Product test
Expensive but beautiful gaming pleasure: Razer Blade 15
by Martin Jud
Gaming power at a fair price: Lenovo Legion review
23.10.2019
Translation: Eva Francis
With its black, simple design, this 15.6-inch gaming notebook could also pass for a stylish office laptop. It's equipped with a Core i7, a GTX 1660 Ti and enough RAM and memory. And it has a 144 Hz display.
You can usually tell if a notebook has been designed for gaming. This doesn't apply to the Legion, which looks more like a pretty Thinkpad. It looks like an office device, at least on the outside. The rather poor battery life and its weight of 2.3 kg speak against this. But when it comes to gaming, you can't go wrong: this device has plenty of power.
The technical details:
Simple gaming design with plenty of connections
When it comes to the design of this notebook, the only thing that alludes to gaming is a white illuminated element in the letter «O». Despite its plastic shell, the Legion doesn't look cheap. The surface of the lid is slightly ribbed, which tickles your fingers when you slide them over it. What's a bit unusual is that the notebook lid isn't flush with the base: the display sticks out by 2.2 cm at the back of the screen.
Another striking feature of this all-black notebook is that you can open up the display to almost 180 degrees. I also like the ventilation design, which directs the airflow from right to left through the case. This makes sure the device cools down enough if you’re using it on your lap or an uneven surface.
The legion is 36 cm wide, 26.7 cm deep and 2.6 cm high. On the left side, there's a USB 3.1 Type-A and a 3.5 mm jack connector; on the right side, there's a second USB 3.1 Type-A.
A USB 3.1 Type-C, a Mini DisplayPort, a third USB 3.1 Type-A, an HDMI Type A, a RJ45-LAN-Port, a mains connection and a Kensington lock are located on the back.
USB 3.1 Type-C, Mini DisplayPort, USB 3.1 Type-A, an HDMI Type A, RJ45-LAN-Port, mains connection and Kensington lock"]]
Gaming display with 144 Hz
The built-in 15.6-inch display has rather thin edges by today's standards. I measured 7 mm on the sides and 9 mm on the top. Only the lower edge is a bit larger with 4 cm – and that's where Lenovo integrated the 720p camera.
The IPS panel has a 1080p resolution and is anti-reflective. It doesn't boast HDR, but has a refresh rate of 144 Hz, which is something I never want to do without again.
With an average of 302 cd/m², the display is bright enough. Only gaming or working in direct sunlight isn't possible. Compared to other notebook panels, this one is illuminated quite regularly. It's slightly brighter in the centre and seems to drop slightly at the bottom left. Yet, these irregularities are not visible by the eye.
Keyboard and touchpad
The touchpad dimensions are 10.2 cm × 5.2 cm and has a very smooth surface that offers enough space for multitouch and gestures. The pad reacts very precisely to my input. There are also two dedicated mouse buttons, which offer a distinct haptic and a discreet acoustic feedback.
Good notebook speakers
Poor battery performance
The lithium-ion battery only has 57 Wh. But gaming notebooks usually don't last longer than one and a half hours without being connected to power supply even if they have a generous battery, so this isn’t quite as tragic.
Battery life with continuous YouTube streaming
Battery life with maximum power and fan volume
A word on noise emission: the notebook is not audible when it's running. Under full load, I measured 52 decibels from where I was sitting – one arm's length away from the display. This corresponds to the noise in a rather quiet office, which is why I never notice the notebook in our editorial office. If you measure the noise right at the fan of the notebook, it's 64 decibels. I measured with a Sony smartphone.
Battery life with office work
If I use the notebook as a mobile office, the battery will die after two and a half to three hours. However, the device isn’t designed for this purpose anyway. It’s far too heavy and has a bulky power supply (19.8 × 9.8 × 2.5 cm).
Processor
The Intel Core i7-9750H is a high-performance mobile 64-bit hexa-core high-end processor. It's the successor of the Intel Core i7-8750H and was launched as a refresh this year. Based on the Coffee Lake microarchitecture, Intel offers it with the improved third generation «14-nm++» process.
With up to two cores, the processor clocks at 2.6 to 4.5 GHz. If all six cores are used, it clocks at 2.6 to 4 GHz. The power consumption is 45 Watt TDP. The chip also features Intel's UHD Graphics 630 GPU.
Graphics card in the lower high-end range
The mobile Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is a lower high-end processor and is based on the Turing architecture (TU116 chip). Compared to the faster RTX 2000 GPUs, it has no integrated ray tracing or tensor cores, but features 1536 shader units instead. It's manufactured in the 12 nm process and works with a frequency of 1455 to 1590 MHz and has 6 GB GDDR6 video RAM (connection via 192 bit interface). The power consumption is 80 watts.
The GTX 1660 TI is comparable to the mobile GTX 1070 in terms of performance, but the 1070 has a TDP of 115 watts.
Good performance for the price
Now it's time to get down to business: this notebook was designed to offer great performance, so let's see if it does. I measure the performance with various benchmarks for processor and graphics card as well as while gaming.
Processor power: Cinebench
Cinebench by Maxon lets you see how your PC performs when rendering Cinema 4D content. Processors with more cores will always deliver better results (except single core results). If you want to compare processors with Cinebench, you can only do this if both processors have the same number of threads.
As you can see a line above the orange result, the notebook performs almost as well as the reference system with the same processor in both the multi-core and single-core tests. That speaks for Lenovo's cooling concept.
Gaming benchmarks
3DMark offers loads of benchmarks to test gaming PCs and laptops. To give you an overview, I tested 1080p-Gaming (Fire Strike), WQHD-Gaming (Time Spy) and UHD-Gaming (Time Spy Extreme).
The Legion clearly performs better in all benchmarks than a mediocre gaming notebook with Intel Core i7-6820HK and Nvidia GeForce GTX 980.
Virtual Reality benchmarks
With the benchmarks defined by VRMark, I want to find out if this notebook is also suitable for Virtual Reality Gaming.
In this test, the Blue Room benchmark for future hardware is the only one the notebook doesn’t meet. If you’ve been thinking of using this notebook for gaming with the latest VR glasses, go ahead. This shouldn’t be a problem at all.
Gaming and FPS
Finally, I tested the performance with actual games by playing the in-game benchmark of Far Cry 5 and gaming Metro Exodus extensively.
The Far Cry 5 benchmark isn't a great reflection of a real game, because it lacks fast twists. But comparisons with already tested notebooks are possible. I set the graphics quality to the highest possible level at 1080p resolution.
When I gamed Metro Exodus at 1080p resolution (DirectX 12) on highest quality level, the game always ran smoothly. But I had to test it for a long time, because if I crawled through dark underground corridors, the FPS rate was visibly higher than in areas above the ground – the Taiga, for instance.
Above ground, I reached an average of 64 FPS; underground it was 93 FPS. The frame rate never dropped below 37 FPS. Therefore, gaming on highest quality level, even without ray tracing, is no problem.
Conclusion: this device is definitely worth its money
When it comes to value for money, there's no beating Lenovo. Thanks to the graphics power of the lower high-end range, a powerful processor and enough RAM, the Lenovo Legion should be a great and loyal gaming notebook. On top of this, it boasts plenty of ports and an eye-friendly 144 Hz display. The screen comes without G-Sync and HDR, but that's understandable from a price point of view.
The only major disadvantage of this device is its short battery life. It won't last longer than an hour if you're playing a graphically demanding game. Having said that, other notebooks aren't suitable for gaming without plugging them in either. Therefore, I'm confident to say the Lenovo Legion is a good buy.
Martin Jud
Senior Editor
martin.jud@digitecgalaxus.chI find my muse in everything. When I don’t, I draw inspiration from daydreaming. After all, if you dream, you don’t sleep through life.
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