Lenovo Legion 5 Pro Review - One of the Best? By Jarrod'sTech

The Lenovo Legion 5 Pro is one of the best Ryzen gaming laptops I’ve tested so far, but it’s not perfect, let’s find out if it lives up to the hype in this detailed review. My model has AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800H CPU, 16 gigs of memory, and a 16” 165Hz screen powered by Nvidia RTX 3070 graphics, but it’s available with lower specs too like Ryzen 5 or RTX 3060 graphics, you can find examples and updated pricing with the links down in the description - oh and make sure you’re subscribed for the upcoming comparisons of the 5 Pro against the Legion 7 and HP Omen 15! Overall build quality feels nice, the lid and bottom panel are aluminum with a grey finish, no sharp corners or edges. The laptop alone weighs 2.6kg or 5.7lb, then about a kilo or 2.3lb heavier with the large 300 watt power brick and cables. The dimensions really aren’t too different compared to most 15” laptops, and that’s because of the unique screen. It’s 16 inches with a 165Hz refresh rate, but it’s using a 16:10 aspect ratio with a resolution above standard 1440p. This means there’s more pixels compared to your traditional 16:9 screen.

There’s more space vertically, but despite this it’s still in a 15” chassis. It gets quite bright at full brightness, over 500 nits, however this drops off sharply as you lower it. The Lenovo Vantage software, the control panel for the laptop, lets you enable or disable optimus, aka hybrid mode. With optimus enabled the screen still has FreeSync, and with optimus disabled you’ve instead got the option of G-Sync, so best of both worlds however you run it. The Vantage software gives you the option to enable or disable panel overdrive which affects screen response time.

By default mine was set to off, but you can turn it on with one click to improve average grey-to-grey response time to around 4.5ms, which is quite nice when compared to other laptops, below the 6ms for transitions to occur within the refresh window. Mine had no noticeable backlight bleed, but this will vary between laptops and panels. There’s a 720p camera above the screen in the middle, no Windows Hello support though. There wasn’t room for a privacy shutter over the camera due to the bigger screen and thinner bezels, so there’s instead a switch on the right which physically disconnects the camera. This is what the camera and microphone look and sound like, and this is what it sounds like while I’m typing on the keyboard.

My keyboard just has white backlighting, but it does light up all keys and secondary key functions. It can only be adjusted between two brightness levels or turned off with function and the space bar. I had no issues typing on it, it felt perhaps a little less tactile compared to the Legion 7 but still pretty nice. Now even if you do get the 5 Pro with the 4 zone RGB keyboard, it does not use the Corsair iCUE software to customize it, so you don’t have to worry about the battery drain issues that I reported in my review of the Legion 7. You can also turn off the lid light with the function plus L shortcut combination.

The precision touchpad clicks down anywhere and works well. While typing my palm does sort of brush on it, but it didn’t feel weird to me or annoying and it never caused any problems. Dave2D mentioned that this was because the touchpad is moved over to the left, but I don’t think that’s the case. The touchpad is still centered relative to the letter section of the keyboard, which is where it should be, it’s just that the touchpad is bigger in this year’s model. He also mentioned this resulted in click or movement while gaming, but I didn’t experience this, and sliding my palm over it doesn’t even move the mouse.

Worst case you could always use a mouse and press the function and F10 shortcut to disable the touchpad. On the left from the back there’s an air exhaust vent, USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C port with DisplayPort 1.4 output and a 3.5mm audio combo jack. The right just has the camera disconnect switch, a USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A port, and there’s an air exhaust on this side too. The rest is on the back, between the two air vents on the corners from left to right there’s gigabit ethernet, a second USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C port, again with DisplayPort 1.4 like the one on the left, but this one also lets you charge the laptop. There are three USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A ports on the back for 4 in total, HDMI 2.1 output, and the power input on the far right. There are icons above the rear ports, however unlike the higher tier Legion 7 they do not light up, so I found them less useful in practice.

There’s a light near the power input for charge level, amber means the charge is 90% or below. Both the left and back Type-C ports with DisplayPort support and HDMI connect directly to the Nvidia discrete graphics, which makes sense given we have the option of disabling optimus anyway. The front has a little section that sticks out in the middle, which makes it very easy to open up. I’m not aware of hinge issues with the Legion 5 last year, the design is different but it looks similar to the new Legion 7, so probably not going to be an issue, I can’t say for sure without long term testing in any case. There wasn’t too much flex to the screen owing to the metal lid, and keyboard flex wasn’t too bad either while pushing down hard, I wouldn’t say it was noticeable, but pressing one key did seem to push the others, it didn’t feel quite as sturdy as the Legion 7.

The bottom panel is aluminum and clean, just air intake vents towards the back, and we can see there’s nothing obstructing it, that whole rectangle section at the back is holes. Getting inside requires removing 10 Philips head screws, and the 4 down the front are shorter than the rest. Opening was easy using the pry tools linked in the description. Inside the storage, WiFi and memory are covered by metal plates. The ones on the sides have three Philips head screws while the memory one just pries off.

We’ve got the battery down the front, two M.2 storage slots above on both left and right, two memory slots in the center, and Wi-Fi 6 card to the right of that. Both of the metal plates over the M.2 slots have thermal pads too. The two 2 watt speakers are on the left and right sides towards the front. They sound decent for a laptop, there’s some bass but I thought they were a little muffled at max volume, and the latencymon results were looking alright. The Legion 5 Pro has a 4-Cell 80Wh battery.

As the Vantage software lets us enable or disable the iGPU, aka optimus, aka hybrid mode, I’ve tested both configurations. Playing a game lasted for over 2 hours with Nvidia battery boost limiting the frame rate to 30 FPS, otherwise while streaming YouTube video we can see that using optimus basically doubles our runtime compared to not using it. I’ve also tested with the screen set to a 60Hz refresh rate up the top, and this gives us an extra 2 hours. I only did this because the 5 Pro has this simple shortcut you can easily press to swap between 165Hz and 60Hz, so based on my results it’s worth doing on battery. For the purposes of comparing against others though, I use default values.

Some laptops like those from ASUS swap the refresh rate automatically when you unplug from wall power but the 5 Pro doesn’t do that by default so I’m not using that result here. It’s basically the same as the Legion 7 with the same sized battery, but not as good as the Legion 5 from last generation closer to the top, granted that one also had lower specs. You can also enable conservation mode through the Vantage software, which keeps the battery at a 55 to 60% maximum charge to help improve battery lifespan. Some other notes about the battery - when on battery power like right now, you can’t use the highest performance mode, it needs to be plugged in to wall power for that, and by default when you unplug it’ll go into quiet mode and the keyboard lighting will turn off, but you can turn that back on if you prefer with the function and space shortcut. It’s also got flip to boot, this wasn’t on by default, but it makes the laptop power on when you open the lid.

Let’s check out thermals next. The 5 Pro uses standard heat pipes, you need to go up to the Legion 7 if you want the vapor chamber cooler. The Vantage software lets us change between different performance profiles, which from lowest to highest are quiet, balance and performance. Balance mode also has a checkbox we can select to automatically tune the system, so I’ve tested that too. You can quickly swap performance modes with the function and Q shortcut, and the color of the power button changes to show you the current mode - a simple feature I wish all laptops had.

While these different modes will adjust fan speed, there’s no way of explicitly controlling fan speed, so you can’t just set it to maximum for example, it depends on the workload. The idle results down the bottom were cooler compared to many others. I’ve run stress tests with both the CPU and GPU loaded up to represent a worst case, as well as playing an actual game. The GPU, represented by the green bars, was never hitting thermal throttling, though the processor seems to be reaching this in this particular stress test, at least prior to using the cooling pad, linked down in the description. The actual game was cooler, though I’m also running it at 1440p here and I normally test 1080p, so potentially less processor load - but hey it comes with a high resolution screen and specs that can run 1440p so it made sense to test this way.

We’re not quite reaching 4GHz on all 8 core in the stress test, even with the cooling pad, which many other Ryzen gaming laptops I’ve tested are capable of - not all but most seem to be able to do it. For some reason the game in quiet mode was clocking much lower compared to the stress test, I’m not exactly sure why but it wasn’t playing great either. This is also observed when looking at power limits, in quiet mode the processor was running below 10 watts, while in the stress test it was capped at 25 watts which sounds much more reasonable to me. This same behavior was also present in the Legion 7, so I guess that’s just how these models run in this specific game. The GPU power limit seems to be 115 watts in quiet and balance modes, while performance mode boosts this to the full 125 watts, or up to 140 with dynamic boost, and we’re seeing above 130 in the game, likely as 1440p is less heavy on the CPU.

Here’s how an actual game performs with these different modes in use. Performance mode was best as you’d expect, while balance mode wasn’t seeing a difference whether or not I was using the auto tune settings. I saw basically no difference whether gaming or testing thermals with the balance and automatic tune on. With the Legion 7 on the other hand, I did actually notice a boost when using the automatic tune in balance mode, but I didn’t see that on the 5 Pro, so I’m not sure if that’s just a bug. Here’s how the different modes perform in Cinebench R23.

The difference isn’t too big between balance and performance modes, at least compared to quiet, the single core performance in particular is capped quite heavily there. The Legion 5 Pro is now offering the best single and multi core scores that I’ve had so far from the Ryzen 7 5800H processor, only being beaten by the higher tier 5900HX above, so a great result compared to others like the XMG Neo 15 or HP Omen 15. Some performance is lost when running on battery power, but it’s still the best result I’ve got for a 5800H laptop. The single core score is basically the same, but the multi core score has lowered by about 4000 points. The keyboard was in the low 30s when idling, normal stuff compared to others and cool to the touch.

With the stress tests running it’s still relatively cool and in the low 40s, there’s a warmer spot near the arrow keys but it’s not hot. Balance mode was similar, mid 40s now in the hot spots towards the right, and no difference with the auto tune setting. The highest performance mode is similar again, it’s only really approaching hot at the back but you don’t need to touch there so no problem, let’s have a listen to fan noise. It sounds pretty much silent when sitting there idle. Stress tests in balance and balance plus auto tune are the same, again no difference, and both were only a little louder than quiet mode which I don’t think was all that quiet.

Performance mode is loudest, but using a cooling pad actually lowers the sound level. We can’t directly change fan speed but because the system is now cooler the fans slow down. Now let’s find out how well this configuration of Lenovo Legion 5 Pro gaming laptop performs in games. To compare it against other laptops I’ve had to use the lower 1080p resolution, as that’s just what I’ve got data for, and I’m also testing it stock with the memory that came in it out of the box, but after that we’ll have a look at what other memory can do. I’ve tested Battlefield 5 in campaign mode at ultra settings, and the Legion 5 Pro is highlighted in red.

The results are great compared to most others, I mean it’s ahead of even the desktop replacement Alienware 51m with desktop 9900K processor, just think about that for a moment. That said, it’s a little behind the two machines above it which have the same 3070 graphics with the same power limits. Shadow of the Tomb Raider was tested with the games benchmark tool with the highest setting preset, and the Legion 5 Pro moves down a few positions here relative to the same laptops. This time it’s quite a fair bit below those other 3070 laptops which are hitting 120 FPS and above, it’s just 3 FPS ahead of the HP Omen 15 which has a lower wattage 3070 and that one also doesn’t let you disable optimus. Far Cry 5 was also tested with the games benchmark tool at max settings.

The Legion 5 Pro continues to move down compared to other laptops in this one. I wasn’t expecting to see it performing below the Omen 15, again for those reasons just mentioned. Sure the difference between them is small, but still this is now the lowest result I’ve got from any 3070 laptop tested. Setting the laptop to 1080p or 1440p in Windows adds black bars above and below, but it depends on the game and whether or not it supports the 16:9 aspect ratio. If it doesn’t, it will just stretch the game vertically so it fills the whole screen, while others like CS:GO let you set 16:9 resolutions which keeps the black bars.

All 13 games I tested at native 16:10 resolution worked fine. Now it is possible to boost gaming performance of the Legion 5 Pro to get it more in line with those other RTX 3070 laptops, and I’ve done this by swapping the memory. I’ve got more information in this dedicated video here if you want to get an understanding of what the problem is. Just briefly as a preview, here’s an example of the same three games with the memory upgrade, so it’s possible to boost FPS at 1080p by around 10% with this simple change and put the Legion 5 pro closer to the other similarly specced laptops. I have also tested the legion 5 Pro in 13 different games like Cyberpunk and Red Dead Redemption 2 at its native 2560 by 1600 resolution in this video here, so check that one out if you want to get an idea of how the 5 Pro actually performs at its native resolution.

Here are the results from 3DMark for those that find them useful. Now for some creator tests. Adobe Premiere was tested with the Puget Systems benchmark. The results from the Legion 5 Pro are right in line with those other Ryzen plus RTX 3070 laptops, just a few points difference, but still a great result compared to Intel 10th gen options, granted 11th gen did just launch. Adobe Photoshop generally depends more on processor performance, and the Legion 5 Pro was scoring exactly the same as the HP Omen 15 with the same CPU and GPU, granted the Omen has both lower CPU and GPU power limits.

DaVinci Resolve is more GPU heavy, and the high wattage RTX 3070 is now doing better out of this same selection of laptops, not quite as good as the XMG Neo 15 with same CPU and GPU, but at least it’s ahead of the lower wattage Omen 15 now. I’ve also tested SPECviewperf which tests out various professional 3D workloads. The drive speed for the 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD was doing well for both reads and writes, and you can always install a second one if you need more space. The BIOS has more options than your average laptop, granted many of the options are also presented through the Vantage software, but there are also some extras like enabling GPU overclocking. From what I can tell this just gives you the option of applying an overclock in software, otherwise we can also apply a GPU overclock in the BIOS itself if you want.

I booted an Ubuntu 20 live CD to test Linux support. Out of the box the Wi-Fi, keyboard, touchpad, speakers and camera work. Screen brightness adjustment didn’t, but performance modes and keyboard lighting can still be changed as these controls are baked into firmware. Now let’s discuss pricing. This will change over time, so check out the links in the description below if you want to see how much it currently goes for.

At the time of making this video, the Legion 5 Pro isn’t available in most regions yet, apparently it’s coming to the US in June. At CES Lenovo announced the 5 Pro should start from $1000 USD. I don’t have the lowest specced configuration though, so expect more for this 3070 model. Here in Australia we’re looking at around $3300 AUD for this model, and here’s how pricing looks for Singapore. Alright so with all of that in mind let’s summarize both the good and the bad to help you decide if the Legion 5 Pro is a gaming laptop worth considering.

You can sort of imagine it as a trimmed down version of the legion 7, as the 5 pro is the better value option and still has the main core features, you’re just not paying for things like flashy RGB lighting and it can’t be specced quite as high. With that in mind, it is certainly one of the better Ryzen gaming laptops I’ve tested so far, but there are still quite a few models I’m yet to try out, so I can’t yet say how it stacks up. The 16” screen is great, it’s got G-Sync or FreeSync, good response time, no backlight bleed and it gets bright. It’s not too much different in size compared to a 15” model due to the 16:10 screen, but it is on the heavier side for a laptop of this size, and that’s not helped by the large 300 watt power brick which appears to be the default even if you pick a lower specced configuration. Overall I don’t think there’s too much to complain about here, except for perhaps the memory selection.

Yeah the gaming performance wasn’t quite as expected at the lower 1080p resolution, but the memory does make less of a difference at the higher native resolution. In any case, it wasn’t too far behind, but you may need to upgrade the memory if you want the best experience. Otherwise outside of gaming, things like creator tasks and CPU tests do exceptionally well. If it actually starts for the originally planned $1000 USD price, well I think that’s straight up going to be a good deal, though I am assuming that’ll be for the lower powered Ryzen 5 and RTX 3060 option - but hey in games there’s not really a difference between 6 and 8 cores today anyway. Make sure you’re subscribed for the upcoming comparisons between the Legion 5 Pro and Legion 7 as well as HP Omen 15, come and join us in Discord and get behind the scenes videos by supporting the channel on Patreon, and for now come and have a look at how well the Legion 5 Pro performs in games at two different resolutions at all setting levels - I’ll see you over in that one next.

Source : Jarrod'sTech