Lenovo Legion Pro 5 Gen 8 16 (2023) Laptop Review

The Lenovo Legion 5 Pro Gen 8 has a fairly simple design. It has some 'gamer' elements, like the shape of the air vents, branding, and RGB keyboard; however, it doesn't look overly flashy, as the chassis is mostly black and gray. It has thin bezels, and instead of a MacBook-like notch, there's a small outward lip at the top of the screen to house the camera and microphones. Air vents are on both sides of the laptop, the bottom, and the back. The speakers are on the sides near the front.

The build quality is great. The construction is a mix of metal and plastic (aluminum on top and plastic on the bottom). It feels sturdy and hefty, exhibiting only a small amount of flex in the display and almost none on the keyboard deck and lid. The finish doesn't scratch easily; the lid picks up fingerprints and smudges, but this isn't an issue on other parts of the laptop. The feet feel solid and stick firmly to the bottom.

The hinges are outstanding. Their wide range allows you to open the laptop to an almost flat position, which is handy when you need to show something to someone sitting opposite you. They feel very smooth when opening and closing the lid and have just the right amount of resistance to keep wobbling to a minimum while still allowing for a one-handed lift.

The Lenovo Legion Pro 5 and its power adapter are bulky and heavy.

The Lenovo Legion Pro 5's serviceability is excellent. To access the internals, you need to remove ten Philips screws and undo a few clips. The screws are of two different sizes, so it's best to keep them organized for the reassembly, and you'll likely need a prying tool to undo the clips. Once inside, all the replaceable parts are easily accessible. Both storage slots support M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 4 SSDs.

You can see the service manual here.

• Lenovo Legion Pro 5 Gen 8 laptop
• 300W power adapter and cord
• Documentation

The Lenovo Legion Pro 5 is available with the following displays:

• 16" IPS 2560 x 1600 165Hz
• 16" IPS 2560 x 1600 240Hz

The QHD+ resolution looks very sharp on a 16-inch display. The 16:10 aspect ratio is quickly becoming the norm; it doesn't affect gaming much, but it's great for productivity, as the extra vertical space lets you see more information at once when reading a document or website, so you don't have to scroll as much.

The 165Hz display has a fast response time, resulting in a clear image with minimal ghosting in fast-moving scenes. The 240Hz will provide a more responsive gaming experience, but the difference isn't significant. You'll have to pair the 240Hz display with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 to get the most out of it. Both displays support variable refresh rate to reduce screen tearing. If you want a gaming laptop with a higher refresh display, the Dell Alienware m18 (2023) is available with a 480Hz FHD+ IPS panel.

The 165Hz display's contrast ratio is decent and within the typical range of most IPS panels. However, it's still relatively low compared to other display technologies like VA and OLED. This contrast level makes blacks look gray in dim settings. The 240Hz display likely has the same contrast ratio.

The 165Hz display gets bright enough for use in most indoor environments but is too dim for outdoors in broad daylight. It gets very dim at the lowest brightness settings, which is great for dark room viewing, as it causes less eye strain. The 240Hz display has an advertised brightness of 500 cd/m², which is enough for outdoor use, but you might still have trouble seeing dark-color content in direct sunlight.

The display's reflection handling is decent. Reflections aren't an issue when viewing bright-color content with the screen at maximum brightness; however, they're distracting when viewing darker content, as the matte coating doesn't do much to reduce the intensity of bright light sources and creates a hazy, halo effect in other areas of the screen.

The display's black uniformity is decent. There's some minor clouding at the top, and backlight bleed at the bottom, but the rest of the screen is fairly uniform.

The display's horizontal viewing angle is okay. The image dims and washes out relatively quickly as you move to the side, so you need to be more or less directly in front of the screen to get the best accuracy.

The display's vertical viewing angle is okay. Like the horizontal viewing angle, the image dims and washes when viewing from above and below, so you need to look at the screen more or less straight on to see an accurate image, which can be challenging in tight places where you don't have much room to tilt the screen, like on a bus or airplane.

The display's accuracy is superb out of the box. The color and white balance inaccuracies are extremely minor and aren't noticeable. The color temperature and gamma are nearly perfect; the only complaint is that dark scenes look slightly too dark. This level of accuracy is good enough for content color-critical work like photo and video editing.

You can change the display's color profile via the pre-installed X-Rite Color Assistant application. These profiles primarily affect brightness. In the case of the Rec 709 profile, it raises the brightness by 50 cd/m².

The 165Hz display has an excellent color gamut. It has full coverage of the commonly used sRGB color space, which is great for general productivity, media consumption, and gaming. It has excellent DCI P3 and Adobe RGB coverage but not enough for professional print photography or HDR video production. The 240Hz display has the same advertised color gamut.

The backlight is entirely flicker-free, which helps reduce eye strain.

The Lenovo Legion 5 Pro has a great keyboard. The layout feels spacious and is easy to get used to. The plastic used for the keycaps feels okay; it isn't particularly premium or overly cheap. The keys have a lot of travel and provide satisfying tactile feedback; however, their operating force is on the higher side, which can cause fatigue over time, and they aren't very stable. Typing noise is low and isn't bothersome in quiet settings. There are four RGB zones; you can customize the lighting via the Lenovo Vantage application.

The touchpad is good. It's relatively large but could have been bigger, considering the amount of space available on the deck. Although plastic, it still feels high-quality and smooth. It tracks movements and gestures well, and there are no issues with palm rejection; however, dragging and dropping items over a long distance or zooming in and out of images doesn't always work. The buttons feel satisfyingly clicky, but you can only click in the bottom half of the touchpad.

The Lenovo Legion Pro 5's speakers get reasonably loud with minimal compression at high volume. They sound clear and full but slightly unnatural, with very little bass or treble.

The webcam's video quality is great. The overall image looks relatively sharp; however, some finer details look muddy, and there's a bit of noise here and there. Colors look vibrant and true to life, though the color temperature is on the cooler side. Voices sound loud and clear over the microphone with almost no background noise.

The Lenovo Legion 5 Pro has an excellent port selection. The USB-A ports on the sides support USB 3.2 Gen 2 data transfer speed (up to 10Gbps). The two USB-As on the back are USB 3.2 Gen 1 (up to 5Gbps) ports. The one closest to the power connector is always on, meaning you can use it to charge a mobile device or peripheral when the laptop is in sleep mode (up to 10W). Both USB-Cs support USB 3.2 Gen 2 data transfer speed and DisplayPort; the only difference is that the one on the back supports Power Delivery, allowing you to fast charge the laptop and other PD-compatible devices connected to the port.

The Lenovo Legion 5 Pro's wireless adapter is a Realtek RTL8852 Wi-Fi 6E. Wi-Fi 6E has faster speeds, lower latency, and less signal interference than previous Wi-Fi standards. However, you need a router that supports Wi-Fi 6E to benefit from these features.

The Lenovo Legion 5 Pro is available with the following CPUs:

• AMD Ryzen 5 7645HX (6 cores/12 threads, up to 5.0GHz, 6MB L2/32MB L3 cache)
• AMD Ryzen 7 7745HX (8 cores/16 threads, up to 5.1GHz, 8MB L2/32MB L3 cache)
• AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX (16 cores/32 threads, up to 5.4GHz, 16MB L2/64MB L3 cache)

All three are high-performance CPUs designed for mobile workstations and gaming laptops. These AMD Zen 4-based chips can handle general productivity tasks like text processing and web browsing, as well as more demanding workloads like video editing, programming, and gaming. Upgrading to the Ryzen 7 or 9 will give you better performance, though the difference will be minimal in GPU-limited games.

The Lenovo Legion Pro 5 is available with the following GPUs:

• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop 6GB GDDR6 (140W TGP with Dynamic Boost)
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop 8GB GDDR6 (140W TGP with Dynamic Boost)
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop 8GB GDDR6 (140W TGP with Dynamic Boost)

The NVIDIA RTX 40-series GPUs aren't a significant upgrade over the 30-series. The most notable addition is a feature called Frame Generation, which uses AI to insert artificially generated frames, resulting in higher frame rates and smoother gameplay in supported games. The RTX 4070 is the fastest and can run games at the display's native QHD+ resolution without many issues; however, you might be unable to max out the graphical settings in the most demanding titles. The RTX 4060 is roughly 20% slower than the 4070; it can handle games at 1440p, but you'll have to lower the settings further to get over 60 fps. The RTX 4050 is mainly a 1080p gaming GPU that can run some games at 1440p. Its 6GB of VRAM is the main limitation, as it isn't enough for demanding games at the QHD resolution. The lack of VRAM will result in stutters and texture pop-ins, meaning some elements take longer to load and seem to appear out of nowhere. You might even experience pop-ins on the RTX 4060 and 4070 in extremely VRAM-heavy games.

This laptop has a MUX (multiplexer) switch, a feature that allows the GPU to send information directly to the display without going through the integrated GPU. This means you'll see better performance than laptops without this feature. The performance difference can be anywhere from 10% to 25%, or more in some cases. There's also support for NVIDIA Advanced Optimus, which will automatically switch between the integrated graphics and discrete GPU depending on the workload without needing a system reboot or setting change in the BIOS.

You can configure this laptop with 16GB or 32GB of memory. The RAM is user-replaceable.

You can configure this laptop with 512GB or 1TB of storage. The SSD is user-replaceable. There are two SO-DIMM slots; both support M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 4 SSDs.

The Lenovo Legion 5 Pro has an outstanding overall score in Geekbench 5. Its AMD Ryzen 5 7645HX CPU has no problem handling simple general productivity tasks and demanding, multi-threaded workloads. If you need better performance, you can upgrade to the Ryzen 7 or Ryzen 9 CPU, which have more cores to handle heavily multi-threaded programs. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 performs very well in the GPU compute test and is suitable for tasks like video editing and 3D graphics. The RTX 4060 and 4070 will provide a smoother experience and complete tasks faster.

These are benchmarks taken in the default Performance profile. The Lenovo Vantage application has multiple profiles that can boost performance, including a Balanced, Balanced with AI Tuning, Performance, and GPU Overclock mode. The AI Tuning and Performance modes mainly affect the CPU. The latter gives the best results, boosting the CPU's performance by 3% in single-threaded and 1.42% in multi-threaded workloads. The GPU Overclock feature lets you increase the GPU clock by 200Mhz and VRAM speed by 400MHz, resulting in a compute score of 94,110, a 4.67% increase.

The Lenovo Legion Pro 5 performs exceptionally well in the Cinebench R23 benchmarks. It's suitable for demanding multi-threaded applications and general heavy multitasking. The AI Tuning and Performance modes have minimal effect on the performance. The latter only boosts the multi-thread performance by 0.82%. The Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 CPUs will perform significantly better, as they have more cores and faster clock speeds.

The Lenovo Legion Pro 5 Gen 8 performs well in Blender. Although the CPU can render images relatively quickly, the discrete GPU is significantly faster, especially when using NVIDIA's Optix API hardware acceleration. Enabling the Performance mode and GPU Overclock results in a slight boost in performance. Here are the results with both enabled:

• CPU Render Time: 2.84 min
• GPU Render Time: 0.40 min
• Optix: 10.2 sec

The Lenovo Legion Pro 5 with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop GPU has an outstanding score in the Basemark GPU benchmark. The RTX 4050 is better suited for 1080p gaming but can handle some games at 1440p with low settings. If you want to play all games at 1440p, it's best to get a model with an RTX 4060 or, better yet, a 4070. The latter will give you more headroom to play with higher graphical settings. Enabling the GPU Overclock results in a score of 112,704, a 7.46% performance increase.

The 512GB SSD's performance is outstanding. Its fast read and write speeds allow the system to boot up, launch apps, and transfer files quickly. Its sequential read speed is particularly fast, which is great for gaming as it helps reduce loading times. The 1TB drive is likely faster, as larger-capacity SSDs tend to perform better.

The Lenovo Legion 5 Pro has poor battery life. No matter what you do, you'll have to plug it in to get through a full day. On the upside, it charges very quickly. Models with a 240Hz display will have shorter battery life.

Borderlands 3 runs reasonably well on the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop GPU. The average frame rate is high, but there are noticeable stutters due to frame drops. With the Performance mode and GPU Overclock enabled, the average frame rate increases to 99 fps at 1080p with high settings and 225 fps with low settings. At the display's native QHD+ resolution (with Performance and GPU Overclock enabled), the RTX 4050 manages an average of 59 fps with high settings and 136 fps with low settings. The RTX 4060 and 4070 will have more headroom at 1440p to play with higher graphical settings.

Civilization VI runs well. It isn't a particularly GPU-intensive game, so every CPU and GPU configuration can run it smoothly at 1080p and 1440p. The Performance and GPU Overclock features increase the average frame rate to 168 fps with high settings and 355 fps with low settings. The average turn time is the same as in the default mode.

At 1440p, the RTX 4050 maintains an average frame rate of 102 fps with high settings and 260 fps with low settings (with Performance and GPU Overclock enabled). The average turn time is better at 6.64 seconds.

Upgrading the GPU to the RTX 4060 or 4070 will give you higher frame rates; however, upgrading the CPU to the Ryzen 7 or Ryzen 9 won't improve the turn time by much.

All Lenovo Legion 5 Pro models can handle CS:GO and other similar, older titles with no problems at 1080p and 1440p. The gameplay is very smooth, with almost no stutters at all. Enabling the Performance mode and maxing out the GPU overclock results in slightly higher average frame rates of 373 fps at 1080p with high settings, which is roughly a 9.3% increase. The average frame rate with low settings doesn't change since the system is CPU-bound. The other CPU and GPU configurations will perform better, but the difference is hard to notice at such high frame rates.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider runs well on the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro. The gameplay is very smooth, with only a few occasional stutters. Switching to the Performance mode and maxing out the GPU Overclock increases the average frame rate to 166 fps with high settings; however, the frame rate with low settings remains the same at 212 fps. At the display's native QHD+ resolution, the RTX 4050 pushes an average of 103 fps with high settings and 160 fps with low settings (Performance and GPU Overclock enabled, no DLSS). The RTX 4060 and 4070 will push higher frame rates at 1440p, resulting in smoother gameplay.

The keyboard feels warm under load, but it isn't uncomfortable. The fans, on the other hand, get fairly loud. With the Performance mode and GPU Overclock enabled, the keyboard temperature rises slightly to 46.7 °C, and the fans get a few dBA louder, producing a higher-pitched noise that can be pretty annoying. The Lenovo Vantage application has a couple of fan profiles, including a Quiet Mode that will lower the fan noise at the cost of some performance loss.

The Lenovo Legion 5 Pro's performance over time is superb. Neither the CPU nor the GPU throttles under load. The Performance mode results are the same.

The Lenovo Legion 5 Pro has many pre-installed applications, including:

• Dolby Vision: Adds Dolby Vision support.
• Legion Arena: Game hub that lets you launch games from multiple platforms.
• Lenovo Hotkey: Lets you create hotkeys and macros.
• Lenovo Now: Ads for Lenovo Support Services, like Accidental Damage Protection and Smart Lock (remote lock and data wipe). It also contains ads for Amazon Music, Dropbox, Adobe Acrobat, and Lenovo accessories.
• Lenovo Vantage: Helps keep the BIOS and drivers up to date. It also lets you view the system's status and warranty information and access various power profiles.
• McAfee: Antivirus software.
• Nahimic: SteelSeries-branded audio customization and configuration utility.
• Nahimic Companion: Audio drivers. It also checks for updates to the Nahimic application.
• Solitaire and Casual Games: Solitaire, FreeCell, Spider, Mahjong, Sudoku, and other casual games.
• Tobii Experience: Eye and head tracking software. It lets you control the camera in some games, blurs the screen when you aren't looking directly at it, and lowers the screen brightness when you aren't in front of the laptop.
• X-Rite Color Assistant: Lets you change the color profile and calibrate the display.

The Lenovo Legion 5 Pro AMD has a four-zone RGB keyboard backlighting. You can customize the backlighting via the Lenovo Vantage software.