Lenovo offers so many gaming laptops under the Legion 5 and Legion 7 labels, with Intel and AMD flavors and Slim and Pro variants, that it can be hard to keep track. Think of the Legion 5 Pro Gen 7 as the poor man's version of the 4.5-star-rated, Editors' Choice award-winning Legion 7 Gen 7—well, not really a poor man's, since it starts at $1,439.99 and is $1,599.99 as tested. But it's a 16-inch, AMD-CPU-powered pixel-pusher that's a full $1,000 cheaper than that 16-inch, Ryzen- and Radeon-powered flagship. If your budget exceeds economy gaming rigs but doesn't reach to the top of the line, the Legion 5 Pro is a first-class choice.
A Power Brick That Weighs a Brick
When we last saw the Legion 5 Pro in July 2021, we complained about its bulk. This year's model is a tenth of an inch thinner (0.78 by 14.2 by 10.3 inches) but still pretty hefty at 5.49 pounds, not counting a huge, heavy AC adapter. A typical 15.6-inch system, like the Acer Predator Helios 300, is 4.8 pounds. Crafted of "Storm Gray" aluminum and magnesium, the Lenovo shows almost no flex if you grasp the screen corners or mash the keyboard deck.
The $1,439.99 base model combines an eight-core, 3.2GHz AMD Ryzen 7 6800H processor with Nvidia's 6GB GeForce RTX 3060 graphics processor, 16GB of memory, and a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive. The screen is a non-touch IPS panel with 16:10 aspect ratio, 2,560-by-1,600-pixel resolution, and a 165Hz refresh rate.
Our test unit (model 82RG0004US) is a Micro Center configuration bolstered with 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and 8GB GeForce RTX 3070 Ti graphics; it's officially $1,979.99 but discounted to $1,599.99 at the time of writing. The GPU and RAM are both maxed out, though thrill seekers can opt for a Ryzen 9 6900HX chip. Windows 11 Home and Wi-Fi 6E are standard.
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Like many gaming laptops, the Legion 5 Pro has no biometrics—there's neither a fingerprint reader nor a face-recognition webcam to sign in with Windows Hello. The screen bezels are slim; the camera has a small on/off switch on the system's right side instead of a sliding shutter above the display. The keyboard has four-zone (not per-key) RGB backlighting and a numeric keypad.
Two USB 3.2 Type-C ports are on the laptop's left side; a USB 3.2 Type-A port joins an audio jack on the right. As with other Legions, a protruding rear block holds additional ports: a second and third USB-A (one that's always on for charging handheld gadgets), a third USB-C, an Ethernet port, an HDMI video-out, and the power connector.
Medium-High Resolution, Medium-Fast Refresh
Lenovo's 2,560-by-1,600-resolution display is pleasing to the eye, with effective contrast and wide viewing angles. Colors don't pop vividly but are clear and well saturated, and white backgrounds are clean rather than dingy, though the screen doesn't tilt back quite as far as I'd like. There's plenty of brightness, and fine details and the edges of letters are sharp.
The panel's 165Hz refresh rate is ample for most games, and it supports both Nvidia G-Sync and AMD FreeSync, as well as the VESA DisplayHDR 400 spec. An X-Rite Color Assistant software utility lets you switch between sRGB and video-oriented Rec. 709 color palettes, though both the software and screen are well short of the color capabilities of mobile workstation displays.
Sadly, the webcam has the familiar lowest-common-denominator 1,280-by-720-pixel resolution, so it can't capture 1080p selfies or videos, and its images look vague or in soft-focus. But it's far from the worst we've seen, offering a relatively well-lit and colorful view without much noise or static. Lenovo Smart Noise Cancellation software optimizes the microphone array for a single speaker or whole conference table and reduces background sounds.
Speaking of sound, SteelSeries Nahimic software offers music, movie, gaming, and voice modes and an equalizer with faux surround sound and a sound tracker option to help you pinpoint ominous noises like footsteps in games. Unfortunately, the bottom-mounted speakers are quiet even at peak volume, and sound is hollow and muffled. You can dimly make out overlapping tracks, but there's no bass to speak of.
Something else that's hollow is the keyboard's typing feel, though it's comfortable in a tappy, slightly loose kind of way. There are dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys above the keypad, though alas they don't work if you toggle Fn Lock to use other top-row keys, like volume and brightness controls, without having to press the Fn key.
Lenovo's Vantage software suite lets you adjust the keyboard's backlighting colors and brightness or enjoy breathing, wave, or gradient color changes. It also lets you choose thermal modes—the cooling fans get loud when the GPU is working—and tweak GPU settings and key macros, as well as handling system updates and Wi-Fi security. Lenovo offers $29.99 annual performance-tuning and $49.99 annual anti-theft (lock and locate) subscriptions and backs the Legion with a one-year courier or carry-in warranty.
Testing the Legion 5 Pro Gen 7: Big-Screen Gamers Go Head-to-Head
For our benchmark charts, we chiefly compared the Legion 5 Pro Gen 7 with its closest competitor: the Intel-powered counterpart known as the Lenovo Legion 5i Pro Gen 7. Another 16-inch gaming laptop, the HP Victus 16, is more or less in the Legion's price ballpark. We rounded out the charts with two 17.3-inch systems: The Acer Nitro 5 is a step or two under the $2,000 line, while the Aorus 17 XE is a step or two over it.
Productivity Tests
UL's PCMark 10 primarily simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage.
Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
The Legion 5 Pro shows off solid results in these tests, breezing past the 4,000-point line in PCMark 10 that indicates excellent productivity for everyday apps like Word and Excel and slightly trailing its Intel-based sibling in our CPU benchmarks. It's more than powerful enough for daily duties and moderate content creation or multimedia editing.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).
To further stress the GPU, we also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.
Our next three tests involve real games—specifically, the built-in 1080p benchmarks from an AAA title (Assassin's Creed Valhalla), a fast-paced esports shooter (Rainbow Six Siege), and a sports racing sim (F1 2021). We run each benchmark twice, using different image quality presets for Valhalla and Rainbow and trying F1 with and without Nvidia's DLSS anti-aliasing technology.
The two Lenovo gaming laptops lead the way here, with the 5 Pro slightly trailing the 5i Pro except for winning in Rainbow Six Siege. The other GeForce RTX 3070 Ti laptop, the Aorus, settles for bronze ahead of the two RTX 3060 rigs. With that in mind, you're getting seriously effective performance for the price.
Battery and Display Tests
We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
After narrowly losing to its Intel doppelganger in most of our tests, the Legion 5 Pro wins bragging rights here with an extra hour and 20 minutes of battery life, though that was only good enough for second place behind the Nitro 5. Its screen shows solid, if not workstation-class, color fidelity and ample brightness.
Verdict: Almost an Editors' Choice Gaming Laptop
Lenovo's Legion 5 Pro Gen 7 is a slightly porky but fast and attractive gaming laptop that fits nicely between value-priced and high-end machines. It doesn't reach the heights of the Legion 7, but it's considerably more affordable and great for daytime productivity as well as gaming. With minor improvements, like better audio and a 1080p webcam, the seventh Legion 5 Pro would have been a world-beater (and an Editors' Choice holder).
It's not the standout that the Legion 7 is, but Lenovo's Legion 5 Pro (the AMD Ryzen sibling of the Intel Core Legion 5i Pro) is an excellent mid-priced gaming laptop.
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