Lenovo legion 5 or Dell G15

 

   Which gaming laptop is better, Lenovo’s        Legion 5 or Dell’s G15?

It’s a closer fight than you might think! I’ll show you all the  differences to help you decide which is best.

Both of my test laptops have similar specs, AMD’s  8 core Ryzen 7 5800H processor, Nvidia’s RTX 3060 graphics, 16 gigs of memory, 512 gig SSD, and  a 15.6” 1080p screen with high refresh rate.
Both have decent build quality considering  the plastic design. I’ve got the grey G15 but 
there’s also a green version, while my dark blue  Legion 5 is also available with a white finish.
Dell’s G15 is a little larger, it’s thicker  and deeper, but the Legion is a little wider.The Dell also weighs more, both with and  without the power brick. The power bricks 
of both laptops are quite large,  but Lenovo’s has higher wattage.
Now both of my laptops have 15.6” 1080p screens,  however the Legion 5’s is 165Hz while my Dell G15’s is 120Hz, but both laptops are available  with 120Hz or 165Hz options and the 165Hz panel is better than the 120Hz option. Unfortunately  it wasn’t possible for me to get the Dell G15 with that higher 165Hz screen in my country, so  this is going to affect my screen test results.
Both laptops also have a MUX switch, so you’ve got  the option of running it with optimus enabled for best battery life, or with optimus disabled  for better gaming performance. Both also have FreeSync when optimus is enabled, but with  optimus disabled only the Legion 5 has G-Sync.
The Lenovo Legion 5’s screen, shown by  the red bars, has a much higher color
gamut compared to the Dell G15 in the purple  bars, but this would be different if you’re able to get that 165Hz panel on the Dell,  as Dell claims 100% sRGB coverage there.
The screen brightness of the Legion 5 was  slightly higher when both were maxed out at 100%. but otherwise the Dell G15 was higher at  lower levels, again as per the purple bar. Unfortunately a big downside to the  120Hz screen in the Dell G15 is that  it has a very slow 22ms average grey-to-grey  response time. While playing games I was able to notice plenty of blur, but again this  should be much lower in the 165Hz panel, 
which the Dell spec sheet rates at  13ms worst case, or 3ms best case. Slower screen response time contributes  to the total system latency, which is the  amount of time between a mouse click and gun  shot fire on the screen in CS:GO. The Legion  was definitely quicker, but there are also  faster options if esports are your thing.Both had very minor backlight bleed, I never  noticed it during normal use on either laptop, but results will vary between laptop and panels.Both laptops have a 720p camera above the screen  in the middle. Neither have IR for Windows Hello face unlock, but the Legion has a switch on  the right to physically disconnect the camera.
This is what the camera and microphone  look and sound like on the Dell G15, and then this is how things look and  sound over on the Lenovo Legion 5.
I think the keyboard is way better on the Legion.  Both have backlit keys, orange for the Dell and 4 zone RGB on the Legion, but the Legion also has a  white only option while the Dell also has a 4 zone RGB option. Typing just feels much nicer on the  Legion in my opinion, the keys are more clicky.
The Legion also doesn’t have super tiny arrow  keys like the Dell, they have their own space.
Both have precision touchpads, and I thought  the larger one on the Legion was also better, it just felt smoother and clicked a bit nicer. Both have their speakers on the left and right  towards the front. I thought both sounded decent, but I’ll give a slight edge to the Dell as it  had a little more bass and sounded slightly less flat. The latencymon results on the Dell  were looking better than the Legion too.
On the left they both have an air exhaust vent  and a 3.5mm audio combo jack. The Legion on top has a USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C port, while  the Dell has a 2.5 gigabit ethernet port. They both have an air  exhaust on the right as well, and both have USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A ports on this  side, one for the Legion and two for the Dell, and the Legion also has its camera  disconnect switch here. It’s worth noting the cheaper Dell G15 with RTX  3050 or 3050 Ti uses slower USB 2.0 here.The rest is on the back packed in between  two air exhausts on the left and right sides. They both have the power input on the right, HDMI  2.1 output, and all USB Type-A ports are 3.2 Gen1,
one for the Dell and 3 here for the Legion. Both  have USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C ports on the back, and  the Legion has its ethernet here, but it’s slower  gigabyte compared to the 2.5 gigabyte the Dell has. The Legion also has these icons above the rear  ports which make it a little easier to see where
you’re plugging cables into without turning the  laptop around, something the Dell is missing. So basically they’re both pretty comparable when  it comes to the I/O. The main differences that the Legion 5 has one extra USB Type-A  port and one extra USB Type-C port, but the Legion also has slower gigabyte ethernet while  the Dell G15 has faster 2.5 gigabyte ethernet. Honestly, I think most people will benefit  more from the extra USB ports on the Legion, unless of course you’re on a network where the  G15 can put its 2.5 gigabit ethernet to use.
The Legion 5 also offers USB Type-C charging  on its rear port and this is something that the G15 does not offer at all, and all Type-C ports  on both laptops offer DisplayPort 1.4 support.
The legion has an extrusion on the front in  the middle which makes opening the lid easier, but that said I didn’t really have  any problems opening the Dell. Both had some flex for the lids and keyboards,  but the Dell G15 seemed to be more solid when pushing down hard. This applied to the  lids too, the Dell had a little less flex, [and I also noticed that while typing the  screen on the Legion moved a bit more, but it was extremely subtle and not a problem.Underneath we can see that both have  air intake vents towards the back, but if we look at where the light actually  shines through it would appear that Dell’s  G15 actually has more space for air ventilation  compared to the Legion 5 as it has a dust filter.
Here’s how both look inside. The Legion 5 has some  additional metal coverings, with those removed we  can see that both laptops are quite similar.  They’ve got their batteries down the front, two memory sticks in dual channel, two M.2  storage slots and upgradeable Wi-Fi 6 cards.
The heat pipes on the Dell are on the  other side of the motherboard, so it’s going to be a bit more involved if you want to  replace the thermal paste on the CPU and GPU.
The Wi-Fi in the Dell G15 was  much faster than the Legion 5, but this might vary by region  based on what cards they’re using, 
plus you could always change the Wi-Fi card and  upgrade it yourself which costs less than $20. Now all testing in this video has been done  with both laptops using their stock memory that they shipped with in order to keep this a  fair comparison, but it should also be possible to boost the performance on both laptops  with x8 sticks, so I’ll test this out later.
The battery in my Dell G15 is 7.5% larger in terms  of watt hour capacity compared to the Legion, at 86 vs 80Wh respectively. Both laptops are also  available with lower batteries though, you can get the Legion with a 60Wh battery and G15 with a 56Wh  battery, so expect different results with those.The Dell G15 was lasting about 30% longer in the  YouTube playback test, or almost 3 hours more, however the Legion 5 was lasting a  little longer when running a game,  but personally I’d much prefer run time  outside of gaming that the Dell offers, 
but that said even the lower Legion  is ahead of most other laptops.
The software experience on the Legion 5  is way better compared to the Dell G15, it’s not even close. Dell uses their Alienware  Command Center here, it takes 30-60 seconds, sometimes more after start up before you can open  it and use it, and it’s not even that useful, all you can really do in terms of  making changes is adjust fans a bit,which to be fair is a feature the Legion  does not have, but that’s about it. Lenovo’s Vantage software opens much faster and  has so many more options. You can change between 3 different performance modes through here, or  optionally use the function plus Q shortcut, and when you do this the power button changes  color to show you which mode you’re currently in. The Dell only has the G mode F9 shortcut  which enables high performance mode and maxes out the fan, so I guess two different  performance modes, either G mode on or off. Lenovo’s Vantage software lets us enable  or disable hybrid mode optimus, 
something that you can only do through the  BIOS on the Dell. The Legion also lets you 
search for updates through here, on  the Dell you have to open separate software for this. The Legion also lets  us modify battery and power settings here, while the Dell again requires yet different  software rather than it being centralized.
Let’s compare thermals next. We’re only  going to look at both laptops running in
their highest performance modes for best  results. If you want to see how well both 
laptops perform in lower performance modes then  refer to the full review videos.
The blue bars represent the CPU while the  green bars represent the GPU temperature. 
The Dell G15 was significantly warmer on  the internals when just sitting there idle, 
though in practice this isn’t really an issue,  and as you’ll hear soon the Legion’s fans were louder. I’ve also tested both in their highest  available performance modes in a combined  CPU plus GPU stress test to represent a worst  case, and while playing an actual game. The Dell was thermal throttling on both the CPU and  GPU in the stress test, and I think the Legion was thermal throttling on the CPU too as it never  went above 95 degrees Celsius, it’s just that the Dell has a higher throttle limit. Regardless  of the test, the Dell was warmer inside.These are the clock speeds for the same tests  just shown. The Legion 5 was hitting higher speeds in all instances, despite having lower  thermal throttle limits and running cooler. The CPU in particular was 400MHz or so higher on  all 8 cores, while the GPUs were much closer,This may be because both GPUs were sitting  at about the same power limit in these tests,
despite the fact that the G15 was reaching GPU  thermal throttling in the stress test. The Legion was able to use more power on the processor in  the stress test despite having the lower thermal throttle limit. Interestingly the TDP reported  by software was lower on the Legion for the CPU while running this particular game, despite  the clock speed being significantly higher.In Cinebench R23, a CPU only workload with the  GPU now idle, the Lenovo Legion 5 was performing better despite both technically having the  same Ryzen 7 5800H processor. The multicore score from the Legion was more than 10% higher,  though the single core difference is way smaller, but given neither would be limited here  this is more down to silicon lottery.
Things change when running on battery power.  The Legion 5 was still slightly ahead in the single core test, but the Dell G15 was hardly losing any performance in the multicore test,where comparatively the Legion 5  is now almost 3000 points behind, 
so not only does the G15 last longer on  battery, it performs better on battery too.
The Legion was cooler to the touch when both were  sitting there idle, but that’s not to say the Dell was warm, low 30 degrees Celsius is normal in  this test, the Legion was just below average. Both were peaking in the low 40s when under heavy  stress test in their highest performance modes, 
and neither felt hot or uncomfortable to  use, let’s have a listen to the fan noise.Both were quiet when idling, but the fans on  the Legion 5 were still audible while the Dell was silent, well apart from some subtle  coil whine, but this might explain why the Legion was cooler internally at idle.  The Legion was a little louder when both were under heavy load in their highest  performance profiles, but not by much.Now let’s find out how well both laptops perform  in a few different games. As mentioned earlier,both laptops did ship to me  with the slower x16 memory, so I’ve also tested both with a faster x8  upgrade to see what the differences are.Cyberpunk 2077 was tested in little China with  the street kid life path on all laptops. I’ve got the Lenovo Legion highlighted in red,  and the Dell G15 highlighted in green here, with two results for each laptop, one with the  stock RAM that the laptop came with and then with my upgrade to x8 memory. In this case the  memory upgrade boosted average FPS on the Legion 5 by about 2, with a bigger change noted in the  1% lows, while the Dell saw smaller differences, though keep in mind as we saw in the thermal  tests earlier, the G15 was generally running at higher temperatures, so at least that  doesn’t seem to be holding it back much.Red Dead Redemption 2 was tested with the games  benchmark, and this time the memory upgrade was making more of a difference. The Dell G15 was  reaching a 12.6% higher average frame rate with the memory change, while the Legion 5 was reaching  11.2% higher average FPS in the same test,
so reasonable improvements are possible on  both by making this change to the memory.Control on the other hand is fairly GPU heavy,  even at 1080p, so at max settings we’re not really seeing a difference with the memory  change, both laptops were performing within margin of error. The Legion 5 was slightly ahead  in average FPS, but it’s like a 1 FPS difference,so nothing you’d actually notice and  kind of within margin of error anyway,but it could be that extra 5 watts  of GPU power available to the 3060.
So in general, the differences weren’t that big  with the memory upgrade with these two laptops,but as I’ve shown in the past there can  be a bigger difference in games at lower setting levels. It really seems to depend on the  specific game and how it utilizes CPU and GPU.There were basically no practical differences  in 3DMark, technically the Dell G15 was a little ahead, but they’re definitely within  margin of error and essentially equivalent.Now let’s check out some  content creator workloads.
Adobe Premiere was tested with the Puget Systems  benchmark, and both laptops are highlighted in red. There’s no real difference here,  technically the Legion 5 was 20 points ahead, but this is just a 3%difference and  realistically within margin of error.The difference was even  smaller in Adobe Photoshop,again the Legion 5 was still technically ahead,but this is definitely within margin of  error so let’s just call them equivalent.The differences in DaVinci Resolve were also  small, again the Legion 5 had a slight edge,perhaps due to the slightly higher GPU  power limit as this is a GPU heavy test,but again results are within margin of error.SPEC View perf tests out various professional 3D  workloads, and the differences were quite small one way or the other in most of the tests,  so again basically equivalent performance.Both of my laptops came with 512gb NVMe M.2  SSDs. The writes on both were quite similar,
but the reads on the Legion 5 were  a fair bit higher than the Dell G15,but results may vary based on  region if they use different drives.Linux support was tested with an Ubuntu 21  live CD. The Touchpad, keyboard, speakers, camera and ethernet worked on both, but out of  the box the Wi-Fi on the Legion didn’t work, which I suspect is just because it uses  Realtek and needs an update. Despite this, I think Linux will go better on the Legion  because you can still adjust performance modes with the function + Q shortcut, as  this is baked into firmware. You can’t  use the G key to toggle high performance  mode on the Dell without software support.
Alright let’s discuss pricing and  availability next. This will of course change over time as both companies frequently  run sales, so prices will change over time,you can refer to the links down in  the description below for updates.At the time of recording, the Dell G15 is  $1480 USD for the same specs I’ve tested here,but with the higher tier 165Hz screen that has  better color gamut, brightness and response time. 
The Legion 5 on the other hand is under $1600  USD when configured to the same specs that I’ve tested here, well this one has a 1TB SSD as they  don’t seem to offer less right now, but again the final price of both will vary depending on the  customizations you make with the links below.All things considered I think it's kind  of difficult to go too wrong with either of these gaming laptops. Ultimately it’s going  to depend on what your priorities are as each  laptop has both positives and negatives. Nothing's  perfect and there’s always going to be tradeoffs, so it’s going to come down to what you can live  with. After weighing up all the compromises,
I think I’m personally leaning towards Lenovo’s  Legion 5, so let’s recap and discuss, why I’d say the build quality of both laptops is  similar, with a slight edge in favor of the Dell G15, but the Dell is also a little larger  and heavier, again always those tradeoffs. I think the keyboard and touchpad  were better with the Legion,but the speakers were a little better on the Dell.
For most people the ports on the Legion will be  better as it’s got an extra USB Type-A and Type-C, but the Dell has faster 2.5 gigabyte ethernet,if your network is able to make use of that.The Legion has Type-C charge  while the Dell does not, and the Legion also has the camera  disconnect switch for privacy.The Wi-Fi is faster on the  Dell, but that’s like a $20 or less upgrade if you really wanted to  boost the Legion’s wireless performance.The battery lasts longer on the Dell and is the best result I’ve ever recorded so far,but the Legion is still well  above average for a gaming laptop.
The Dell also has the edge in terms of  performance while running on battery power though.
The Dell generally runs hotter though, at  least on the internals. The externals of both weren’t too bad on either, and although  the fans from either laptop weren’t quite as loud as a lot of other gaming laptops  I’ve tested, the Legion still was louder.
Although the Alienware Command Center  software on the Dell is next to useless,
it does at least offer us some fan  control,

Thank you
HinaWaqas