Appearance, design, workmanship
It’s such a constant, our Legion. Thankfully, the sharp shapes and aggressive design of the first Lenovo Ys we’re currently seeing from the competition are no longer here, nice straight lines, rounded edges and corners, practical “warts” at the back. The only difference is that the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro has the design of the Legion 7, specifically the metal chassis. The lid has a sleek silver embedded Lenovo logo on it, and two slanted mouldings – presumably to increase the lid’s strength. As I’ve mentioned before, there’s a “wart” on the back that’s made of plastic and for me, it’s a practical thing. The cooling vents are in the rear corners and extend 1/3 of the way up the side.

The design is on an excellent level, Physical dimensions are: 26.85mm x 356mm x 264.2mm with a weight starting at 2.45kg (depending on configuration).

The picture, the display, the colors, the frequency… The display has a 16:10 aspect ratio – which is great for work. A resolution of 2,560 x 1,600 pixels – that’s great for everything. A frequency of 165Hz – which is brilliant for gaming, but fine for work too. With a brightness of 500 nits you can work in peace even now in the summer sun, really! Contrast is 1200:1. By adjusting the backlight with DC, there’s no flickering PWM. For GSync gamers.

Above the display we find the HD camera, which you can turn off with the HW switch on the right side of the laptop.

The touchpad is large, it’s centered under the space bar so it’s not in the middle of the palmrest, but that’s not a problem at all because it’s more comfortable that way. The response is instant and the accuracy is seamless, there were times when my “left and right button” presses didn’t work quite accurately. On the other hand, once one learns and gets used to the gestures, one can work with it almost as well as with TrackPoint…

The connector set is rich and perhaps nothing important is missing. Although, it’s a fact that I’d rather see DisplayPort than HDMI, but I understand why HDMI – it’s everywhere nowadays and it works even on higher resolutions. However, on the left side we have 2x USB-C. One in Thunderbolt 4 spec (USB 4, DisplayPort 1.4) and the other (USB 3.2 Gen 2, DisplayPort 1.4). On the back, it’s USB-A (USB 3.2 Gen 1, permanently powered), USB-A (USB 3.2 Gen 1), USB-C (USB 3.2 Gen 2, DisplayPort 1.4, powered), HDMI™, RJ45, powered… So you can probably see why the DisplayPort isn’t there. Right side, USB-A 3.1 Gen 2, E-Shutter button, combined headphone and microphone port. So for me it’s no problem to connect anything and anywhere, or use some TB dock and use the laptop as a desktop with the power supply and that TB dock connected.

An i7-12700H processor with 6 powerful cores that have Hyper-Threading and 8 power saving cores, complemented by 32GB of DDR5 4800MHz RAM. 1TB NVME Gen 4 x4 storage. With speeds of up to 7,000 MB/s read and 5,100 MB/s write. And here’s probably the most important thing – the graphics card. This is the RTX 3070 Ti in the 130W version, don’t be fooled by the fact that the card has half the power consumption compared to the desktop version or even a third compared to the most corrosive desktop versions… Performance is definitely not the same ratio lower.

The cooling here is very well designed with the Legion Coldfront 4.0 system (140% more powerful fans with 40% thinner blades than the previous version) which allows for 3 power management modes. Well, and finally “red” gaming mode, when the CPU and GPU gets the blame for increasing the power limits to the very maximum the laptop is able to keep, here the fan sound is already noticeable even in a busy office, but it is not annoying and distracting, so with headphones at gaming absolutely no problem.

The battery has a capacity of 83 Wh, which gives us about 4 hours of work, because even if one switches the laptop to silent mode, most of today’s applications just exhaust the dedicated GPU, so it has a power consumption of around 20W, which lasts us roughly the aforementioned 4 hours of work.

You can see that FPS depends a lot on the graphics, so the higher the setting the lower the FPS, but both games can be set to play around the refresh rate of the monitor, so for me it’s perfectly fine and it’s just a matter of who prefers more FPS or better graphics.

Footnote, if you connect an external monitor with a resolution of 2560×1440 pixels, you will gain another 10% of performance, because the 160 pixels in height that the laptop display has in addition will make just 10% difference.

However, for me, a gaming laptop is no longer an oxymoron and you can play royally on this particular machine. Just plug in a mouse and a headset and that’s all that’s missing.

Regarding the CPU the situation is clear, there the CPU reacts according to the profile settings as follows:

On silent settings: PL1 35W, PL2 45W

Automatic mode: PL1 70W and PL2 80W

Powerful mode: PL1 115W and PL2 135W

It’s so nice to see how much the CPU is greedy and the laptop responds according to your settings.

The GPU, despite the specification of 130W maximum, is able to take even 150W and boost to 1875 MHz for a short time, there is room here for UV cards and getting both lower power and stable boost, theoretically even higher, but I didn’t get to that through short time.