptop, we come to the components. As I noted earlier, prices beginning at $1,099.99, with our $i,599.99 review unit the most expensive selection. These figures range from upper entry-level to midrange—no version of this laptop is either super-cheap or overly expensive.

Our test model carries a Core i7-10750H processor, 16GB of retention, a GeForce RTX 2060 GPU, and a 1TB solid-state drive. At the time of writing it'due south the standard listing at B&H Photo, with a limited stock at a sale price of $1,299. The $1,599.99 model on Lenovo.com is the aforementioned as ours bated from the storage, with a 512GB SSD and a 1TB hard drive. Then you'll want to chase around various etailers and Lenovo itself if interested in this machine.

The $1,099.99 model comes with a Core i5-10300H processor, 8GB of memory, a GeForce GTX 1650 GPU, and a 128GB SSD. The two middle models on Lenovo'due south site offering Core i5 and i7 options, equally well as varied storage capacities and GeForce GTX 1660 Ti graphics. In all cases, I'd avert the 128GB SSD configurations, as that storage capacity merely style besides skimpy for mod game requirements.

Performance Testing: Potent Hard disk drive Gaming Proficiency

To provide context for the Legion 5i's performance, I've put together a batch of competing laptops. Nearly are other 15-inchers, though the ROG Zephyrus G14 has really broken the mold on value and performance, and so information technology's included as well. You'll find their specifications in the table below.

We don't review as many midrange gaming laptops—roughly $1,300 to $2,000 models—as we practice entry-level and premium machines (in part due to the configurations manufacturers choose to transport for review), and so there'south a mix here of lower- and higher-priced models. The Acer Predator Helios 300 ($i,199.99 as tested) represents the all-time entry-level value over $1,000; the Dell G5 15 SE is an all-AMD alternative at the same price. The Zephyrus G14, as mentioned, is a superb midrange value at $one,449.99.

Last, the Legion Y740 is Lenovo's 2019 equivalent model. We tested it in a higher $one,919.99 configuration, and so fifty-fifty though it's a generation behind our Legion 5i, it boasts a more than powerful Nvidia GPU. On certain CPU-axial tests, though, the improvements of the 5i should testify in its newer-generation processor, even though the GPU is a step downwards in our particular configurations.

Productivity, Storage, and Media Tests

PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic functioning suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark ten test nosotros run simulates unlike real-world productivity and content creation workflows. Nosotros use information technology to appraise overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet jockeying, web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark viii, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system'southward kicking drive. Both tests yield a proprietary numeric score; college numbers are amend.

The Legion 5i wasn't the tiptop performer in PCMark 10, but all of these laptops show an aptitude for zipping through everyday home and office jobs and multitasking. Similarly, all of these SSDs are snappy, and so you'll be able to boot and load files and games quickly.

Next is Maxon'due south CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 examination, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex paradigm. The effect is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads.

Cinebench is oft a good predictor of our Handbrake video editing trial, another tough, threaded conditioning that'southward highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads. In information technology, we put a stopwatch on examination systems as they transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video (the open-source Blender demo motion-picture show Tears of Steel) to a 1080p MP4 file. It'southward a timed test, and lower results are better.

We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop epitome-editing criterion. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG exam image. We fourth dimension each operation and add up the total. As with Handbrake, lower times are amend hither.

The Legion 5i and its processor are decent performers here, with notably good results in Photoshop. As we've seen before, AMD's Ryzen 4000 processors in similar-priced machines tend to be a notch above Intel'southward offerings in thread-aware media tasks, so you lot may favor those options if you intend to do media editing on the side. None of these machines is a specialist media workstation, though, and ultimately the Legion 5i and its accomplice are just serviceable for these tasks. It'due south all about gaming and, every bit you lot'll encounter, the AMD Ryzen chips hither cannot assert superiority on that front; gaming is mostly nearly the GPUs.

Graphics Tests

3DMark measures relative graphics musculus past rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run ii unlike 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, simply Sky Diver is more than suited to midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more enervating and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff. The results are proprietary scores.

Next upward is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition exam renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes. In this case, it's rendered in the eponymous Unigine engine, offer a different 3D workload scenario for a 2d opinion on each laptop'south graphical prowess.

All of these scores are strong, demonstrating capable performance for 3D tasks and gaming. There isn't much separation in the results, though, so it's hard to draw house conclusions amidst the laptops. The in-game benchmark results exercise a meliorate job of that, then let'due south continue on...

Real-World Gaming Tests

The synthetic tests above are helpful for measuring general 3D aptitude, but it'due south difficult to shell full retail video games for judging gaming operation. Far Weep 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider are both modern, high-fidelity titles with congenital-in benchmarks that illustrate how a organisation handles existent-world gameplay at various settings. We run them at 1080p resolution at the games' medium and all-time prototype-quality presets (Normal and Ultra for Far Weep five under DirectX eleven, Medium and Very Loftier for Ascent of the Tomb Raider under DirectX 12).

These are pretty great results for the 5i for a number of reasons. On i paw, it stuck very shut to the GeForce RTX 2070 in the Legion Y740, likely because that was the down-tuned Max-Q version of that GPU. On the other, it bested the AMD-based machines, even the Zephyrus G14 using the same GPU. That could exist a function down to CPU and part to improved thermals (Lenovo's so-called "ColdFront 2.0" thermal pattern does seem effective, and the G14 has less room for cooling with its 14-inch chassis), but it's worth a few frames per second either way.

The Legion 5i besides beat out the Helios 300 and its GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, though that machine hung close and represents good operation per dollar. I also constitute that the Legion 5i ran reasonably quiet and didn't become especially warm, which we tin can over again give thanks the thermal design for. Y'all will hear the fans more with the college-performance setting bachelor in Lenovo's software, and that tradeoff is worth a couple of frames per second.

Outside of these head-to-head GPU comparisons, the frame rates hither are considerately proficient. The RTX 2060 is perhaps better than some may think every bit Nvidia's entry-level RTX GPU, even without because its addition of ray-tracing capabilities over the GTX series. It produced well higher up 60fps in these tests, in fact closer to 100fps in AAA titles, while less demanding games volition approach the 144fps ceiling.

Bombardment Rundown Exam

After fully recharging the laptop, we ready the machine in power-salvage mode (as opposed to counterbalanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in grooming for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop in airplane mode.) In this exam, nosotros loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the same Tears of Steel short we apply in our Handbrake test—with screen brightness set at 50 percentage and volume at 100 percent until the arrangement quits.

The Legion 5i outlived its competitors. This effect means the 5i can serve as your daily driver, lasting off the charger for school or a commute through nigh of the mean solar day. Information technology doesn't come up close to rivaling the 15- or 20-plus-hour life of some ultraportables, but it'due south long a gaming laptop.

A Solid All-Rounder at a Reasonable Price

There's enough to like about the Legion 5i, from a sturdy build to solid gaming performance. It's not the lightest or nearly heady design, merely it feels well-made and includes some advanced features. The keyboard is improved over past iterations, and the webcam placement is more sensible. Add a GPU that just about matches the performance of a more expensive choice from previous-generation Legion laptops, likewise equally a superior processor, and this is an overall improve value than before.

Information technology'southward not quite an Editors' Choice, every bit the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 offers an equally-notwithstanding unbeatable midrange value and some premium gaming rigs deliver more ability on the high end, but information technology strongly occupies an appealing space betwixt.

Lenovo Legion 5i

Cons

The Lesser Line

The Lenovo Legion 5i is a smart refinement of final year's Legion gaming laptops, delivering practical pattern updates, a new CPU, and solid 1080p gaming performance at a fair price.

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Source: https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/lenovo-legion-5i

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