I would have agreed with you once upon a time. But Legion laptops have taken a little hit in quality from a lot of the threads I have seen.
Also, hardly fair to be so vague, a Legion 7 against a TUF is a no brainer, That said, a Legion 5 against a Strix G18 is also a no brainer.
As a guy who has had hands on 2 generations of A15 and 2 generations of Legion 5, they both have merits and flaws. The stock cooling on the Legion seems to be a little better on the Gen 6 and 7 than the FA506 and FA507 A15s. That said the screens on the top versions of the A15 are much better. My FA507RR has a 165hz QHD screen with near 100% DCI-P3 compared to the gen 7 Legion having similar screen but only 100% SRGB.
The 2022 and onwards TUF laptops now have more controls in Armoury Crate. Including fan controls, 3rd party software like G-helper can then tap into the fan tables and allow me to completely control fan curves and power limits in EVERY power mode. A feature that is only available Legion 7s if I recall and it isn't as good, and legiontoolkit isn't quite as refined as G-helper. Gen 6 Legion 5s can still use Legionfancontrol but gen 7s got locked out of setting ambient in the BIOS and eventually locked out control completely. So for cooling, Gen 6 is actually better in terms of control, and the A15 trumps that too.
There were issues with the A15 models where you could smell Intel's money when the A15 and F15 shared chassis, yet ASUS blocked more vents on the A15 so the thermals were terrible. Not sure if it was the A15 only or the F15 as well, but early models suffered that and no active cooling on the VRMs. These issues have since been rectified. Legions have not had such issues that I am aware of.
The cooling assembly on the Legions is pretty good, TIMs are Honeywell 7958 and thermal pads, not sure about those, but I did find that the cast aluminium plate that cools the VRMs and VRAM to be a little unrefined and sometimes not a great fit for contact on those components. I also found there were still rough casting marks and half cooked polishing on the contact points. Easy to rectify with 1000grit, a small flatting pad and a Dremel with metal polish. Follow it up with some high grade thermal putty and the temps of those parts are much better. Similar story for both Gen 6 and 7 Legion 5s. The A15s used a poor thermal putty and likely a cheaper TIM on the dies, that said, on the FA506 when I opened up more vents in the chassis and used a homemade cooling tray, the temps dropped dramatically. The Legions have good ventilation in their chassis I forgot to add that. Both A15s used several heat pipes to reasonable effect, the main let down was the aluminium branch for cooling the VRMs, I though it could be copper since it wasn't masssive. The putty used boiled and didn't make full contact with the VRAM which was not good. Ventilation on the A15s could be improved in my opinion. Clever use of Liquid metal and U6 pro on the 2 newer version here made huge differences in thermals. Easily over 10c, so the cooling assemblies are pretty good, just help back by TIMs.
The AI swap between balanced and Performance for gaming is a little janky to be honest, that's on both the gen 6 and 7. I've had to manually swap over several times. I also wish you could modify the GPU power limits in balanced, so you can use full GPU power and have the CPU sit nicely lower when not needed. The TUF models don't use these gimmicks, you pick what you want. Turbo for better fans, Manual for being able to tune the fans, CPU limits and GPU limits + overclocking.
Both laptops could benefit from being able to use XMP its a pretty basic feature and Ryzen chips love faster RAM so it is wasted performance, plain and simple. Options for undervolting the CPU or using an offset would be nice. I know silicon lottery exists, but still saving a little power, maybe naturally gaining top end or just having the same performance and a cooler machine is great.
GPU overclocking is complicated. Useable frequency at stock voltages is pretty poor, undervolting and tuning for max stable OC frequency underload is your best option to truly get all the power you can at 140w or the gen 6s 130w. Legion take the win on VRAM tuning as the limit of OC is how far you can stably push it as it is. I have seen a stable +500 on the VRAM with no artifacts or ECC FPS drops. ASUS decided to cap the OC on the VRAM to +300 as they didn't want to help the miners. I confronted them about this after the crypto crash and they brushed it under the carpet then refused to talk to me.
I prefer the TUF keyboard and shortcut layouts as well as the 4 bonus buttons, nice large touchpad too. The interfaces is preference really, I like both designs. The power button showing the power mode is nice on the Legion, aside on the Gen 7 it doesn't go red, it just turns off. It also cannot play Borderlands on DX12 it will just crash out and its a pain altering game files to change it back to DX11. This may just be a flaw with this particular Gen 7 but it is annoying none the less. It also crashes after any windows update. It is fine afterwards but again its an annoyance for this to happen. Touch wood, I have had no issues with either TUF machines. I have also had the Legions crash in such a way I had to remove the batter and CMOS to clear the BIOS to get them to reboot and work properly. A lesser user would be RMA'ing their machine for this kind of fault. I fully admit, these faults could just be this particular machine, but I can only comment on what I have experience of.
They both have a pretty muted aesthetic which is quite nice. Overall they are both great budget machines if you compare them accurately, TUF vs Legion 5, both have compromises and things that its purely down to preferences. In stock form, Legion has better cooling, but could still be better, TUF has better control software and those open options make for better 3rd party use too and the screens are also much better.
Would I pick one over the other? All depends on the hardware and price, either could sway me.
That's what I think as well, especially about the current gen of gaming laptops! Lenovo has the customisation and the much better parts and options available whereas Asus is just coasting with old designs and the same parts they've used for years!
I have not had a Lenovo computer yet, but Lenovo are being talked about as the current leaders in the market. With the current increase in costs of everything I just hope that they do not cheap out on (lower their) quality like many other already have started to. I therefor do not find it surprising that you find Lenovo much better then Asus.
There are differing screen options available in the gen 8 laptops, for example this is the specifications for the one fitted to my slim 7 - 16" 3.2K (3200 x 2000), IPS, 16:10, 165Hz, 100% DCI-P3, 430 nits, NVIDIA®G-SYNC®Support, TÜV Rheinland®Certified, X-Rite Pantone®Certified
It's definitely not so cut and dried for feature sets though because both ASUS and Lenovo have differing approaches to testing and quality control. ASUS will push out brand new technology as soon as possible which often leads to horror stories of melting chips on motherboards, laptops and gaming handhelds with cooling issues that lead to chassis or component failure.
Whereas Lenovo spend more time in the development and testing of their products to mitigate all of the above issues as much as possible (allowing for the fact that how customers treat their laptops is entirely out of Lenovo's control)
For both companies you will always get hardware failures but it is actually how they deal with those that counts as well. I did admittedly struggled dealing with Lenovo initially over my Legion warranty repair but they were still light years ahead of ASUS UK customer support.
I am aware the newer models have more options, I can only comment on what I personally experienced though.
The Legion 7 is not a fair competitor to the TUF line up though, The main 7 pro would be closer to the Strix machines and the 7 slims more a Zephyrus rival. Legion 5s are inline with the TUFs.
Alas I do think ASUS QA on lower models is a little to be desired sometimes, that said, being a main stay in the market, the more machines you sell the more errors and failures come to light. I'm not really swinging either way in terms of preferred OEMs, ASUS has a few shady things recently which made me lose respect for them as a company. I have read of several horror stories from both OEMs on their customer service and RMA. Surprisingly more so on Lenovo's side than ASUS's. I have personally had a meh experience with ASUS UK based service centres and their forum admins. Ask a question and they just spout spec sheet nonsense without even reading your question properly, then if they can't answer it, instead of trying to they just ignore you.
Again, I am not for or against either OEM having used both machines, I do like them both.
