With the Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 (beginning at $1,299; $1,549 as examined) gaming laptop computer, Lenovo took its Lenovo Legion Professional 5 Gen 8 laptop computer and gave it a beneficiant trim. Successfully, Lenovo slashed some off the edges, squeezing all of it down right into a thinner, lighter bundle whereas preserving the massive show and good keyboard. Plus, souped-up Nvidia GeForce RTX 40 Collection graphics make this laptop computer a pleasure to sport on, placing up fierce competitors for different laptops in its value vary. In truth, this slimmer Lenovo is shut in functionality to laptops costing a whole bunch extra, just like the Gigabyte Aero 16 OLED (2023) and Origin EON16-S. For that, we give the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 our Editors’ Selection award for midrange gaming laptops.
Like All of the Different Legions, Only a Hair Slimmer
The Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 borrows from the Legion system seen on the Lenovo Legion Professional 5 Gen 8 and the Lenovo Legion Professional 7i Gen 8, however with some tweaks. It nonetheless has an anodized aluminum show lid, however it retains the value down with a tough plastic casing for the decrease chassis. All the identical, it feels completely sturdy, with minimal flex. Whereas most Legion Professional fashions have sides that flare out close to the again, the Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 retains it tight. The rear exhaust, additionally, doesn’t protrude as a lot because it beforehand did.
All the trimmings helped Lenovo shrink the Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 down to five.17 kilos and simply 0.92 inch thick and 14.16 inches huge, although it is nonetheless simply as deep because the Legion Professional 5 Gen 8, at 10.25 inches. Whereas Lenovo has “Slim” within the title, it isn’t outdoing rivals on that entrance, because the latest Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF measured in at simply 0.82 inch thick.
The Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 additionally consists of skinny rubber ft on the underside that add a hair of thickness, which additionally cut back the flexibility to slip it into particularly tight laptop computer sleeves. The trade-off is that these rubber ft do a superb job holding the laptop computer in place in your desk or lap.
Regardless of the trimming, Lenovo hasn’t lower a lot in the best way of options and ports right here. The left facet of the laptop computer consists of two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Kind-C ports with DisplayPort 1.4 help (one additionally able to 140-watt energy supply) and a headset jack. The capabilities listed below are first rate, however it might have been higher to see the brand new USB4 ports for the elevated bandwidth.
The best facet features a full-size SD card reader—a significant get for inventive customers and a function not even seen on the beefier Legion Professional 5 Gen 8 or Legion Professional 7i Gen 8. You will additionally discover a change to disable the webcam.
In fact, the again edge consists of ports as effectively, the place you’ll discover two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Kind-A ports, an Ethernet jack, and a full-size HDMI port with a peak throughput of 8K at 30Hz. Lenovo additionally consists of its proprietary AC energy port on this again edge.
With this helpful collection of ports on the again, the laptop computer is straightforward to arrange at a desk with out a ton of seen wire muddle. All the rear ports are labeled alongside the highest of the laptop computer as effectively, so that they’re simple to seek out with out spinning the laptop computer round. Whenever you don’t need wires, you’ll be able to get pleasure from a quick wi-fi reference to Wi-Fi 6E help.
Lenovo didn’t make sacrifices to the keyboard to get the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 slimmer. It’s nonetheless the poppy, massive keyboard discovered on the opposite Legion fashions. That’s thrilling information if you need a usable quantity pad. It’s even higher information in case you hate the cramped little arrow keys discovered on many laptops or the shrunken proper Shift key discovered on many gaming laptops. Lenovo’s answer is simply to shift the arrow keys down beneath the remainder of the keyboard, permitting them to stay massive. The isolation makes them simpler to make use of, as effectively. The keyboard has four-zone RGB lighting, and Lenovo truly lists it as spill-resistant, although I used to be hesitant to check that.
Above the keyboard, Lenovo pulled the same transfer to what I noticed on the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16, which has a speaker-style grille above the keyboard however truly makes use of it for air consumption. It’s the identical for the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8, which has down-firing audio system on the entrance corners of the laptop computer.
The Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 is on the market in two configurations. The mannequin examined (quantity 16APH8) has an MSRP of $1,549 and consists of an AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS CPU with 16GB of DDR5 reminiscence. It packs an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 with 8GB of devoted VRAM. This mannequin will include 1TB of storage, although our check unit solely had 512GB. The show on this model has a 2,560-by-1,600-pixel decision, a 165Hz refresh fee, and an sRGB colour protection ranking of 100%.
Lenovo’s cheaper configuration comes out to $1,299 and drops the CPU to an AMD Ryzen 5 7640HS, swaps out to an RTX 4050 with 6GB of VRAM, and lowers storage to 512GB. This unit additionally sees an enormous show downgrade, utilizing a 1,920-by-1,200 panel with a slower 144Hz refresh fee and far decrease colour protection.
No matter configuration, you’ll get a 16-inch show from this laptop computer, and Lenovo considerably trims the underside bezel to maintain it extra according to the facet and high bezels. The show attaches to a reasonably sturdy hinge that retains the display from jiggling an excessive amount of after positioning it.
The webcam on the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 could also be a 1080p one, however it looks like a name-only improve to the frequent 720p choices discovered on most laptops. The picture is tender and appears quite blocky even in vibrant lighting circumstances. With out Home windows Whats up facial recognition or a fingerprint scanner, you’ll be signing into this machine with a password or PIN.
Utilizing the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8: A Minimize Above Funds
Utilizing this laptop computer’s keyboard, I used to be capable of get my typing as much as 113 phrases per minute with 100% accuracy measured in Monkeytype, although it took extra focus than I’d like. The keys put up stiff resistance, making for constant and tactile typing, however they require extra care to make sure they really depress. Particularly, that stiffness makes hitting the identical key in fast succession barely trickier.
These keycaps don’t really feel fairly as dished as a few of Lenovo’s different laptops, presenting extra potential to go off the sting of a keycap with out feeling it. For any minor nitpicks I’ve round typing, although, the quibbles are greater than balanced out by the usual association of the quantity pad and the full-size, offset arrow keys, which all make modifying textual content and knowledge entry considerably smoother.
Lenovo’s touchpad is nothing particular. My fingers glide throughout the floor with little resistance, although urgent to click on has no notably satisfying tactility. The floor feels somewhat small given the house accessible beneath the keyboard, however shrinking the touchpad’s potential width to make room for larger arrow keys looks like the correct transfer, finally.
Once more, the 16-inch show on the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 scores large factors. Its excessive decision, modest brightness, anti-glare end, easy refresh fee, and colour all make for pleasurable viewing in a wide range of conditions. If you end up engaged on it, it gives substantial house for multitasking and straightforward visibility in most circumstances. As for watching films, the colours present a extra full of life image than most funds gaming laptops. Lastly, the panel’s excessive refresh fee gives visible smoothness whereas gaming. G-Sync help additionally helps keep away from tearing—one thing that’s not at all times a given on gaming laptops.
The audio system do not present fairly as large an expertise because the show. They pump out a modest quantity that suffices in quiet eventualities, however they do not overpower a lot background noise and lack substantial bass.
Lenovo places a number of additional bits of software program on the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 that do not come customary with Home windows 11. Lenovo Vantage gives mandatory controls over the {hardware} of the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8, and the Nahimic panel allows extra management over sound. X-Ceremony Coloration Assistant (for adjusting display tone) and Legion Enviornment (for launching video games and tweaking {hardware} settings) are the one installs that don’t really feel totally mandatory.
Testing the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8: Un-Smothered Energy
The Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 suits neatly into the midrange with a reliable set of parts for the value—even leaving room to tune up the GPU by 10W. In fact, we see no scarcity of machines vying for dominance in that midrange house. The MSI Stealth 14 Studio takes the same tack packing in mid-to-high-end {hardware} at a modest value whereas going for a compact construct—however smaller than the Legion Slim 5 Gen 8, to make sure.
Some go for cheaper designs to allow them to pack higher-power parts with out compromising on value, as is the case with the MSI Katana 15 B13V, which incorporates an RTX 4070 for the value. In the meantime, you even have choices just like the Gigabyte Aero 16 OLED (2023) and Origin EON16-S, which increase their costs to incorporate extra highly effective parts.
Productiveness and Content material Creation Assessments
We run the identical basic productiveness benchmarks throughout each cellular and desktop methods. Our first check is UL’s PCMark 10, which simulates a wide range of real-world productiveness and workplace workflows to measure total system efficiency and likewise features a storage subtest for the first drive.
Our different three benchmarks concentrate on the CPU, utilizing all accessible cores and threads, to fee a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 makes use of that firm’s Cinema 4D engine to render a posh scene, whereas Geekbench 5.4 Professional from Primate Labs simulates in style apps starting from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine studying. Lastly, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to transform a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p decision (decrease instances are higher).
Lastly, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Methods, which makes use of the Inventive Cloud model 22 of Adobe’s well-known picture editor to fee a PC’s efficiency for content material creation and multimedia purposes. It is an automatic extension that executes a wide range of basic and GPU-accelerated Photoshop duties starting from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving a picture to making use of masks, gradient fills, and filters.
Any rating above 4,000 factors in PCMark 10’s productiveness benchmark is a telling signal that the machine will maintain up effectively in on a regular basis workplace work. A rating of greater than 5,000 is an indication of excellence. For gaming laptops, this barrier is normally simple to interrupt, because of their highly effective internals, as we noticed clearly right here with every machine previous the 7,000-point mark. For on a regular basis computing, any of those merchandise be greater than sufficient for a while to come back.
The Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 did not blow away the competitors right here, however it carried out respectably. Whereas it got here in with a shocking victory in PCMark 10’s productiveness check, its eight-core Ryzen 7 7840HS processor merely could not sustain with the higher-performing, 14-core Raptor Lake CPUs within the Gigabyte, Origin, and MSI Stealth laptops. Nonetheless, the Legion Slim 5 pulled forward of the MSI Katana 15’s 10-core Intel Core i7-13620H throughout the board, displaying that core rely isn’t all that it takes to win.
Whereas these assessments confirmed a CPU shortfall in essentially the most demanding duties, the truth is that each one of those methods have efficiency to spare on the subject of on a regular basis computing duties. And Lenovo’s small efficiency deficit right here is greater than balanced out by how far its value is beneath the laptops that beat it.
Whereas the storage within the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 additionally carried out the worst on this group, it’s reassuring to see Lenovo didn’t fully skimp right here, as some funds gaming laptops go for a lot lower-performing storage that doesn’t even break the two,000-point mark.
Graphics and Gaming Assessments
For gaming laptops and different cellular gaming {hardware}, we run each artificial and real-world gaming benchmarks. The previous consists of two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, Night time Raid (extra modest, appropriate for methods with built-in graphics) and Time Spy (extra demanding, appropriate for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). One other a part of that gauntlet is the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which we use to gauge OpenGL efficiency. These GFXBench assessments are rendered offscreen to accommodate totally different native show resolutions; extra frames per second (fps) means greater efficiency.
Our real-world gaming testing comes from the in-game benchmarks of F1 2021, Murderer’s Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege. These three video games—all benchmarked at 1080p decision—characterize simulation, open-world action-adventure, and aggressive/esports shooter video games, respectively. Valhalla and Siege are run twice (Valhalla at Medium and Extremely high quality, Siege at Low and Extremely high quality), whereas F1 2021 is run as soon as at Extremely high quality settings and, for Nvidia GeForce RTX-based methods, a second time with Nvidia’s performance-boosting DLSS anti-aliasing turned on.
The Slim shined within the graphics and gaming assessments, displaying off the efficiency of its design. Remember the fact that the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 was operating an RTX 4060—a GPU that ought to ostensibly underperform subsequent to the RTX 4070 discovered within the MSI Katana 15, Gigabyte Aero 16 OLED, and Origin EON16-S. It’s at all times fascinating to see Lenovo’s highly effective cooling and energy funds assist it land wins as compared. Lenovo wasn’t close to the highest for 3DMark’s Time Spy check, however it was an in depth race, with the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 virtually matching the MSI Katana 15 and Gigabyte Aero 16 OLED.
The Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 stored a tidy hole between itself and the MSI Stealth 14 Studio, demonstrating the distinction an even bigger chassis and extra cooling could make when operating the identical components.
As anticipated, the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8’s potential to maintain up in artificial benchmarks with methods which are extra highly effective on paper continued to play out in precise video games. Regardless of operating a extra highly effective CPU and GPU combo, the Gigabyte Aero 16 OLED fell behind the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 in each one among our gaming benchmarks. Why?
As a result of the Aero is concentrated on compactness and primarily creator workloads, its RTX 4070 GPU has a restricted quantity of whole graphics energy, or TGP, of 105W (in contrast with its 115W max), whereas the RTX 4060 contained in the Legion Slim 5 is about to 125W, which is definitely 10 greater than urged by Nvidia for the RTX 4060. This sees what must be a superior GPU within the Aero throttled from its full potential, whereas the graphics chip contained in the Legion Slim 5, a technically lower-class GPU, is ready to punch above its weight.
Although the MSI Katana 15 typically had the sting, it is also set at 105W (not 115W), and so the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 equally stored the race tight. That distinction was additional highlighted within the margins between the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 and MSI Stealth 14 Studio. In the same state of affairs to the Gigabyte Aero, the MSI Stealth 14 Studio has a throttled GPU…all the best way all the way down to 90W. Regardless of utilizing the identical graphics chip in title, this distinction allowed the Legion to outpace it in F1 2021 and Murderer’s Creed Valhalla. MSI solely caught a break in additional CPU-bound gaming eventualities, as we noticed in our Rainbow Six Siege check at 1080p Low.
Lenovo’s internals are additionally a good match for the two,560-by-1,600 show. The system simply continued to run F1 2021 and Murderer’s Creed: Valhalla at playable body charges of greater than 70fps at this greater decision. The laptop computer confirmed promise for esports as effectively, operating Rainbow Six Siege at a median of 155fps at 1600p.
Curiously, the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8’s ends in Rainbow Six Siege did not parallel the opposite benchmarks. The CPU seems to be a limiting issue. Switching the sport to run with the Vulkan API can unlock some additional efficiency, serving to make again a number of the floor that the Slim misplaced right here.
Battery and Show Assessments
We consider the battery lifetime of laptops by operating a repeatable check beginning every machine from totally charged, turning off Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting, and enjoying a regionally saved 720p video (the open-source Blender film Tears of Metal) with Home windows show brightness set to 50% and audio quantity to 100% till the system quits.
Moreover, we measure key show metrics utilizing a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its software program to investigate the show’s colour saturation—what proportion of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 colour gamuts or palettes the display can present—and its brightness ranges in nits (candelas per sq. meter) when set to 50% and 100% brightness.
Lenovo continues to ship worth within the show and battery departments. Its 16-inch show has a pointy decision and quick refresh fee which are matched by an admirable colour gamut that makes for extra satisfying visuals. Whereas the show wasn’t terribly vibrant at 346 nits max, the anti-glare end helps for simpler visibility. The display can also be a big a part of what units the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 other than different funds opponents like MSI’s Katana 15, which makes use of a dismal show as compared, missing colour, brightness, measurement, and determination subsequent to the Slim 5 Gen 8’s.
The Gigabyte Aero 16 OLED and MSI Stealth 14 Studio present their nature as machines geared towards creators first and avid gamers second, as they’ve considerably broader colour protection and run brighter. Significantly, the Aero permits for a 4K OLED show, enabling beautiful distinction and readability at the price of a slower refresh fee.
As for battery life, netting somewhat greater than 6 hours is respectable for a gaming laptop computer, particularly one with so massive a display. It’s price noting that Lenovo runs its laptop computer shows particularly dimly when set to 50% brightness, so it conserves lots of power whereas dramatically decreasing visibility. It additionally has an 80Wh battery, so its slender conquer the MSI Katana 15 (which has solely a 53.5Wh battery) is just not so spectacular. Nonetheless, it is a first rate displaying subsequent to the MSI Stealth 14 Studio, which couldn’t even break 3.5 hours with a 72Wh battery, possible as a result of its vibrant show.
Verdict: An Overpowered Midranger Wins the Crown
The Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 acknowledges {that a} gaming laptop computer doesn’t must be as thick as attainable and might nonetheless guarantee ample cooling when the muscle tissues want flexing. To this finish, within the Slim 5 Gen 8, it finds a neat stability of refined, trimmed-down design that also lets its internals cruise (even above their max energy rankings). Lenovo then added in some high-end construct high quality with an altogether wonderful keyboard that’s helpful for each work and play. At its retail value, the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 already wins our Editors’ Selection award for midrange gaming laptops. And given how usually Lenovo reductions its gaming laptops over their lifetimes, this deal may simply get even higher over time.
