Lenovo Legion 5 82JW0012US

We have a 144 hertz 1080p panel it’s pretty fast for gaming it’s bright it’s color accurate I like the screen a lot it is however an upgraded panel the base panel is a 60 hertz screen which you know if you’re getting a gaming laptop like this it’d go for a higher refresh screen but there’s also this third option of a 120 hertz lower brightness screen which I personally do not recommend I haven’t seen the one specifically from Lenovo but it’s listed at 250 nits and from my experience 250 nits is perfectly fine for just like browsing the web and doing stuff but if you’re playing games it just doesn’t feel bright enough don’t get that 250 nit screen if you can avoid it I just spend that extra money to get the 144 hertz option the webcam this year has been moved up from the bottom of the screen to the top which is awesome and they have a privacy filter this year so you can hit this switch and it’ll cover up the webcam physically so technically you would be more secure if you’re worried about that and I like this feature I feel like more laptops in general should have a physical cover over the lens like an optional slide like that it’s simple but it’s like it’s just a thing I think it’s pretty cool okay the keyboard I like the keyboard uh in general I think most people will like this keyboard there is a number pad so everything’s got shifted over to the left if you know symmetry bothers you but I think Lenovo does this often with their kind of mid-tier devices they just include a number pad but the actual keyboard experience is on point and it’s got white backlighting which looks really clean the trackpad is nice it doesn’t have the dedicated physical buttons like it did last year it’s like a the actual click is built right into the trackpad like a lot of other gaming laptops but it’s still a good trackpad and oh my favorite part about this keyboard the actual deck itself it’s this really nice soft touch material and from what i’ve seen from last year’s material as well this stuff holds up like I have a friend that has a y530 and I used to be concerned about lenovo’s materials kind of becoming gummier over time but last year’s model held up and this feels exactly the same to me so I think it’s going to be a durable soft touch material the performance on this machine is quite good i’m running the six core intel processor with an rtx 2060 and it’s the regular 2016 not the max q version so it’s just a little bit more powerful than other competitors that are pushed max q devices this is a appropriately cooled system it’s nice to see and the fans don’t get super loud and they also have that keyboard shortcuts you can switch between the performance modes so you can go between like balanced and high performance and quiet mode but this year they have this colored led in the power button which lets you know visually what mode you’re in just by looking at the power button now this year they still don’t have manual fan control it’s something I talked about last year I wish that on a device like this you could just control the fans by yourself so if you’re doing something that requires better performance you can just crank it up uh but you can’t it does a pretty good job just through those three settings but I like my manual all right so inside you have you can see the do big fans they exhaust at the back and the sides with a nice heat pipe array good thermal system the ssd wi-fi card and the two ram slots are behind two shrouds but remove those and you have access to them and the battery is not particularly big it’s a 60 watt hour battery very similar battery life to last year’s i’m getting three and a half hours on this which is to be expected it’s a smaller battery I do think that there is a option for a larger battery but then it just removes the uh the sata cage so you just get a slightly bigger battery but no hard drive I did notice that there seems to be room for a second nvme like if you remove the hard drive cage there just seems to be this perfect amount of space for a secondary nvme which is i’ve never actually seen something like this where the space seems like so well engineered that if you remove the hard drive cage there’s now room for the nvme to slot in it’s pretty cool all right so that is the internal of this system uh there’s speakers on the left and right they sound like gaming laptop speakers not terrible but they’re not great uh ports on this device so the vast majority of ports on these Lenovo legion devices are on the back of the machine which I really like keeps the whole thing clean the usb-c porch does not support thunderbolt 3. so if you need it you don’t have access to that but there’s four usb-a’s so there’s two on the back and one on each side so it’s got this healthy dose of usb-a on the system all right so this is a pretty solid system overall now if you remember in the beginning of this video I mentioned that the starting price of this thing was supposed to be like 850 or 900 it is but there’s a bit of um there’s a bit of a twist to that that pricing only applies to the ryzen amd versions and once you spec this thing out with an intel chip it’s quite expensive it’s actually more expensive than I thought it would be this feels like it’s a I don’t know 150 200 bucks more than it should be now here’s the thing Lenovo stuff goes on sale very frequently we’re not talking like special black friday and back-to-school stuff it’s just constantly on sale so you just need to be diligent and look at the pricing of this stuff and catch it when it is on sale because if you buy this thing at full retail price I don’t think it’s really worth the money like it’s okay it’s just not great value if you do get it on sale though I think this is a great get um so yeah you just make sure you purchase this thing on sale if you can now there is a second device that I want to talk about because if you’re interested in the legion 5 you’re probably interested in this thing as well this is the Lenovo ideapad gaming 3. it’s a bit of a weird name this had like a different moniker last year but this is the the 2020 version and this is also like a 8 900 device I was going to do a review on this but I decided to wait for this thing to come in before I even talked about this because here’s the thing I don’t think this is worth getting because of the existence of this machine this is a inferior product in basically every manner it’s not as well built it has worse performance it has worse thermals it’s got a smaller battery a dimmer screen the list goes on the idea gaming pad 3 is an inferior product to the legion 5. it is cheaper by like 150 bucks but if you’re on the market for something like this and you just can’t afford this one but you can’t afford the idea pad save up until you can pick this one up because just a better product that I think will even last longer because of the improved thermal performance