The Lenovo Legion 5 Pro is a stylish and well-built laptop computer with great gaming performance. A robust cooling system, beautiful screen, good keyboard, and rugged build quality all contribute to its ability to stand out amongst the competition.
However, there are a few drawbacks which may result in you wanting to steer clear of this device. The thing that has impressed me the most with this laptop is the screen. I’ve used multiple 144Hz and 165Hz panels before, but this one by far has the best colours and response time of any I’ve used.
Gaming on this panel is a great experience, with smooth motion and no blur whatsoever. The screen also seems much larger than my old 15. 6″ laptop, despite the fact that it’s only an extra ¾ of an inch taller whilst maintaining the same width.
It makes a surprising amount of difference. The pixel density is so high that aliasing in games is nearly impossible to see, although that does come with the drawback of requiring UI scaling. This usually looks fine in games, but in the desktop environment, it can result in blurry elements.
I’m also having a strange issue where switching to an external display causes my desktop icon click zones in Windows to become much wider than normal, but shutting the system down and doing a cold boot fixes this.
When I was considering purchasing this system, I saw a lot of people complaining about the 16:10 aspect ratio having black bars; this is being blown completely out of proportion. I’ve played dozens of games on this computer so far, and I have yet to see a single one that actually had black bars in gameplay.
There definitely were a few menus and loading screens which did, but that was it. The bigger concern for black bars is in streaming videos, as most videos online are published in 16:9. Overall though, the advantages of the 16:10 screen definitely outweigh the drawbacks.
The keyboard is very nice. It doesn’t ghost at all, and the keys have enough actuation force that I don’t accidentally press them when resting my hand on the keyboard. The keys also have a concave design and have enough surface friction as to keep my fingertips centered, so I’m less likely to have my finger slip and hit multiple keys.
Though I originally thought of it as a gimmick, the RGB lighting is actually kind of nice for setting up both a blue and red back-light for use in the daytime versus nighttime. One really great feature is in the inclusion of a Fn-lock, meaning that you can switch between function keys and additional functions like screen brightness and volume control without having to do a reboot or hold the function key.
I really wish that the media keys had been included as a separate set of keys, though. They share the home, end, page up, and page down keys, which I do use a lot, making the media keys a lot more cumbersome to use.
Another gripe I have is in the fact that the S-key also includes a home-row groove, which has repeatedly led to me placing my left hand on the wrong keys when trying to find the home row. The computer’s chassis design is really nice.
The lid and bottom are both aluminum, whereas the keyboard cover is some sort of plastic or composite material. However, this is actually a good thing. It’s still very robust; it barely flexes at all, even when purposefully pressing down on it.
Meanwhile, the fact that it’s not metal means that the keyboard does not heat up as much as it would otherwise, so it’s more comfortable to use. I’m also very impressed by the aesthetics of the laptop.
The black keyboard and trim on grey chassis is stylish without being so over the top that it’s embarrassing. Meanwhile, the RGB lighting and lid logo can be turned off (with Fn+space and Fn+L respectively).
I would prefer a more subtle lid logo, however. The Y-logo is still chintzy and childish, and it’s not what I’d expect for a “professional” line of laptops. My old laptop merely had their standard manufacturer logo in a reflective chrome style, which was much nicer.
My only other complaint is in the fact that the trim behind the lid prevents the screen from opening further, and I definitely would like to do so when using the laptop whilst I’m standing. It’s still usable, but it just barely falls short of what I feel would be ideal.
If I were a little shorter or the surface a little higher, it’d probably be fine. One final thought is the fact that the materials the laptop is made of seem to be good at staying clean, or at least at looking it.
Even after a few weeks of heavy use, it still looks like it did when it came out of the box. My last laptop was all-black, and it would get grubby-looking and require wiping off fairly frequently. The computer also has a good selection of ports, at least better than most competitors.
If it had just one more USB-A port, I’d be thrilled. However, four is still pretty generous. I also would have liked to see an SD-card reader and Kensington lock, though I’m not too miffed by their omission.
Three outputs for external displays is plenty, and I like the fact that the Ethernet port doesn’t have moving parts to break off like some laptops do. The fact that most of the I/O is on the back whilst a couple of the USB ports are on either side is well-designed.
There are a few main drawbacks to this machine, however. The first is the fact that the fan profile is unable to be customised. For gaming, the fan profile is perfectly fine. It runs quiet enough to not be distracting whilst still keeping the system cool.
However, when doing basic desktop use like online shopping, video streaming, or even just word processing, the fans constantly turn on and off due to the fan profile being far too aggressive at low temperatures.
Enabling “Quiet Mode” doesn’t seem to make any difference in this regard, either. It’s bad enough that I considered returning the laptop solely for this reason. I did end up finding out that you can enable a power plan setting to disable the CPU’s turbo boost clocks with a registry edit, which does help somewhat (and the extra processing power isn’t really necessary when not gaming anyways), but having to constantly switch the power plan is annoying.
The second drawback is the absurdly large 300W power brick. This thing weighs nearly 2½ pounds, which is nearly half the weight of the laptop itself. The cables are inflexible, and it’s awkward to try to pack up and place into a bag for travel.
There’s no need for a 300W power brick in the first place. My system with a R7 5800H and RTX 3070 can only use 170W under full CPU and GPU load, so even with 20W-40W of additional power for the screen and other components, a 230W power brick (which Lenovo includes with lower-spec versions) would have been sufficient even for worst-case scenarios.
Granted, charging the laptop whilst at full load would be slower then, but I’d gladly take that trade-off. Most people aren’t buying gaming laptops to use on battery power, anyways. The third drawback is if you ever have to contact Lenovo’s support team.
My unit came with a 1TB+1TB storage configuration despite being advertised as having a single 2TB storage configuration, and the support team was completely unable to resolve this issue. My first call resulted in having a replacement unit sent to me, which meant that I had to wait over a week to even use the laptop as I originally intended to.
The replacement had the same configuration issue as well as having a defective trackpad that didn’t work whatsoever, so clearly the call centre and the replacement centre are not communicating with each other.
When I called back about this, I was told I’d receive a shipping label to return the replacement. It didn’t arrive. I called back and was told to keep waiting. It still didn’t arrive. I called back, and this third support rep was able to have one sent to me before the end of the phone call.
I was also told I’d receive a 7% refund to account for the configuration error (which is less than half of the cost of the 2TB drive that was advertised to me and I paid for) within 24-hours, but it’s been days now with still no refund.
The other option was to send the unit back for a full refund, but at that point, all the sales that occur in late November were over, so now any other laptop would have been much more expensive. Also, the call centre is in India, so actually calling support is a terrible experience of hard-to-understand accents and phone service interruptions.
Unfortunately, there is no way to e-mail or text chat with a support rep. I should also note that this is their premium “Ultimate Support” package. What a joke. Linux users may also wish to steer clear for now.
It’s possible to make it mostly work, but it involves a lot of troubleshooting, installing kernel updates, and setting boot parameters. By default, the WiFi chip did not work in Ubuntu without a kernel update, and some extra configuration was needed to get the Nvidia drivers set up.
Manjaro was a smoother experience, with both WiFi and graphics drivers working out of the box, but I had scaling issues when using KDE Plasma. Neither distro had working screen brightness controls for the built-in display when using the dedicated graphics mode, although setting the boot parameter ‘nvidia.
NVreg_RegistryDwords=EnableBrightnessControl=1′ fixes it. In hybrid mode, the built-in display’s brightness controls work, but I can’t get any external displays to work. Even after getting Linux set up, the battery life isn’t great since the processor seems to have less power-saving features than on Windows, and this exacerbates the aforementioned fan noise issue.
In conclusion, if you only intend to use Windows, can deal with the portability and fan noise drawbacks, and don’t mind the potential (lack of) support problems, it’s a really good computer. The performance is great, the screen is beautiful, and the build quality and aesthetics are very good.
Apart from the service experience I had, I’m pretty satisfied with the purchase.