Lenovo Legion 5 Pro Review - Simply INCREDIBLE By Hardware Canucks

So, what I have in front of me is the new Lenovo legion 5 pro now. This isn't replacing the legion 5 from last year. In fact, it slots right between the legion 5 and the 7. I'm not exactly sure why it's called pro, because it's catered towards gamers and not professionals, even though you know that boundary is sort of starting to fade away these days, but anyways, I'm gonna. Let you guys judge on that. This laptop actually brings a lot of improvements to the table compared to last year's legion, five in terms of performance.

So now it comes with AMD's, new 5008 series, processor and NVIDIA's, RTX, 30, series, graphics and, of course, a few tweaks in terms of design that I really like, but most importantly, there's one aspect that I just love about this laptop. So let's take a deep dive on the legion 5 pro right after this put everything on display, you say the tower 100 mini by thermal take grants you a three-way view of your components with that mini vending machine. Look that is surely unique for an it enclosure. You've got ATX power, supply support, large CPU, tower heat sinks, triple slot GPUs with no riser necessary and all the ventilated panels are properly dustproof. The motherboard I o is facing up for easy access and the two included fans ensure proper airflow out of the box.

This tower, 100 mini, is for those who like to explore, check it out below alright. So, let's start off with pricing and availability, it starts at sixteen hundred dollars and for that you get a dozen 7 5800h with eight cores and 16 threads 16 gigabytes of ram, half a terabyte of storage and a RTX 3060. Now our sample comes with a 3070, but we're not exactly sure how much it's gonna cost, I'm guessing. Maybe 1800 and availability is set here in North America to end of July. One thing to note is that the display across all legion 5 pro models are configured with 16 by 10 quad HD, plus 165 hertz IPS with g-sync.

I know that's a lot, but it's cool. Unfortunately, you can configure this laptop with a RTX 3080. I think that GPU is reserved for the legion 7. Let's start off with exterior impressions and right off the bat, I know what some of you guys might be thinking. Why like? Why get it? Why? Why seriously? I think that was a bad joke, but honestly, this is a step back.

In my opinion, I really love the subtle legion logo on the top right hand, corner of the legion five last year it was very minimal, and it didn't look that aggressive. This, on the other hand, feels like they went back two years, took the design ID from the legion y545 and then slapped it on the back of the legion 5 pro now. At this point, I think it all comes down to personal preference and from our conversations with legion, they did tell us that the 5 pro is geared towards the gamer aesthetic, with the y logo at the front, whereas the 5 and the 7 take a more minimalistic and simple design approach. Build quality is slightly better on the 5 pro compared to the legion 5 last year. The front panel and the bottom panel are made out of aluminum, whereas the rest of the chassis is made out of plastic, but it's put together really well, you can sort of feel it when you pick this thing up honestly.

This storm gray finish is such a refreshing look compared to the competition where we're mostly seeing black laptops. Now I'm an advocate for anything that is gray, so this certainly matches my style. Another noticeable improvement is with the hinge, design and its rigidity. It's very stiff and there's barely any wobble, which is awesome, but I am aware that some users in the past have reported uh the hinge failing in fact the legion 5 and the legion 7i that I had last year did exhibit some crack noise. When I opened the lid uh, you know it just happens once in a while, which did bother me, but I didn't experience any of that with the sample.

It looks like they've taken care of that issue with the legion 5 pro and I hope that they do update that with the newer 7 and the number 5 series. It's very smooth, and I love it from a portability standpoint. The 5 pro isn't the slimmest chassis that I've come across. It weighs over five pounds, and it's 1.1 inches thick. So this thing is a pretty heavy device to lug around, not to mention the included power.

Brick is just huge. It's a 300 watt power supply, so you'll certainly need to make some room in your bag to accommodate that with uh the laptop itself. The interior space is very similar to the legion five. You get a full-size keyboard, along with a dedicated section for the arrow keys, which is awesome, Lenovo's true strike system for the keys work pretty well. There is adequate amount of travel distance with good feedback.

One thing I noticed with the keys themselves is that they're concave, like the ThinkPad series, whereas the 5 and the 7 are more flat. It's very subtle, but the difference it makes when typing is huge. I also prefer the black on gray, aesthetic, with the keys compared to the greyhound gray that you find on the 7i. RGB lighting has made its way into the 5 pro, but in my opinion, it's not as bright as a 7i, and I think this might be due to the lack of corsair's IQ system. All the effects are laggy, and the customizability is very limited uh.

Also, for those of you who are wondering the y logo at the front, uh can be turned off if you want so, basically just have to hit function and l, and it goes off, and you can do that back again. Boom boom boom boom, so fast cool. I can keep doing this yeah just uh just a little trick. The trackpad is it's all right. The surface is made out of some form of plastic, which won't give you the same level of comfort compared to something that has a glass surface.

I also noticed a little of delay when swiping through desktops or when using any sort of Windows-based gesture. Honestly, I wouldn't rely on this trackpad to get any work done that involves precision you're much better off using a dedicated mouse. I should also mention that the placement of this trackpad is way off center and that takes away some space for your left palms to sit on comfortably without rubbing against the trackpad. Obviously they had to make room for this in order for the arrow keys, so there's that trade-off. So this is the webcam test on the legion 5 pro and the quality looks pretty good.

In fact, it's better than the competition and the microphone sounds really nice. One interesting thing that legion has done to this laptop is they've integrated, a webcam, a shutter switch, which is not a software thing. It's actually more of a hardware thing. So if I go into device manager and hit the switch, it takes off the camera permanently, which I think is really cool. The speakers are located at the bottom, and they sound alright.

There is a little of depth to the base, but the trebles are practically. You know non-existent. They're not too crisp or there's not a lot of clarity in the high ends. So you know it's its your average speaker that you get from a gaming laptop, so nothing crazy here. The o layout on the five pro is very similar to other legion laptops.

As you can see, the majority of them are located at the back for easier, cable management. So you have power in three USB type: a ports which are 3.2, gen, 1, HDMI, an USB type c 3.2, gen, 2 port with power delivery and a rj45 jack. Switching to the right hand, side. There is another USB type, a port and, on the left, another type c 3.2 gen 2, along with an audio jack, that's a lot of ports, but I'm not complaining, but there are a few things that you need to be aware of. First, the majority of Taipei ports are gen 1 5 gigabits per second versus gen, 2 10 gigabits per second.

So it's not the fastest connection. The other thing is more of a warning. You see if you're using external, drives just watch out where you place them since the five pro's exhaust vents blast the back area with some really hot air. If the drive is being accessed and its own heat goes up, that could lead to some problems. Switching gears to the display- and this is by far my favorite feature of the 5 pro you see- Lenovo- managed to fit a 16-inch panel into the same chassis structure that they have with their other legion laptops.

They did this by illuminating, the larger chin at the bottom and gave it a taller 16 by 10 aspect ratio and the result is an awesome experience for productivity and gaming. You get more vertical screen real estate to work with. If you do a lot of split screen window management, this will certainly benefit you, and it's a unique approach by legion in the gaming space, because we're used to seeing 15-inch laptops with 16 by 9 aspect ratio screens. But this is certainly an upgrade uh and the quality of the panel is perfect too. As you can see, it covers 100 RGB, 77, adobe, RGB and 78 DC ip3, which is expected for an IPS panel, and it's calibrated by Pantone.

Also, this might be one of the first gaming laptops featuring a 500 nit display. That's right, 500 nits, it's super bright, and I absolutely loved using this thing during brighter conditions. On top of that, you get 165, hertz, quad, HD, plus resolution and g-sync I mean what else can we ask for on a gaming laptop seriously legion, just knocked it out of the park. Upgradability is pretty straightforward on the 5 pro once you get under the hood, you get instant access to memory slots which are already populated on my sample. Maximum supported memory is up to 32 gigabytes.

The primary NVMe SSD is tucked underneath this cover and the drive speeds are really fast. Both in read and write performance. There is an extra m.2 slot hidden underneath this cover over here. On the left hand, side, if you want to expand storage battery testing, is always interesting with gaming laptops. I never know what I'm going to get, especially when comparing AMD to intel machines- and it looks like this time.

The legion 5 pro gets a pretty good result in the light load test, with almost eight and a half hours of runtime. That's still way off from the new racer blade advanced, but we can't forget the new 16x10 screen ratio and the 16-inch size will naturally chew down more battery power versus 15-inch laptops switching over to something more intensive, and you can see the price lesions paying to get the dozen 7 5800h operating at a bit higher power level it chews into the battery, but at the same time we never expect all that much from gaming notebooks when they're on battery power make sure to check out that video. I did about that right over here and, yes, we'll be adding unplugged performance tests to all laptop reviews in a little while so definitely stay tuned. For that now, before I get into performance, I just want to quickly walk you through Lenovo's vantage software, that's being offered here, um, it's a very straightforward interface, nothing's, really hidden here. Everything is right at your fingertips in one single home page and that's really cool.

Now, along with system information, there is a touchpad, lock switch, which will come in handy when you're gaming and there's an overdrive toggle, which basically tightens up the display's response times and a hybrid mode switch now I'll get into the hybrid mode in the gaming section, but turning it off tells the internal mix switch to completely disable the integrated GPU and run the display directly off of the RTX 3070. , there's also a handy area where you can have the system automatically close certain apps when it detects a game running and, of course, there's a network boost section which increases network priority for any bandwidth, heavy programs. And finally, there are the thermal modes, which are the usual quiet balance and performance, but they threw in a new auto-detection, feature that's available for 16 games right now, so, basically it dynamically senses which game is being played and then loads a custom profile and modifies the CPU and GPU frequencies accordingly. Now this might sound like NVIDIA's dynamic boost, but it isn't it's just a custom legion solution and does it work well, at least in cs, go in modern warfare. It actually did offer a bit better performance than just running in balance mode alone, but then again, simply running in performance mode ends up getting you the best frame rates by a long shot.

Anyways about these performance modes, they're a lot more than just temperatures since in performance mode. The dozen 75800h runs right up to a constant 78 watts, which is way, way above AMD's configurable, TDP of between 35 watts and 45 watts. This pretty much proves that AMD's allowing their partners to run pretty loose with their specs. Even the balance mode starts at 65 watts and eventually runs at 53 watts until it hits a constant 45 watts, but the only mode that's anywhere close to what AMD sets as a baseline is quiet where we ended up seeing an average of around 37 watts. Now those high power numbers also have a pretty big effect on clock speeds, but you can also see there's a point of diminishing returns when it comes to pumping juice into a CPU.

That means, while performance mode takes almost 60 percent more than balanced. It only hits a maximum of 500 megahertz faster. The biggest impact is with temperatures where performance heads right up to a constant 93 degrees which might sound super high, but it's still a good 12 degrees away from AMD's max temperature of 105 degrees. So there's not too much to worry about here. Meanwhile, balanced and quiet are super well-behaved, but that's to be expected.

Since legion's cold front cooling system is one of the best around. You can actually see that by looking at the surface temperatures for the legion 5 pro, where pretty much everything stays comfortable to the touch without any super worrying hot spots, even from a noise standpoint. This is one of the quietest gaming laptops I've seen in a while, since even in the highest performance mode, it was pretty easy to deal with. But personally I would use the balanced mode for gaming. Now all of this leads to the legion 5 pro becoming one of the fastest gaming laptops we've ever tested, even though it's going toe-to-toe against some laptops rocking the 5900 series chips.

But you also have to remember that this is on performance mode, which is actually why the results start improving in longer tests. But at the end of the day, like we've seen with every laptop, a slightly lower end processor operating at a higher power limit can usually match or even beat higher end ones if they're operating at lower limits but move beyond just heavy and full multi-core results and the legion 5 starts falling behind a bit in resolve and premiere. But even then it's still super competitive with some of the best I've tested. But what about that? RTX 3070! That's inside this thing! Well, if you thought the CPU was being pushed check out these numbers guys even in quiet mode, it ends up hitting above 110 watts, while balanced mode brings it about 118, but then performance mode and yeah. That's 140 watts.

You guys see there, but the resulting frequencies need a bit of an explainer. First, the difference between balanced and performance modes once again shows that pumping a chip full of power doesn't really lead to that much higher frequencies. Now we're talking about just 125 megahertz, even though a full 25, more watts is being directed into the 3070. But what you didn't see here is quiet mode until now, because its behavior super odd, basically what's happening, is frequencies are being modulated to keep it within a lower power and temperature envelope. That'll lead to super erratic performance and even though it looks faster than the other two modes, it actually isn't, as for temperatures well, they're amazing, right across the board and the GPU doesn't come close to throttling and that obviously leads to the fans kicking into higher gear in every single setting.

The interesting thing about the gaming results is well even with a RTX 3070. The legion 5 pro can absolutely dominate in some games, while in others it's still right near the top of the charts. The only exceptions to that seems to come in games that favor intel CPUs like the i7 1087h and the racer blade 15. I reviewed just a few weeks ago. I mean either way.

This kind of performance is something everyone wanted from last generation, dozen laptops, but it's finally, here now and moving on to the five pros native resolution. Well, since this is the first laptop, I'm testing with a 1600p display, there's not much really to say other than it has no trouble even gaming beyond 1080p, so final thoughts on the legion 5 pro. It's simply incredible guys. If there's one thing that I have to pick about this laptop that stands out among competition, it's got to be that display. It's fast, sharp, color, accurate and really bright, and the performance is really impressive.

I mean you've seen the numbers. Pricing is also not that bad either battery life is alright. I mean it's not the best that I've seen so far and the keyboard is pretty good, except for the RGB lighting. I think that needs work and, of course the trackpad is it's all right. It seriously needs refinement and of course there is the design which I personally don't mind, because you know it's gray and not just another black laptop you see, there are some amazing ryzen-based laptops out there and each one of them have their own forte, but at the end of the day it all comes down to what you value the most.

If that's simply the display, if you want to have a stunning display, that's bright and just fast and all that stuff, and if you value performance then this should be on the top of your list and the rest sort of follows after but keep in mind the trade-offs that I mentioned earlier. So on that note, thank you so much for watching. I hope you were able to take away everything that you needed to know about the legion 5 pro. Let us know what you think: I'm ever with high reconnects thanks for watching and spend responsibly, and I'll, see you guys in the next one.

Source : Hardware Canucks