Lenovo Legion 5 Pro 16 review: A gaming laptop with a bright 165-Hz display

[Jorro]

Legion 5 Pro series panels has internal resolution 3840 x 2400 pixels.

1) install latest NVidia driver (not from Lenovo)
2) install driver from this site: drivers.softpedia.com/get/MONITOR/LG/LG-Ultra-HD-4K-Monitor-Driver-1-0.shtml

Enjoy gaming 4k

Where did you get that information from? Please share.

Regards,

[Jorro]

First, the below comment about internal resolution of the panel being 4k is hoax. I researched it. Whoever found out that "hack", if it at all works, doesn't know it's downsampling the perceived 4K picture into the actual native resolution which is 2560x1600, as specified. Which means this is going to degrade the image quality, I repeat if it at all works.

Second,
This laptop is a beast! I bought it for programming and because I don't need to pay a Windows license just to keep the Windows unused - I use Gentoo Linux.

This thing compiled the whole software selection in under a day.

The display is great, it's powerful, the fans are not that annoying, given I'm used to a lot of cooling noise while working and in the same time I switched to a quieter environment where fans should have been more annoying than usual and they are actually less annoying. Of course, don't take my word on it, everybody has different preference and levels of tolerance.

I can't notice any coil whine. If there's any, I can't hear it because it usually happens under load and under load, the fans are working, so it makes no difference, I guess. However there are periods in which the fans are quiet and I doubt there weren't moments in such periods with enough load to produce coil whine, so I'd conclude there's none. Somewhere I read it was Intel's fault because of the design of their chipsets and here it's AMD so I guess this is kind of a confirmation.

In Linux, most hardware works and it seems prebuilt kernels work better than custom ones, mainly because you almost don't need to touch anything. I guess somebody would produce a better custom kernel, but I wasn't able to. Whatever I did, I couldn't make the touchpad work with my own kernel.

The main problem of this laptop is the numpad. It makes you either move the laptop off of the center and to the right, or twist your body a bit on the left, so that your hands rest on the keyboard. I don't know if in gaming the numpad makes sense, but for work it doesn't. Some argue they are accountants and engineers, but I'm an engineer too and I think nothing can make up for that non-ergonomic design. Whoever needs to punch numbers, can buy a numeric keyboard which, one can position however they like.

My situation on the other hand is that an external keyboard makes it mandatory to move the laptop further from me, which in turn makes it mandatory to buy an external monitor, which defeats the purpose of buying a laptop. Yes, it would be nice to have all of that, but sometimes you can't. In my case - most of the time. In the same time laptops like P1, X1 Extreme and all Dell's don't make sense. Especially Dell's with their PWM displays. Yes, I got that all displays use PWM, but Dell ones use especially bad PWM. And in a country like mine, where you can't just return something in the first month just like that, it's a big risk of ending up with something that kills your eyes.

The next disadvantage is the charger. That 300W brick is 1.170 kg with the cables. I still haven't researched if I can do with a USB-PD charger, especially when I'm not using that power budget of 130W(how much exactly it was?). I think a 150W USB-PD charger (if that is possible) would be fine and I'll use the brick when I'm compiling the Gentoo packages. But I read somewhere the laptop was actually charging external batteries with capacity of under 100W and a 100W limitation of power delivery through USB pops in my mind, I'm not sure if that's correct, but if it is, you end up with the almost 1.2 kg brick. I know such a laptop is not to be carried around a lot, but from time to time it's necessary. Not a big problem if you have a healthy body, but even when I had the 3.5 kg package of Lenovo T61p I used back then, makes you tired pretty quickly.

And yes - those are the two only disadvantages for me - the offset keyboard and the brick charger.

There's a third one, which is kind of my personal and that's why I didn't put it with the other two. It's the video card. I don't need it! I'd strip it out and sell it, if I could instead of paying a few hundred dollars more because of it. But there aren't other models, suitable to my needs and preferences. I couldn't even find the version with the weaker 3050 model on the market!

[fran]

Who the f*** needs 500 nits?

[Jorro]

After all there is some coil whine, but it's only noticeable while the laptop is cold and the fans are not working, at a very quiet place and it's not constant, it appears only from time to time.

[Jorro]

After two months of use I can say this laptop is cheap but not in price. It's more expensive than other comparable laptops. If you buy this for work and have the money, go for the professional series. Or at least consider it very well.

90% of the outside of this crap, including the lid and the bottom is plastics. The lid is curved and doesn't close completely from the left. You can see a curve and and 2-3mm gap right between the middle panel where the camera is and the left edge of the lid, not fitting completely to the base. when you press it a bit you can hear clanking sound.

Lenovo now ships this with Mediatek wireless module, which is utterly and completely crap. There are some reports online for Realtek modules as well, which might be better, but anyway, the quality Intel chip is replaced with really low quality chips.

They even removed that part of the specs, so you don't know what you're getting. You don't even know what you might get!

We've seen the critics and requests to Lenovo and the fact that most of the world's population is right-handed doesn't seem to affect them, but what amuses me most is that the left offset keyboard and the big clickpad is inconvenient even for people who prefer to point with their left hand, like me.

Be it my left or right palm resting on the palm rest constantly interferes with my other hand trying to use the clickpad. Due to the multi-touch functionality it always interprets it as something other than what I want.

The keyboard itself is very inconvenient. They call this full-size keyboard, but it isn't. It would have been full-size if there wasn't this numeric keyboard to eat the space for normal sized buttons. Key press experience is almost like it's made of wood. The material of the keys sticks all the oils it can from your skin and then dust does the rest - very dirty keyboard in no time at all. I'm not sure if it will stay clean even if I use surgical gloves.

More than two months already and I still hit NumLock instead of backspace, part of the seemingly big Enter is actually a backslash, and there are two of them, who knows why they cut the Enter for the second. The other is next to the left Shift.

I'm not a big fan of numeric keyboards, but I usually make use of them when they are present, but this one is just the drop that overflows the cup of the "full size keyboard". As I said this is not full size at all and that reflects in usability of the part that was fitted for "convenience".

Not to mention the obscure touchpad+keyboard combo hardware which is wired through USB and I2C and I don't know what else, which is very hard to setup in Linux. At the same time they claim they support Linux. What is in reality is Ubuntu supports Legion 5 pro. Not Lenovo support Linux, but the other way around. And It's not fully supported as NVIDIA cards create a whole lot of problems with dynamic graphics (hybrid mode in Linux), sleep, hibernation and a whole lot of packages. Also there are issues with which adapter is wired to which video output, but this I didn't get to test.

Only the arrow keys seem to be of normal full size.

The only good thing for me, although I guess for the majority of others is not, is the display. For now the panel seems to be the only quality thing in this brick.

And when I say brick, did I mention the power supply brick? It's 1.2kg with the cables and it's really a brick sized brick. It takes a lot of space too. I wonder, there are so small 100W GAN2 power supplies, couldn't Lenovo use that technology to produce their power supply bricks? they would be at least a third smaller.

My opinion is this is a very expensive low class laptop. I bet there are better quality gaming laptops in the same price range. For comparison, it costed me 1550 Euro (VAT included) for the Ryzen 7 5800H + NVIDIA RTX 3060 model. Because I don't live in a country where you can easily return the product and I need a laptop after all, I'm selling this as soon as I earn the money to buy a professional series laptop of a quality make and hardware.

[Jorro]

I forgot to add the Mediatek chip makes even simple browsing a pain. Lots of lost network packages result in you waiting for requests that the other side didn't receive. You must constantly refresh and click twice on the same thing and sometimes a refresh of the page wipes it's state and you have no other choice but to wait for the timeout so that the browser can resend those requests. It can't maintain stable SSH connection for example, various realtime chat applications constantly loose connection, it's just madness. I'll try to convince Lenovo support to swap the WL module with what it was advertised, but I doubt I'll succeed and in the same time they are allowed to keep the laptop for as much as 30 days without any legal limitations.

[Hypo]

The article mentions about activating Dolby Vision. I can't see where I can activate this.

As per the specs, the Legion 5 Pro panel supports Dolby Vision and HDR. But I am getting the purple and green tint while playing some Dolby Vision HDR content (format: Dolby Vision, Version 1.0, dvhe.05.06, BL+RPU).  However, a sample file downloaded from the Dolby website (format: Dolby Vision, Version 1.0, dvhe.05.09, BL+RPU) plays well.

[Jorro]

First, I was wrong the bottom is not plastic, it is very light aluminum alloy. At first it looked like plastic, but I needed to open it and it definitely isn't.

Now on the point - another portion of negative feedback for this laptop.

Today, while I was cleaning my display, I was surprised to notice a greasy pattern that resembled the keyboard. Yes, that's right, the grease from my fingers ended up on the display.

Another thing I notices is the clickpad started making very soft pops when I touch with two fingers and try to swipe near the bottom. Have in mind I don't use the clicking functionality, I only tap, so it's not because of overuse. There's just some gap somewhere.

This laptop is like 4 months old.

I have no words to describe how disappointed I am.

[Andrej]

First, I was wrong the bottom is not plastic, it is very light aluminum alloy. At first it looked like plastic, but I needed to open it and it definitely isn't.

Now on the point - another portion of negative feedback for this laptop.

Today, while I was cleaning my display, I was surprised to notice a greasy pattern that resembled the keyboard. Yes, that's right, the grease from my fingers ended up on the display.

Another thing I notices is the clickpad started making very soft pops when I touch with two fingers and try to swipe near the bottom. Have in mind I don't use the clicking functionality, I only tap, so it's not because of overuse. There's just some gap somewhere.

This laptop is like 4 months old.

I have no words to describe how disappointed I am.

You're kinda obsessed with this laptop. You keep returning to this site and writing on and on about this. Sell it, buy different laptop and move on.

[Jorro]

You're kinda obsessed with this laptop. You keep returning to this site and writing on and on about this. Sell it, buy different laptop and move on.

Really?

It seems to me you're obsessed with it and can't handle the fact it has shortcomings and they are a lot for it's price and you're blaming it on the bad news bearer.

Get over it, you're not getting what you want. Nobody is.

As to why I return here, this is because I used mostly this place to get informed, so I give back. Well it might not be in line with the advertisements or the sponsors policies, but after all I'm a user and would like to help other users.

By the way once you get this thing and start experiencing and investigating its problems, you find out about plenty more problems people are experiencing. Especially if you're a power user.

Thankfully I'm not experiencing most of them, which only comes to show how lucky I am.

And yes, I'm selling it next month. I'm getting a ThinkPad.

[JJSancuraio]

You're kinda obsessed with this laptop. You keep returning to this site and writing on and on about this. Sell it, buy different laptop and move on.

Really?

It seems to me you're obsessed with it and can't handle the fact it has shortcomings and they are a lot for it's price and you're blaming it on the bad news bearer.

Get over it, you're not getting what you want. Nobody is.

As to why I return here, this is because I used mostly this place to get informed, so I give back. Well it might not be in line with the advertisements or the sponsors policies, but after all I'm a user and would like to help other users.

By the way once you get this thing and start experiencing and investigating its problems, you find out about plenty more problems people are experiencing. Especially if you're a power user.

Thankfully I'm not experiencing most of them, which only comes to show how lucky I am.

And yes, I'm selling it next month. I'm getting a ThinkPad.

You are def reaching with your in depth look. You might need to see a doctor for OCD issues. The laptop is def one of the best I have ever used. It makes me money on a daily basis and that's all I care for. It also lets me game when I am on the go away from my home office.

Get over yourself with this laptop. Sell it and buy something better. good luck though with that lol.

The only real issue is the cheap ram they ship with it. 1600p resolution was something I have been using for quite awhile now and it is good to have it on a laptop.