We’re here today to take a look at the Lenovo Legion 5i gaming laptop that’s complete with a GeForce RTX 2060 so you can work (play games) with #RTXOn
Let’s get real here. For reasons most of us already know, we’re stuck at home and we’re stuck with our desktops because, hey, lots of work today (games, mostly). Now, with that said, at this time where work is mostly done on a computer and you’re looking for a proper machine to do your job (play games on), a laptop may prove to be a more efficient choice compared to a good ol’ desktop. To each his own and all that jazz aside, we’re here today to take a look at the Lenovo Legion 5i gaming laptop that’s complete with a GeForce RTX 2060 so you can work (play games) with #RTXOn.
PACKAGING
The Lenovo Legion 5i is pretty massive right from the
get-go. Just look at that thing. Monolithic I tell you.
Prop it up and you’ll be met with the Legion 5i together with a humongous power brick and the Legion M300 gaming mouse. We’re not sure if this is the standard bundle for this one or there’s something else. Let us know in the comments section or send us a message on Facebook and we’ll get back to you a-sap.
DESIGN AND DISPLAY
On a personal note, Lenovo’s straightforward design approach, one we’ve seen prominently on the ThinkPad series, looks to live on in the Legion line up of gaming laptops. Think that no-frills design and incorporate that with that gaming aesthetics and you’ve got yourself Legion in a nutshell. Just beautiful stuff right here. Classy is the word I’m looking for.
The Legion 5i features a 15.6-inch display with 1080p
resolution. The side bezels are quite thin, but still present. The camera also
has a nifty privacy feature that slides over to the webcam itself for an easy
cover. Nifty. It can even go 180-degrees but why you'd do it we have no idea.
Moving forward, There’s minimal stuff going on the sides as
well. The left side is home to a USB Type A port together with the audio jack,
while on the other end there’s another USB Type A port and a power indicator.
It’s nice that most of the ports including two USB Type A
ports, a USB Type C port, an HDMI port, the power jack, and a Kensington Lock are
on the backside of the laptop. This is ideal since instead of wires and ports
sticking out from the sides and getting in the way of your work/desk space you’ll
get a more organized workflow.
The Legion 5i features a full-size keyboard here with the arrow keys detached a bit from the rest of the keys. The Fn keys are the default here, but you can switch on the fly by pressing Fn+Esc. You can also change your keyboard RGB profile by pressing Fn+Space. There's no other shortcut to turn down or up the brightness or change the animation, though.
PERFORMANCE
The Legion 5i we’re reviewing right now comes equipped with an Intel Core i7 10750U and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 paired with 8GB of RAM. Now, we didn’t exactly open up the unit to see if we can upgrade it since there’s that risk of denting the sample, and we have to return it after all. We’re clumsy like that. But looking around we see that you can add a 2.5-inch drive and an extra SO-DIMM, and you can also upgrade/replace the M.2 drive it already has onboard. This one has a 512GB Western Digital PC SN730 SSD, which you may find lacking once you fill it up with games and whatnot.
So, yeah. Check out below for the benchmark results:
Cinebench R20 and Cinebech R15
Cinebench is a real-world cross-platform test suite that
evaluates your computer's hardware capabilities. Improvements to Cinebench
Release 20 reflect the overall advancements to CPU and rendering technology in
recent years, providing a more accurate measurement of Cinema 4D's ability to
take advantage of multiple CPU cores and modern processor features available to
the average user. Best of all: It's free.
3DMark Time Spy
3DMark Time Spy is a DirectX 12 benchmark test for Windows 10 gaming PCs. Time Spy is one of the first DirectX 12 apps to be built the right way from the ground up to fully realize the performance gains that the new API offers. With its Extreme counterpart rendering visuals in 4K. CPU Score and GPU Score are logged separately for more information.
3DMark Firestrike
Fire Strike is a showcase DirectX 11 benchmark for modern gaming PCs. Its ambitious real-time graphics are rendered with detail and complexity far beyond other DirectX 11 benchmarks and games. With Extreme and Ultra versions raising resolution in 25650 x 1440 and 4K.
Blender Benchmark
The Blender Benchmark Tool runs blender and renders on several production files, and the Open Data portal on blender.org, where the results will be (optionally) uploaded. Our tests will include bmw27, classroom, and fish_cat.
Cyberpunk 2077
We’re replacing The Witcher 3 with Cyberpunk 2077. Needless
to say, if your machine can run CD Projekt Red’s hype machine with RTXOn, then
you’re already set up for a long time. Probably. You get the point. If that’s
not enough indication, here. It’s demanding AF.
Settings:
Ultra Preset
Film Grain: On
Chromatic Aberration: On
Depth of Field: On
Lens Flare: On
Motion Blue: On
Contact Shadows: On
Improved Facial Lighting Geometry: On
Anisotropy: 16
Local Shadow Mesh Quality: High
Local Shadow Quality: High
Cascaded Shadows Range: High
Cascaded Shadows Resolution: High
Distant Shadows Resolution: High
Volumetric Fog Resolution: Ultra
Volumetric Cloud Quality: Ultra
Screen Space Reflections Quality: Ultra
Subsurface Scattering Quality: High
Mirror Quality: High
Level of Detail: High
Ray Tracing Off/Psycho
DLSS Off/Quality
 |
| Ultra Preset, No DLSS, No RTX |
 |
| Ultra Preset, RTX Psycho, DLSS Quality |
 |
| Ultra Preset, RTX Psycho, DLSS Off |
Video Test
With RTX Off, DLSS Quality
With RTX On, DLSS Quality
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the latest Tomb Raider title
from Crystal Dynamics. It features a built-in benchmark tool, which is also
available in the demo version so you can try it out for yourself, too. It also
features Ray Tracing and DLSS, both of which we're not going to use for parity
across the board.
Settings:
API: DirectX 12
Ultra Settings Preset
Min/Max Frame Rate: None/Unlimited
Character Texture Detail: Ultra
Effects Texture Detail: Ultra
Dynamic Shadow Quality: Ultra
World Texture Detail: Ultra
Texture Streaming: Ultra
Capsule Shadow Quality: Ultra
Screen Space Reflections: Ultra
Ambient Occlusion Quality: Ultra
World Level of Detail: Ultra
Tesselation Quality: Ultra
Animation Quality: Best
Assassin's Creed Valhalla
Assassin's Creed Valhalla is the latest in the Assassin's Creed franchise. Quite an expansive world out there from the snowy mountains and cliffs to luscious greens and whatnot.
Settings:
Ultra High Preset
Motion Blur: Off
Vsync: Off
Anti-Aliasing: High
Adaptive Quality: Off
Forza Horizon 4
Forza Horizon 4 features an in-game benchmark mode that loads an automated race to profile your PC's performance in various settings. It looks cool as heck, too.
Settings:
VSync: Off
Motion Blur: Off
Anisotropic Filtering: Ultra
Night Shadows: On
Shadow Quality: Ultra
Environment Texture Quality: Ultra
Static Geometry Quality: Ultra
Dynamic Geometry Quality: Ultra
MSAA: 2X
SSAO Quality: High
Reflection Quality: High
Windshield Reflection Quality: High
Mirror Quality: Ultra
World Car Level of Detail: Ultra
Deformable Terrain Quality: Ultra
SSR Quality: High
Lens Effects: Ultra
Shader Quality: Ultra
Particle effects Quality: High
Overwatch
There's no better way to show you how it works on esports titles like Overwatch than to actually show you how it plays. Can't standardize this since Overwatch deletes recorded gameplay after an update, so this will work for now.
Settings:
Epic Preset
Render Scale: 100%
Texture Quality: High
Texture Filtering Quality: Epic - 16X
Local Fog Detail: Ultra
Dynamic Reflections: High
Shadow Detail: Ultra
Model Detail: Ultra
Effects Detail: Ultra
Anti-Alias Quality: High - SMAA Medium
Local Reflections: On
Ambient Occlusion: On
Gears 5
Gears 5 is the latest installment in The Coalition's Gears of War franchise. It's a third person shooter that features a cover-system mechanic and a mini-game reload mechanic. It also features an exact 1-minute benchmark that we're going to use for our data.
Settings:
API: DirectX 12
Ultra Settings Preset
Min/Max Frame Rate: None/Unlimited
Character Texture Detail: Ultra
Effects Texture Detail: Ultra
Dynamic Shadow Quality: Ultra
World Texture Detail: Ultra
Texture Streaming: Ultra
Capsule Shadow Quality: Ultra
Screen Space Reflections: Ultra
Ambient Occlusion Quality: Ultra
World Level of Detail: Ultra
Tesselation Quality: Ultra
Animation Quality: Best
wPrime
wPrime tests your processor performance by calculating square roots with a recursive call of Newton's method for estimating functions. 1024M and 32M scores are recorded.
Temperature
Our temperature tests are done with the system idle in the
first 30 minutes after boot up, and afterwards a System Stability Test on AIDA64 for another 30 minutes.
CONCLUSION
Lenovo offers the Legion 5i in many configurations starting with a 10th Gen Intel Core CPU and a GeForce GTX GPU. That should allow you to move up the ladder based on your needs, and based on a quick Google-Fu you can have plenty of options with this one. The sweetest deal we found at the time of writing features the same CPU and GPU, but with an 16GB RAM and 1TB HDD. Compared to the configuration we reviewed, you’ll only need to add Php995 on top of this version to get both of that upgrade. And considering SRPs spike up with an upgrade on storage, best check those deals as they might be available for you.
As a gaming device, the Legion 5i is easily a powerhouse built for esports titles and current-gen games. Sure, the RTX 2060 might be the baseline when it comes to Ray Tracing, but then again considering Cyberpunk 2077 needs some optimization, it can still handle itself with the help of some graphical tweaks and DLSS to help with the workload. Ray Tracing has value in that game.
COMMENTS