Is Legion 5 Pro a Good Gaming Laptop? Legion 5 Pro Full Review 2022

The Legion 5 Pro was one of the best gaming laptops last year, combining beefy hardware with excellent design and that qhd 16x10 screen, and it quickly won my heart. So, how is it this year? Does this 2022's legion 5 pro live up to the legacy of its predecessor? To no one's surprise, the answer is yes. They have kept everything great about the previous generation and improved on it.

Legion 5 Pro Full Review 2022 Buy Now

Pricing and Specs

Okay, first things first, let's talk about the pricing The Legion 5 pro is equipped with the Ryzen 76800 h cpu, the Rtx 3060 gpu, 16 GB of ddr5 ram, and one TV SSD, and it costs around $100 in the United States and around 1,50,000 rupees in India. If you want more graphics power, you can choose the rtx 3070 or 3070 ti versions. Similarly, if you're not aware, Lenovo also sells the Legion 5i Pro, which is basically the intel variant.

Design

With that out of the way, let's start with the design here. Lenovo has simplified the design of the Legion fibro even further this time. While last year's model featured a big glowing white logo on the lid, that has been replaced with a simple legion texture. The keyboard colour also matches the body now, which adds to the flush minimal look of this device. That aside, it still has the top notch build quality that I like, the same true strike keyboard and the same build materials for me. Its build quality leaves no room for complaints and I think this is one of the best looking gaming laptops out there. Unfortunately, it still comes with the same comically large power brick. Here you're looking at a package of over 3 kgs, which is sure to take a toll on your back if you move around with your laptop a lot. There is not much to talk about the design because most of it has remained the same. It is as if lenovo found the perfect formula and stuck with it, which is not bad in itself.

Which laptop is best for graphic designers?

Display

The display is not that different this time either, and once again I can't help but be amazed by it. I mean, just look at the specs; a 16-inch qhd screen with a smooth 165 hertz refresh rate, a 3ms response time, and 500 nits of brightness, all while boosting 100 SRGB gamut. Furthermore, there's also a 240 hertz option this time around. The display also comes pre-calibrated and you can even choose between different colour profiles like srgb and rec 709 inside the x-right colour assistant app. 

I measured its contrast ratio at a thousand seventy to one, which is slightly lower than what we got on last year's model, but it leaves no room for complaints in terms of viewing angles and white balance In my tests, I found that this screen covers 98 srgb and 73 p3 gamut, so apart from gaming and multimedia consumption, this thing is good enough for photo editing and similar workloads as well. At 530 units of brightness, the Legion 5 pro screen is easily visible outdoors too, and setting it at 50 to 75 was comfortable enough for my eyes in a well-lit room. Like most gaming laptops, the Legion 5 pro screen has an anti-glare coating, which makes it easy to use when you have a bunch of light sources directly reflecting on the display. Besides this, whether you're gaming or coding or reading, this 16:9 aspect ratio makes a big difference. So all in all, the Legion 5 Pro screen surpasses most of the competition in this price bracket.

Keyboard

This unit has four-zone rGB lighting, whereas it is also available with a simple white backlight. There's also the stingray white version, which looks quite elegant with its blue backlit keys Okay, while I was not that much of a fan of the keyboard on the last gen legion five pro, this one has actually grown on me, so much so that I now prefer the legion two-strike keyboard over the keyboards on most other gaming laptops. The keyboard gives off a decent tactile feel while gaming and typing. The keycaps are not wobbly, and the full-sized keys are a delight to type on. You can also switch between the lighting modes from the lenovo vantage app or with the function key plus spacebar shortcut. But just like last year, the RGB lighting here is not the brightest, even though the letters and secondary functions are uniformly lit. I was also expecting Lenovo to implement a glass trackpad this time, but it is still stuck with the mylar plastic trackpad. This trackpad is far from bad, but it simply cannot compete with the smoothness of a glass one.

Speaker

This guy houses the same speaker setup as we've seen before as well, between the frame and the lower half of the laptop, like the trackpad These dual speakers are just okay for a gaming laptop. The base feels recessed and the mids outshine everything else After some tinkering with the nahimic app, I was able to get a slightly immersive audio experience though.

Webcam

Okay, moving on. It's 2022, but the webcam here is still a 720p unit. I found it to be usable for attending video conferences, and this camera switch is also a welcome feature, but if you are a streamer, you should probably get an aftermarket webcam for much better quality.

Performance

We now talk about the most important aspect of a gaming laptop: performance This year, the Legion 5 Pro is available with an AMD Ryzen 6600 edge or Ryzen 7 6800 edge processor. Lenovo has discontinued the use of the rdx 3050 here, and your GPU options now include the rtx 3060, 3070, and 3070 ti, as well as the Ryzen 7 6800 edge plus 140 watt rdx 3060 combo, which I believe offers the best value for money. This is the first Ryzen 6000 series equipped laptop to arrive in our office, and I was quite eager to find out how different it was from Intel's 12th gen processor, so I fired up a bunch of benchmarks right away, and it seems that the 12 gen is still a leader as far as raw performance is concerned. On almost every test, the Asus Stuff F15 with a core i7 12700 CPU that I recently reviewed easily outperformed the Ryzen 7 6800 Edge. It is ahead by 10 to 15 on Cinebench r23 and we can notice similar results on other benchmarks like 7zip va5 corona and Puket bench.

Gaming Peformance

In terms of gaming performance, the Legion 5 pro managed 318 fps on average with a 1% low of 100 fps while playing CS:GO at very high settings, which is oddly higher than the top F15 with Intel 12 gen. Similarly, the Legion 5 Pro breezed through GTA 5 and Borderlands 3 at high presets with an average frame rate of over 100 fps. Hitman 3, on the other hand, yielded an average of 66 fps and, similar to the tough f-15, I did not find any notable improvement when dropping the settings to media Playing control on ultra with rate racing set to high was a decent experience, with the fps averaging at 56 or 69 fps on medium settings Cyberpunk 2077, on the other hand, is practically unplayable with only 33fps on average on ultra settings without DLSS, but you can get much better gameplay at medium settings instead, and when turning off retracing completely, the Legion 5 Pro averages an impressive 102 fps.

Thermals

Compared to its predecessor, Lenovo has significantly upgraded the cooling system this time with what it calls "cold front 4.0.  It also claims that the fans are now 140 percent more powerful, with 40 percent thinner blades. It also has a dedicated copper block to further cool the CPU, and yes, the thermals here do live up to Lenovo slaves Even after multiple sessions of gaming, putting my hands on the keyboard deck did not feel uneasy at all. I recorded a temperature of 45 to 46 degrees Celsius when playing Cyberpunk 2077 on medium, where the heat was mostly localised to the area between the entrance and the power bottoms. Oh and as for the fans, you will hear them only when the laptop goes through some CPU and GPU intensive workload, so I found myself using it in performance mode most of the time. Oh, and a neat touch that Lenovo has added here is the colour-coded notification light on the power button, so I can immediately tell if the laptop is running in performance balance or quiet mode.

Battery

In terms of battery life, this year's legion 5 pro has the same 80 watt cell as its predecessor, but despite this, I was getting like one or two hours of additional screen on time here in my general usage. It lasted me four to six hours on average under my regular usage. You can get much more than six hours of screen on time by switching to the igpu only mode and limiting the refresh rate to just 60 hertz. However, this does come with a significant performance drop, so I'd only use it when there is a power cut or something for charging. This big 300 watt charger can take the legion 5 pro from 0 to 100 in about two hours. There's also rapid charge support in case you're in a hurry and quickly need some juice before you head out.

Verdicts

Okay, let's wrap up this review now, and it's no surprise that the 2022 edition of the Legion 5 Pro gets a big seal of approval from me. Granted, its AMD CPU is not as powerful as Intel's 12 gen processors, but the gains in terms of battery life and thermals are hard to overlook. Plus, it also has an incredible display and solid build quality, which makes it an easy recommendation. So yeah, if you're looking for a reliable gaming laptop in the sub-$1500 price range, getting this year's Legion 5 Pro won't disappoint you a bit. So guys, that was all for our full review of the 2022 edition of the Lenovo LEGION 5 PRO.