Lenovo Legion 5 Advantage Edition review: affordable AMD gaming

With the Lenovo Legion 5 Advantage Edition you've got one of the best gaming laptops to launch in 2022, but it achieves this on its value for money prospect rather than its top-end specs. This is very much a mid-ranger in gaming laptop terms, so adjust your expectations accordingly.

Our in-depth Lenovo Legion 5 Advantage Edition review will tell you everything you need to know about this particular gaming laptop, ahead of deciding whether to buy. We've tested the gaming performance, the battery life, the display, and everything else besides.

Just in case your shopping isn't done, we've got a lot more in the way of buying advice for you: check out our guides to the best gaming desks and the best gaming headsets on sale right now.

Price and availability

The Lenovo Legion 5 Advantage Edition is available now from a variety of retailers – check the widgets embedded in this page for the most recent deals. It's also worth checking our Lenovo discount codes page to help lower the cost. At the time of writing you can pick it up for around £1,000 or $1,255, with retailers including Currys stocking the laptop. Bear in mind that the same Lenovo Legion 5 looks can be found with several different selections of components inside than those we've reviewed here.

Design and screen

The Lenovo Legion 5 Advantage Edition is not one of those gaming laptops that's going to light up whatever room it's in and dazzle you with a full-scale rainbow light show every time you open up the lid. Compared with many of its competitors it's rather understated and low key in the looks department, built simply from plastic and aluminium, which of course means you can use it as a general-purpose laptop at the office without attracting too much attention.

Overall the aesthetic is rather chunky and angular, but not in an off-putting way. We like the way the screen is a little way forward from the back of the laptop, the look of the rounded keys on the keyboard, and the subtle Legion lettering on the back of the lid. This laptop weighs in at 2.4 kilograms (5.3 pounds), so it's a chunk more than a typical ultra-portable.

The 15.6-inch IPS LCD display, with its 1,920 x 1,080 pixel resolution, is typical of the laptop as a whole: it's good, but it's not the best in class. Brightness tops out at 250 nits, so you're going to get more vibrant and better-looking screens elsewhere, but we've still been happy with what the screen offered for movies, day-to-day computing and of course gaming. The 5ms response time, 165Hz refresh rate and support for AMD FreeSync means that we didn't notice any problems with tearing and ghosting.

Most of the ports on the Legion 5 are at the back, which is actually a good call: three USB-A 3.2 Gen 1, one USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 (DisplayPort 1.4 and power delivery), one HDMI 2.1. On the left side as you look at the laptop is a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 (DisplayPort 1.4) and a 3.5 mm headphone/mic jack, while on the right is a USB-A 3.2 Gen 1. You also get a separate power port on the back, plus Ethernet, and there's a 720p webcam built into the bezel just above the screen.

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Performance and features

Our Lenovo Legion 5 Advantage Edition review unit came with an AMY Ryzen 7 5800H processor, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and an AMD Radeon RX 6600M GPU – and if that doesn't mean all that much to you, it's comfortably enough power to tackle the best games on the market at the moment. If you like the looks of the laptop but want to spend a bit more or even less, then a variety of other configurations are available.

This AMD-based model includes technologies such as AMD Smart Access Memory for improving performance when an AMD CPU and GPU are combined, and AMD SmartShift, which uses AI algorithms to further optimise communications and workload between the most important components in your laptop.

It all adds up to a 3DMark score of 7,994 in our tests, in between the averages for gaming laptops (5,730) and gaming PCs (9,216). That shows you what we're talking about in terms of graphics performance: good enough to get every game playing very smoothly (remember you're locked to a 1080p resolution), without ever troubling the very highest possible frames-per-second rates. Of course the pricing of the laptop reflects that compromise as well.

Every game that we played on the Lenovo Legion 5 Advantage Edition looked impressively slick, with most graphics settings ramped up. In the older Grand Theft Auto V we saw more than 100fps most of the time, while in the newer and more demanding Cyberpunk 2077 the average was more in the region of 40-60fps – still decent enough for enjoyable gameplay, but not at the top-end of the scale.

Even when the laptop is getting worked hard there's never a problem with excessive noise or heat. You can certainly hear the fans – it's inevitable on a gaming laptop with this kind of GPU power – but they never become overpowering in terms of volume. There's a dual fan design and a quad-channel exhaust system here in what Lenovo calls Legion Coldfront 3.0, and based on the time that we've spent with the laptop, it seems to work rather well.

When it comes to normal, non-gaming computing, Lenovo has managed to cram a full keyboard into this frame, complete with a number pad. That's going to help when you're firing up Excel, and overall the typing and trackpad experience is a great one: the chassis feels solid and well supported, with a decent amount of travel on the keys. Our review unit didn't offer any keyboard lighting, but it is apparently an option on some models.

Creatives will want to know that there's 100% sRGB colour palette support on the display and it also offers Dolby Vision high dynamic range for keeping the darkest and lightest parts of any frame in view (although, as we said, it's not the very brightest display on the market). 

The Nahimic-powered 2W stereo speakers are perfectly serviceable too, though the most serious gamers are always going to want to go for the best headset option. 

Battery life on this laptop isn't good enough that you'll be confident getting away from a mains power connection for a whole day. An hour of video streaming (at maximum display brightness) knocked the battery level down by 15 percent, while 15 minutes of reasonably demanding gaming was enough to reduce the battery charge by 25 percent. You don't need to be much of a maths whizz to work out what those figures mean in terms of what you can expect from battery life overall.

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Lenovo Legion 5 Advantage Edition review: verdict

If you're a fan of AMD gear and want to make the most of its CPUs and GPUs working together, then the Advantage Edition of the Lenovo Legion 5 is going to stand out to you (without looking all too 'gamer' overall). 

At the time of writing you can pick up this review model for around £1,000 or $1,250. That's not bad at all for a gaming laptop that's capable of coping with the most demanding games out there. 

However, said gaming performance isn't going to break any records, while just about everything else – the screen, the speakers, the keyboard and trackpad experience – are perfectly fine but not a lot more than that.

We'd say the Lenovo Legion 5 Advantage Edition gives you more bang for your buck than a lot of gaming laptops, and value for money is a high priority for most of us.

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Also consider

If you want to stick to a similar screen size yet need a bit more oomph from your components – and have more in way of a budget – then the MSI Vector GP66 might have enough to catch your attention. Our review unit came packing a 12th Gen Intel Core i7-12700H processor, 16GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 GPU, but it's also going to set you back more than £2,000, which is double the price.

If you really do want to keep costs down then the Acer Nitro 5 can be had for around £1,200 in the UK, so not much more than the Lenovo Legion 5 Advantage Edition – and it comes from a laptop brand you can trust. Like the Lenovo, it has a 15.6-inch screen, and the version we tested offered an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H processor, 16GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 GPU.

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