[In-depth Comparison] Lenovo Legion 5 (15″ AMD, 2021) vs HP Omen 15 (2021, 15-en1000) – battle of the mid-rangers

Today we have two laptops, which arguably started the Incognito Gaming niche. Truth be told, we truly needed someone to innovate in the laptop design space, since the black and red aesthetic quickly became overused. Now, manufacturers are starting to experiment by implementing new colors and materials, which can only bode well for the consumer.

The Legion 5 from Lenovo and the Omen 15 from HP are the middle ground in their respective companies’ gaming portfolio, delivering more than enough gaming performance, while not costing you an arm and a leg. Today we are comparing the latest Legion 5 against the latest Omen 15, to see which mid-ranger will come on top.

Today we are giving you an in-depth comparison between the Lenovo Legion 5 (15″ AMD, 2021) and the HP Omen 15 (2021, 15-en1000).

Lenovo Legion 5 (15″ AMD, 2021): Full Specs / In-depth Review

HP Omen 15 (2021, 15-en1000): Full Specs / In-depth Review

Lenovo Legion 5 (15″ AMD, 2021) configurations:

HP Omen 15 (2021, 15-en1000) configurations:

Contents


Design and construction

In terms of the design, the laptops utilize similar tactics to be a low-key gaming beast. The Legion 5 keeps the same design from last year, with a boxy exterior that is built entirely from plastic. The branding isn’t overdone, which is great. The small Lenovo wordmark is seen on the edge of the lid and the base, with there also being a larger Legion wordmark on the upper left corner of the lid. The Legion 5 is 2.40 kg heavy and nearly 26 mm tall at its thickest point when it comes to the dimensions. Its lid opens easily with one hand, revealing a matte display with relatively thin bezels. The lid is quite bendy though.

The HP Omen 15 takes a similar approach, using a similar boxy design. It has a plastic lid and an aluminum base with an attractive anodized finish. Here, you get a bit of color with the Omen logo on the back of the lid, which changes color from green to blue depending on the angle. It looks like a gem from Zelda, if we have to be honest, which is fantastic. The lid of the Omen 15 also opens easily with a single hand, with all of the bezels being thin, except the bottom one. The Omen is slightly lighter and thinner, however.

Lenovo Legion 5 (15″ AMD, 2021)

HP Omen 15 (2021, 15-en1000)


Keyboard and touchpad

Starting with the Legion 5, its combo consists of a pretty great keyboard with large keycaps, long key travel, and clicky feedback. Furthermore, the arrow keys are some of the largest ones that we have seen and they are slightly separated, eliminating the change of accidental presses. The keyboard has either white, blue, or a 4-zone RGB backlight. The touchpad is also very precise and has a Mylar surface, which is also found on ThinkPads.

The Omen 15 lacks a NumPad but also gets large keycaps, especially the arrow keys. It also has long key travel,  clicky feedback and offers either a White or a 4-zone RGB backlight. The touchpad here lacks dedicated buttons but delivers responsiveness, a clicky mechanism, and unrivaled accuracy.

Lenovo Legion 5 (15″ AMD, 2021)

HP Omen 15 (2021, 15-en1000)


Ports

The Legion 5 has a total of four USB Type-A 3.2 (Gen. 1) ports, two USB Type-C 3.2 (Gen. 2) ports, an HDMI connector, an RJ-45 connector, a proprietary power plug, and a 3.5 mm audio jack.

Lenovo Legion 5 (15″ AMD, 2021)

Going over to the Omen 15, it gets a total of three USB Type-A 3.2 (Gen. 1) ports, one USB Type-C 3.2 (Gen. 1) port, a 3.5 mm audio jack, an HDMI 2.1 connector, an RJ-45 connector, a Mini DisplayPort, and an SD card reader.

HP Omen 15 (2021, 15-en1000)


Spec sheet


Dissasembly, Upgrade options

Both laptops are incredibly easy to open up. The Legion 5 has 10 Phillips-head screws holding it together, while the Omen 15 relies on 8 Phillips-head screws. After you unscrew all of them, use a plastic pry tool to lift the bottom panel.

In terms of upgradeability, both laptops have two SODIMM RAM slots and two M.2 PCIe x4 drive slots, which should really increase their longevity. The SODIMM slots work in dual-channel and can fit up to 64GB of DDR4 RAM on both notebooks.

Lenovo Legion 5 (15″ AMD, 2021)

HP Omen 15 (2021, 15-en1000)


Display quality

The Legion 5 has a total of three display options, all with a 15.6-inch diagonal, Full HD resolution, and IPS panels. They come with either a 60Hz, 120Hz, or 165Hz refresh rate. Our laptop used the 165Hz Full HD option, which had a pixel density of 142 PPI, a pitch of 0.18 х 0.18 mm, and a Retina distance of 60cm (24″).

As for the Omen 15, it also offers three display choices, all with Full HD resolution, a 15.6-inch diagonal, and IPS panels. They have a refresh rate of either 60Hz, 144Hz, or 165Hz. Furthermore, the pixel density, pitch, and Retina distance are the same.

Lenovo Legion 5 (15″ AMD, 2021)

HP Omen 15 (2021, 15-en1000)

Both laptops display excellent viewing angles. Below we have pictures at 45 degrees to evaluate quality.

Lenovo Legion 5 (15″ AMD, 2021)

HP Omen 15 (2021, 15-en1000)

The display on the Omen has higher maximum brightness at the center of the screen (336 nits), higher maximum brightness as an average for the entire display area (322 nits), and a lower deviation of just 8%, while the Legion 5 display has a deviation of 23%, resulting in poor luminance in the bottom left corner, On the other hand, the Lenovo panel has a higher contrast ratio of 1190:1.

Lenovo Legion 5 (15″ AMD, 2021)

HP Omen 15 (2021, 15-en1000)


Color coverage

To make sure we are on the same page, we would like to give you a little introduction to the sRGB color gamut and the Adobe RGB. To start, there’s the CIE 1976 Uniform Chromaticity Diagram that represents the visible specter of colors by the human eye, giving you a better perception of the color gamut coverage and the color accuracy.

Inside the black triangle, you will see the standard color gamut (sRGB) that is being used by millions of people on HDTV and on the web. As for the Adobe RGB, this is used in professional cameras, monitors, etc for printing. Basically, colors inside the black triangle are used by everyone and this is the essential part of the color quality and color accuracy of a mainstream notebook.

Still, we’ve included other color spaces like the famous DCI-P3 standard used by movie studios, as well as the digital UHD Rec.2020 standard. Rec.2020, however, is still a thing of the future and it’s difficult for today’s displays to cover that well. We’ve also included the so-called Michael Pointer gamut, or Pointer’s gamut, which represents the colors that naturally occur around us every day.

The yellow dotted line shows Lenovo Legion 5 (15″ AMD, 2021)’s and HP Omen 15 (2021, 15-en1000)’s color gamut coverage.

Both displays show near-complete sRGB coverage, with 97% for the Legion 5 and 96% for the Omen 15.

Lenovo Legion 5 (15″ AMD, 2021)

HP Omen 15 (2021, 15-en1000)


Color accuracy

Our “Design and Gaming” profile delivers optimal color temperature (6500K) at 140 cd/m2 luminance and sRGB gamma mode.

We tested the accuracy of the display with 24 commonly used colors like light and dark human skin, blue sky, green grass, orange, etc. You can check out the results at factory condition and also, with the “Design and Gaming” profile. The MSI laptop has a better color accuracy from the factory, but with our profile, its dE value of 1.0 matches the standard exactly. The ASUS laptop starts with a dE value of 3.0, which goes down to 0.6 after applying our profile.

Below you can check the results from the test of both laptops, with both the factory settings (left) and with our “Design and Gaming” profile applied (right).

Lenovo Legion 5 (15″ AMD, 2021)

HP Omen 15 (2021, 15-en1000)


Response time (Gaming capabilities)

We test the reaction time of the pixels with the usual “black-to-white” and “white-to-black” methods from 10% to 90% and vice versa.

Both laptops had a very fast response time, which was below 10 ms. However, the Legion 5 had a faster Fall + Rise time of 8.1 ms.

Lenovo Legion 5 (15″ AMD, 2021)

HP Omen 15 (2021, 15-en1000)


Health Impact / PWM (Blue light)

PWM – Screen flickering

Pulse-width modulation (PWM) is an easy way to control monitor brightness. When you lower the brightness, the light intensity of the backlight is not lowered, but instead turned off and on by the electronics with a frequency indistinguishable to the human eye. In these light impulses, the light/no-light time ratio varies, while brightness remains unchanged, which is harmful to your eyes. You can read more about that in our dedicated article on PWM.

In terms of flickering both panels show no usage of PWM across any brightness levels.

Lenovo Legion 5 (15″ AMD, 2021)

HP Omen 15 (2021, 15-en1000)


Blue light emissions

Installing our Health-Guard profile not only eliminates PWM but also reduces the harmful Blue Light emissions while keeping the colors of the screen perceptually accurate. If you’re not familiar with the Blue light, the TL;DR version is – emissions that negatively affect your eyes, skin, and your whole body. You can find more information about that in our dedicated article on Blue Light.

Buy our profiles

Here at LaptopMedia, we create a set of custom-tailored profiles for every notebook we review. They boost the productivity of display and reduce negative effects such as blue light emissions and PWM. You can read more about them here.

Lenovo Legion 5 (15″ AMD, 2021) 15.6″ FHD IPS BOE NV156FHM-NY8 (BOE0998): Buy our profiles

HP Omen 15 (2021, 15-en1000) 15.6″ FHD IPS LGD05FE: Buy our profiles

Sound

Both laptops get bottom-firing speakers, with two cutouts on the bottom panel for each laptop. As for quality, the Lenovo setup does have deviations from clarity, however, they are only seen in the low frequencies, while the HP Omen setup has deviations across the entire frequency range.

Lenovo Legion 5 (15″ AMD, 2021)

HP Omen 15 (2021, 15-en1000)


Battery

The way we conduct our battery tests is with the Windows Better performance setting turned on, screen brightness adjusted to 120 nits, and all other programs turned off except for the one we are testing the notebook with. The Legion 5 laptop has a battery size of 60Wh, which isn’t that much, especially for a gaming device. As for the HP Omen 15 laptop, it has a larger 71Wh unit. The results of the battery tests went heavily in favor of the HP Omen 15, with it delivering a 67% higher battery life in our Web-browsing test and 72% higher battery life in our video playback test.

In order to simulate real-life conditions, we used our own script for automatic web browsing through over 70 websites.

For every test like this, we use the same video in HD.


Performance

Both the Legion 5 and the Omen 15 offer the Zen 3-based Ryzen 5000H-series processors. The laptop that we tested both came with the Ryzen 7 5800H, which has eight cores and sixteen threads. Going over to the graphics, the Legion 5 and the Omen 15 have a lot of GPU options, but we will mainly focus on the RTX Ampere units. The Legion 5 that we tested had the 130W version of the RTX 3060. The Omen 15 that we tested came with the 100W version of the RTX 3070.

CPU benchmarks

Despite using the same processor, the Legion 5 excelled in 3D Rendering, performing 8% better. However, the Omen 15 was faster in Photoshop, although not by much, with a lead of 0.3 seconds.

Results are from the Cinebench R23 CPU test (the higher the score, the better)

Results are from our Photoshop benchmark test (the lower the score, the better)


GPU benchmarks

Despite the HP Omen 15 looking a lot more powerful, due to its RTX 3070, the 30W lower TDP definitely puts it very close to the 130W RTX 3060. The HP laptop performed better in all of our tests with 2.1%, 15.7%, and 2.5% leads in 3DMark Fire Strike, Unigine Heaven 4.0, and Unigine Superposition, respectively.

Results are from the 3DMark: Fire Strike (Graphics) benchmark (higher the score, the better)


Gaming tests

Lenovo Legion 5 (15″ AMD, 2021)

HP Omen 15 (2021, 15-en1000)

Borderlands 3Full HD, V.Low (Check settings)Full HD, Medium (Check settings)Full HD, High (Check settings)Full HD, Badass (Check settings)
Lenovo Legion 5 (15″ AMD, 2021) – RTX 3060 (130W)109 fps96 fps82 fps69 fps
HP Omen 15 (2021, 15-en1000) – RTX 3070 (100W)117 fps (+7%)104 fps (+8%)86 fps (+5%)71 fps (+3%)

rise-of-the-tomb-raider

Rise of the Tomb Raider (2016)Full HD, Medium (Check settings)Full HD, Very High (Check settings)Full HD, MAX (Check settings)
Lenovo Legion 5 (15″ AMD, 2021) – RTX 3060 (130W)154 fps (+7%)96 fps (+5%)64 fps (+2%)
HP Omen 15 (2021, 15-en1000) – RTX 3070 (100W)144 fps91 fps63 fps

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon WildlandsFull HD, High (Check settings)Full HD, Very High (Check settings)Full HD, Ultra (Check settings)
Lenovo Legion 5 (15″ AMD, 2021) – RTX 3060 (130W)94 fps82 fps56 fps
HP Omen 15 (2021, 15-en1000) – RTX 3070 (100W)99 fps (+5%)87 fps (+6%)59 fps (+5%)

Shadow of the Tomb Raider (2018)Full HD, Medium (Check settings)Full HD, High (Check settings)Full HD, Highest (Check settings)
Lenovo Legion 5 (15″ AMD, 2021) – RTX 3060 (130W)115 fps110 fps78 fps (+1%)
HP Omen 15 (2021, 15-en1000) – RTX 3070 (100W)116 fps (+1%)111 fps (+1%)77 fps

Temperatures and comfort

Max CPU load

With the laptops having a nearly identical CPU, with a slight clock speed difference, let’s see which manufacturer can squeeze more out of it. In the CPU stress test, 100% on the CPU cores, monitoring their frequencies and chip temperature. The first column shows a computer’s reaction to a short load (2-10 seconds), the second column simulates a serious task (between 15 and 30 seconds), and the third column is a good indicator of how good the laptop is for long loads such as video rendering.

Average core frequency (base frequency + X); CPU temp.

AMD Ryzen 7 5800H (45W TDP)0:02 – 0:10 sec0:15 – 0:30 sec10:00 – 15:00 min
Lenovo Legion 5 (15″ AMD, 2021)3.17 GHz @ 61°C3.17 GHz @ 64°C3.17 GHz @ 75°C
HP Omen 15 (2021, 15-en1000)3.33 GHz (B+4%) @ 78°C3.33 GHz (B+4%) @ 85°C3.42 GHz (B+7%) @ 88°C

The Ryzen 7 5800H in the HP Omen 15 maintains a higher frequency in all stages of our stress test, while also keeping higher temperatures. However, the temps are within the normal ranges. It looks like Lenovo wanted to have a stable-performing CPU that runs very cool, even after prolonged exposure to heavy workloads.

Gaming comfort

The Lenovo Legion 5 has a 4°C lower outside temperature but is also a lot noisier. We feel like the Omen 15’s fans were quieter, while the outside temperature wasn’t that high.

Lenovo Legion 5 (15″ AMD, 2021)

HP Omen 15 (2021, 15-en1000)


Verdict

We’ll cut right to the chase. The HP Omen 15 surprised us with not only what we believe to be the better design, but also a better quality of materials, as it features an aluminum base, in contrast to the all-plastic design on the Legion 5. It is also lighter and thinner, which is a big plus. The keyboard quality is great on both laptops, but the Legion has a NumPad, while the Omen lacks one. They also both feature a backlight and precise touchpads.

The I/O is a lot wider on the Legion 5, delivering an abundance of ports. However, it does lack an SD card reader, which is present on the Omen 15 laptop. Both notebooks offer the same degree of upgradeability, with two SODIMM RAM slots and two M.2 PCIe x4 drive slots.

The HP Omen 15 has an overall better display, with higher brightness and more even luminance, which will result in a better experience when using the laptop for professional color-sensitive work. The audio setup on the Legion 5 has fewer deviations, while still being bottom-firing. In addition to the audio, the Omen laptop delivers a much better battery life. The performance is pretty even between the two laptops, with the 130W RTX 3060 giving the 100W RTX 3070 a run for its money. Keep in mind, though, that the Legion 5 can be configured with an even more powerful 130W RTX 3070.

Finally, the Lenovo laptop does seem to have a better cooling setup however, its CPU also ran at a much lower frequency. The Ryzen 7 5800H inside doesn’t go above 75°C, at the expense of clock speeds. The Omen 15 reached decently higher speeds, while not exceeding a temperature of 90°C, which is better, in our opinion. In general, the Legion 5 is the better laptop exclusively for gaming.

Lenovo Legion 5 (15″ AMD, 2021): Full Specs / In-depth Review

HP Omen 15 (2021, 15-en1000): Full Specs / In-depth Review

Why choose Lenovo Legion 5 (15″ AMD, 2021)?

  • + Wider I/O
  • + Keyboard with a NumPad
  • + Better comfort during full load
  • + Offers GPU with higher TDP

Why choose HP Omen 15 (2021, 15-en1000)?

  • + Has an SD card slot
  • + Much better battery life
  • + Allows its CPU to reach higher clock speeds

Lenovo Legion 5 (15″ AMD, 2021) configurations:

HP Omen 15 (2021, 15-en1000) configurations:

 

 

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