It’s CES week chums, which usually translates to “I want that but I also want to not eat cardboard for a month”. Plenty of cool gadgets are being shown off, and if you’re looking for a gaming upgrade plus you’re brand loyal, then you’ve come to the right place. Lenovo took to the stage this week to show off its new range of laptops, which range from beefy bastard gaming machine down to a more humble workhorse. Here’s a quick breakdown on those:
Legion 7
Lenovo’s main event gaming laptop, the big new feature this year in the Legion range is the addition of AMD’s latest Ryzen 5000 series processors paired with NVIDIA’s second gen RTX series GPUs. The flagship now boasts a 16:10 aspect ration in a 16-inch screen form factor that’s capable of a 2560 x 1600px resolution, 165Hz refresh rate, and a 3ms response time. With 500 nits of brightness, HDR 400 certified with Dolby Vision support, and NVIDIA G Sync added, anything displayed on the screen should look aces.
What’s powering this device? The latest Ryzen 5000 series of laptop processors, based on the 7nm Zen 3 architecture, is the brawn behind the brains and maxes out at a high end Ryzen 9 chip. An RTX 3000 Series GPU from Nvidia, 32GB of 3200MHz DDR4 RAM and 2TB of M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD storage completes the package that’ll retail for $1700 in the US when it arrives in June.
Legion 5 Series
On the more moderate side of the gaming laptop equation, this year’s 5 series doesn’t look too bad or too confusing when you accidentally buy an Xbox Series S because your failing eyesight can’t make out different fonts. This year will see the Legion 5 available in 15 and 17 inch models alongside a more heavy-duty Pro model, with shipping kicking off in March.
The Legion 5 Pro has specs comparable to the Legion 7, although its internal chip maxes out with a Ryzen 7 chip and 16GB of RAM. Starting from $999 though, it’s not too badly priced. The regular Legion 5 will set you back a minimum of $769, can go up to a Ryzen 7 chip, 32GB of RAM, and up to 2TB of SSD storage. As for the screens, the 15-inch model has a FHD panel with 60Hz, 120Hz, and 165Hz, while the 17-inch beast only has 144Hz and 60Hz options.
Legion Slim 7
Nothing too revolutionary here: A lean workhorse with a 15.6 inch display and up to a 4K panel with a 60Hz refresh rate, or an FHD panel with a 165Hz refresh rate based on your tastes. The key selling point here is that the Legion Slim 7 is thinner than cinema profit margins and makes for a lightweight mobile gaming and content creation platform. No pricing yet on this one, but it’ll be rocking the suburbs in May.
Last Updated: January 14, 2021
