Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

Lenovo doubles down on AMD Ryzen with new Legion gaming PCs

Chuong Nguyen
By

With the latest refresh of its Legion gaming lineup, Lenovo is placing big bets on AMD’s Ryzen processors to bring the needed power, performance, and battery life. Rightfully so, AMD’s latest 7nm Ryzen 4000 mobile processors have attracted plenty of attention and praise for its performance and affordable price, making them a great fit for a portable gaming system.

Recommended Videos

The 4000 series aren’t available quite yet for desktops, but Lenovo also has a new gaming desktop as well, relying on AMD’s still capable and powerful Ryzen 3000 desktop family alongside the latest Nvidia RTX graphics.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
Check your inbox!
Privacy Policy

Lenovo’s mobile Legion goes big

Image used with permission by copyright holder

In addition to the 15-inch Ryzen-powered Legion 5 laptop that’s already on the market today, Lenovo is bringing an even larger 17-inch option to gamers.

Like its smaller sibling, the 17-inch Lenovo Legion 5 gaming laptop packs in plenty of performance, pairing AMD’s Ryzen 4000 H-series mobile CPU alongside rival Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2060 graphics.

You’ll get the same immersive Dolby Atmos audio tuning with the built-in Harmon Kardon speaker system for audio and a fast 144Hz refresh rate display with FHD resolution. Everything is kept cool with Lenovo Legion ColdFront 2.0 thermal engineering.

With 7.5 hours of battery life and support for Rapid Charge Pro, though with gaming laptops, our expectations remain low.

The 15-inch Legion 5 starts at $759, while the 17-inch will start at $1,089 when it launches in September.

There will also be an upgraded version of the Legion 5 in the form of the Legion 5P for e-sports that tops out with more RAM and includes more tuning control to maximize system performance, but that system won’t be available in North America.

Image used with permission by copyright holder

If you don’t need all that performance but want to stay within the Ryzen ecosystem, Lenovo’s 15.6-inch IdeaPad Gaming 3 may be a great companion for casual gaming. This system tops out with AMD’s Ryzen 7 4800 H-Series processor and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Ti graphics.

While you won’t get the simulated Dolby Atmos tuning from the more premium Legion configurations, you do benefit from Dolby Audio sound from the dual speakers, and the system can be configured with up to a 1TB SSD, 32GB DDR4 memory, and 120Hz refresh rate display.

The IdeaPad Gaming 3 starts at $659 when in launches later this month.

Legion Tower 5 desktop

Image used with permission by copyright holder

With the Legion Tower 5 desktop, Lenovo abandoned the desktop’s sculpted exterior aesthetics in favor of flatter surfaces that make it look more minimal. The simpler design makes the Legion Tower 5 more suited for use for gaming and for work, if needed, and the system can handle most tasks you throw its way thanks to the Ryzen 9 3950X and GeForce RTX 2070 GPU combo.

There is a lot of flexibility for expansion as well with a desktop, and the tower can be configured with up to two 1TB SSD and two 2TB 3.5-inch HDD for storage along with a whopping 128GB of DDR4 memory.

To keep things running smoothly, Lenovo claimed that it has improved the system’s thermals with larger fans, a 150-watt cooler, and optional 200W liquid cooling. The Legion Tower 5 will be available in October with prices starting at $829.

Lenovo also announced a scaled-down IdeaCentre Gaming 5 for casual gamers that tops out with AMD’s Ryzen 7 3700X processor and GeForce RTX 2060 graphics. Unfortunately, though, this system won’t arrive in North America.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Chuong Nguyen
Chuong Nguyen
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Silicon Valley-based technology reporter and Giants baseball fan who splits his time between Northern California and Southern…
This was the most exciting gaming laptop I reviewed in 2023
The lid of the Lenovo Legion 9i.

I've never used a laptop quite like the Lenovo Legion 9i. It's the only laptop I've given a perfect score, which you can read about in my Lenovo Legion 9i review, and it puts many of the best gaming laptops to shame. It's out of reach for most people -- it's certainly too expensive for me -- but I didn't touch another laptop this year that excited me as much as the Legion 9i did.

Sure, it's a powerful laptop, but when you're spending $3,000 (or more) on a gaming laptop, you expect peak performance. The Legion 9i stands out so much because it refines this class of laptop. It takes all of the elements that make 16-inch desktop replacements impractical and turns them on their head. It's not a flawless laptop -- no laptop ever is -- but it's the closest I've seen this year.
Slimmed down

Read more
AMD’s new Ryzen 8040 CPUs aren’t all that new
AMD revealing its Ryzen 8040 CPUs.

AMD new Ryzen 8040 CPUs aren't as new as they seem. During its Advancing AI event, AMD announced that Ryzen 8040 chips are coming to laptops, and you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a new generation of processors. AMD doesn't call them next-gen CPUs, rather referring to them as "the next step in personal AI processing." And that's because these aren't next-gen CPUs.

Ryzen 8040 mobile chips will replace Ryzen 7040 mobile chips, and based on that fact alone, it's easy to assume that the Ryzen 8040 CPUs are better. They have a higher number! From what AMD has shared so far, though, these supposedly new chips look like nothing more than a rebrand of the CPUs already available in laptops. AMD set itself up for this type of confusing, misleading situation, too.
New name, old cores
First, how do we really know these are just rebranded Ryzen 7040 chips? I've included the full product stack below that spells it out. These chips, code-named Hawk Point, are using AMD's Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA 3 GPU cores, which the previous-generation Phoenix CPUs also used. There's also the NPU, which I'll circle back to in a moment.

Read more
Intel said AMD’s Ryzen 7000 is snake oil
AMD CEO Lisa Su holding an APU chip.

In what is one of the most bizarrely aggressive pieces of marketing material I've seen, Intel compared AMD's Ryzen 7000 mobile chips to snake oil. Over the weekend, Intel posted its Core Truths playbook, which lays out how AMD's mobile processor naming scheme misleads customers. The presentation has since been deleted, according to The Verge.

There's an element of truth to that, which I'll get to in a moment, but first, the playbook, which was first spotted by VideoCardz. Intel starts with claiming that there's a "long history of selling half-truths to unsuspecting customers" alongside images of a snake oil salesman and a suspicious used car seller. This sets up a comparison between the Ryzen 5 7520U and the Core i5-1335U. Intel's chip is 83% faster, according to the presentation, due to the older architecture that AMD's part uses.

Read more