Choosing Your Lenovo Legion 5/5i Laptop

I’ve been lurking around the Legion Community Group on Facebook and one of the most common questions that I see is what model and specs of Legion Laptop should they get? There are particularly those who have no idea or would simply want to get the best worth for their money. I decided to make this guide cause I’ve been seeing a lot of posts regarding their less than a month-old laptop for sale and the reason is they’ll be upgrading to something with better specs and that’s just sad. They immediately lose money for reselling their laptop due to it being tagged as a 2nd hand item. It could have been easily avoided with just a little bit more research in my opinion. 

Let’s first talk about what kind of laptop specs would you possibly need, what are the best deals currently available in the PH market, and what’s the best option if you’re on a tight budget.  Here are a few pointers when it comes to deciding what specs to get:

Processors: 

Gaming = Intel while Productivity = AMD

Both can handle work tasks and gaming but AMD’s Ryzen processors provide more cores which allows you to handle and process tasks faster. Intel has been around for a long time and I would say that their processors are better-optimized for games but also works well on work-related tasks.

Video Card or GPU:

Video cards aren’t just needed for games. It’s also important if you plan on doing content creation. It’s not as important when it comes to programming or coding but would really come in handy when you’re taking a break and would like to play games. 

RAM: 

You won’t have to worry that much with this since all Legion Laptops come with a minimum of 8GB which should be sufficient for most. The more RAM you have the better. I would like to suggest getting 16GB right from the start but this really depends on how much you actually need. Try to track the tasks or games or tasks and games that you would like to do all at the same time. Check on your task manager how much memory is being used and then decide.

Monitor:

Unless you’re on a very very tight budget then I wouldn’t want you to compromise on this one. Get at least a laptop with a 144hz screen. The 120hz screen has lower brightness and color accuracy which for me are important both for games and content creation.

Those are the only important specs that you have to consider. I left out the Harddisk since all Legion Laptops come with SSD already. It’s just a matter of what size you’ll need. I find it that 500GB for me is already a decent size unless you’re planning to download a lot of AAA games.

Best Deals:

If we’re talking about the best deals in the official resellers in PH then it’s definitely these two for the legion 5i:

I’m leaning more towards the i5 10300h one which is about 9,500 pesos difference in terms of pricing. There’s only a 7% speed difference base on CPU benchmark. The i5 wouldn’t have any problems running any games, especially if partnered with the RTX2060. It’s already good for Lumion 10, Autocad, Photo and Video editing software, and a lot more. Make sure to also check the system requirement of any software you would like to use.

Now for some, No AMD = no buy which I can totally understand. Who wouldn’t want more cores and power on their processors while paying less right? I can’t recommend anything from the official resellers in the PH market at the moment but here are some good deals that I found. 

I got this Legion 5 model 2 months ago from Benstore PH when 144hz wasn’t a thing yet in the PH market and because I wanted to get a powerful processor for work. I settled with the GTX 1660ti since it was the best GPU available during that time nevertheless I’ve had nothing but a good experience with it as it runs any games I want. Productivity wise I’ll just leave this below for comparison:

I’ve seen others posting how they got a Ryzen 7 4800h with RTX 2060 but didn’t really see an easy way on how to acquire one. I’ll update this post in case that changes. Now if you noticed I didn’t mention the R5 and didn’t compare it to the R7 just like what I did with the i5 and i7. That’s because there isn’t that much of a good deal currently with the r5 in my opinion. This is sad because the R5 is almost comparable to the i7-1750h.
You don’t have enough budget? No worries at all. Although there’s a bit of a compromise in terms of experience. The compromise mainly is about the screen. 120hz screen obviously has a lower refresh rate than the one with 144hz but it’s also a bit dimmer. You won’t notice on normal usage but during games, I love setting the brightness to the max to see much better especially during shooters or FPS games. These laptops also have GPUs like the GTX 1650 or 1650ti which isn’t that bad but it’s important to know the difference. The so-called difference is negligible that I feel like they shouldn’t have released the 1650ti anymore. Make sure to get the one with GTX1650 only if you’re on a budget. You won’t feel and see much difference.  GTX 1650 vs GTX 1650TI When it comes to the processor it depends on what you’ll be mainly using it for. Like I mentioned above Intel is more on games while Ryzen is more on productivity.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to find sellers that have the 1650 GPU. Most that I’ve seen currently only have the GTX 1650ti available. Leave a comment or send me an email in case you have an idea of where to find good deals! 
Check this guide on how to setup you Legion Laptop after buying one.

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