Lenovo debuts AMD Ryzen 5000-powered Legion gaming notebooks

If there’s one thing we’ve seen plenty of on the digital CES 2021 stages, it’s AMD-powered gaming machines. The same goes for Lenovo’s Legion gaming arm, which announced a range of new gaming notebooks all powered by AMD’s latest Ryzen processors and Nvidia’s next-gen RTX GPUs. 

The shift to AMD is an interesting one, because Lenovo announced early in 2020 that it will launch its new range of gaming laptops using Intel’s latest chips.

Lenovo showed off a variety of machines this year, all coming in at remarkably low price points if you consider the specs they managed to pack into them. These start around $770 for the bottom of the range, that’s around R12,000 converted. 

Lenovo Legion 7

Coming in as the flagship device, the Legion 7 features a large 16in 2560 x 1600 IPS display with a lekker fast 165Hz refresh rate. Even more, it’s got a 3ms response time, 500 nits brightness, HDR 400 certification and Dolby Vision support as well as Nvidia G-Sync. That’s… an impressive display right there. 

Under the hood, Lenovo didn’t hold back either. It clearly went for the cream of the crop when considering internal components, like the AMD Ryzen 5000 processors (up to a Ryzen 9) and an Nvidia RTX 3000-series (according to rumours — this one’s not confirmed). You’ll even get up to 32GB 3200MHz DDR4 RAM and up to 2TB of M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD storage. 

This one will retail for $1,700 (around R26,000), And it’ll presumably launch around June 2021. 

The Legion Slim 7

As all things in tech become slimmer, lighter and smaller — the same is happening to gaming notebooks. Lenovo’s announced a lighter option for those who like to game on-the-move (like, in your bathroom or patio maybe?) called the Legion Slim 7.

Similar to the base 7 model, this one will also pack the newer AMD and Nvidia components (again, no specific models confirmed just yet),. Here, you’ll have the option to choose between a) a 15.6in 4K IPS display with a 60Hz refresh rate or b) a FHD panel with a 165Hz refresh rate. Basically, you’ll go for ‘a’ if you’re a designer/content creator and ‘b’ if you’re into hardcore esports. 

This one will be available in retail by May 2021, but Lenovo’s yet to announce pricing on this one. With those specs, expect it to be priced slightly less than the bigger Legion 7. 

Lenovo Legion 5 series

If there’s one thing we can appreciate about Lenovo’s gaming laptops, it’s the naming conventions. It’s straightforward, and you know what you’re getting. With that in mind, here’s the Legion 5 series, which includes three machines — the base Legion 5 15in, the Legion 5 17in and the Legion 5 Pro. 

Starting with the most powerful in the series, the Legion 5 Pro features 16in display with a  165Hz refresh rate (similar to the Legion 7’s display). It’s also fitted with some of AMD and Nvidia’s next-gen components, but this time they’ll be slightly less powerful than the flagship options, with up to a Ryzen 7 CPU and only 16GB of RAM. This one will retail for R1,000 (converted to R16,000) and will launch in March 2021. 

On to the Legion 5 siblings, here you’ll have the option between 15.6in and 17in options, both coming in as FHD panels. You’ll have a choice between 165Hz, 120Hz and 60Hz on the 15.6in model, while the 17in option offers 144Hz and 60Hz iterations. Both will top out at a next-gen Ryzen 7 and give you up to 32GB of RAM and 2TB of M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD. They also feature Nvidia’s latest RTX GPUs but we don’t know exactly which ones yet. 

These will start out at $770 (converted to R12,000), which isn’t bad for a gaming machine in this day and age.

Source: The Verge