Lenovo Legion 5i Pro Gen 7 Review - Still As Fantastic As Ever

Today, I’ve something really exciting that I’ve been looking forward to for quite a while now. If you guys remember, Lenovo came out with the Legion 5 Pro almost a year ago now and that laptop was fantastic. It paired a Ryzen 7 5800H with the RTX 3070 that has a 140 watt TGP, giving really impressive performance. But the most impressive thing about it was that you get that amount of performance for a price of just about $2,700 Singapore Dollars which translates to roughly $2,000 US Dollars. It was hard to beat and probably still is. But in my hands right now is the all new Legion 5i Pro for 2022

Yes, I know it’s not the direct successor to the one I reviewed. This is the 5i Pro and that means it has an Intel CPU. But it’s the Intel 12th-Gen Core i7-12700H and it’s paired with the RTX 3070 Ti no less.

To get straight to the point, performance is downright amazing and rightfully so.

But before we dive into the performance, let’s talk a little bit about the laptop itself. Now if you’re thinking this looks almost exactly like the previous generation… you will be right. It still retains the angular lines and sharp silhouette with the two large exhaust fans adorning the back. It’s also going to be primarily made out of aluminum, which makes it really robust while giving a premium feel. The only portion that’s made out of sturdy plastic would be that rear shroud that comprises the dual vents and most of the ports.

The weight is also roughly the same, coming in at about 2 point 5 kilograms (2.49kg) or about 5 and a half pounds. (5.49lbs)

Honestly, the only difference between this generation and the previous in terms of design, would be the absence of the backlit Y logo. This has instead been replaced with a simple Legion font. That’s it.

So if you like the design of the previous generation, you will probably still like it here. And if you didn’t like the previous generation… well… you’ll probably still not like it here.

Personally, I do like it, it’s a little more minimalistic.

Now open it up and you get a really nice IPS display in a 16 by 10 aspect ratio with minimal bezels all around. Depending on the configuration, there should be three main panel options for the display. One option for Full HD and two options for Quad HD. We have one of the higher resolution panels here.

16-inches, IPS, 2,560 x 1,600 resolution, 165Hz refresh rate with OverDrive, 500 nits brightness, 100% sRGB, HDR400 certified, Dolby Vision and G-Sync support.

In essence, it really is a beautiful IPS display that you’ll enjoy doing anything with. Just using the laptop normally for documents or entertainment, or even a little bit of color work in Lightroom and such. It performs well. But perhaps the best use case is ultimately what this laptop is designed for, gaming and yes, I definitely, thoroughly enjoyed gaming on this laptop with this display. Great resolution, 165Hz is really awesome and it gets plenty bright with G-Sync support even. Playing games like Halo Infinite was really nice.

Up top, you get a standard 720p webcam that’s not going to win you any awards, but isn’t that bad either. It’s going to be fine for Zoom or Discord, no worries about that. There’s also a toggle switch for the camera located on the right side for your privacy needs.

Moving down, you have your power button with a LED that will give you an easy indication on the power profile you’re on. Blue for Quiet, White for Balance, and Red for Performance, to which you can easily toggle through via the Fn + Q shortcut.

And of course, you get the very familiar keyboard from Lenovo, the Legion TrueStrike keyboard. I personally like this keyboard quite a fair bit and I do find them to be one of the more comfortable keyboards out there to do both gaming and typing. It also does feature 4-zone RGB lighting that’s fully configurable via the Lenovo Vantage software. As for the trackpad, it works and is fine, no qualms about it really. And in fact one thing I did notice as an improvement over the previous generation was the palm rejection. Without disabling the trackpad at all, I could game fine without any accidental inputs. Considering that almost half your palm would be resting on the trackpad when resting on the WASD cluster, this is great.

Audio quality is about the same as the last generation, which means to say it’s still great. You still get two 2 watt speakers located on each corner on the underside and they provide plenty of volume with decent clarity.

Included is an 80 watt hour battery. Lenovo claims up to 7 hours with Mobilemark 2018 using Hybrid Mode and we would say it’s a little shy of that. For the most part, you can expect around 5-6 hours of battery life, which isn’t too bad for a gaming laptop of this caliber, but definitely nothing to shout about.

As for ports, an upgrade all around thanks to Intel 12th-Gen. On the left, you get Thunderbolt 4 and a Type-C port while on the right, you get a standard USB 3.2 Gen1, headphone/mic combo and that handy webcam e-shutter switch. The rest are found on the back where you’ll get RJ45 Ethernet, a Type-C port that supports power delivery up to 135 watts, HDMI 2.1, two more standard USB 3.2 Gen2, and the proprietary charging port.

But now, let’s talk about the main reason why you’re watching. Let’s talk about specifications and performance. Now there are many different configurations available for the Legion 5i Pro, but here’s what we have with us today.

Core i7-12700H, 16GB of DDR5 RAM running at 4800MHz, RTX 3070 Ti with 150 watt TGP and 1TB of NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD storage.

First up, the usual Cinebench R23. The Core i7-12700H is a CPU with 6 Performance Cores and 8 Efficiency Core and with this whole new architecture, it really performs. On both the Quiet and Balance power profiles, it’ll achieve roughly 10,000 for the multi-core, which is already pretty respectable. But change it up to Performance mode and it increases a full 70%, achieving a score of roughly 17,000.

As for DaVinci Resolve, the performance is great as well. Even on the Quiet power profile, it was able to render the 10 minute 4K project not too far off from real-time. But swap over to Performance, and it rendered almost twice as fast.

As for gaming, we tested on two main resolutions, 1080p and 1440p, and we made sure to run the laptop using Performance mode and on the discrete GPU mode only for the best possible performance. Here are the numbers. At 1080p, in games like CS:GO or Valorant, you can be rest assured that you’ll make full use of that high refresh rate display, while in games like Halo Infinite, you’ll still enjoy frame rates well into the triple digits. Bring the resolution up to 1440p and the RTX 3070 Ti will still deliver. Again, CS:GO and Valorant are still well above 300 frames per second and the other triple A titles are still well above 100 or very near that number. All of that at the highest possible settings no less. If you’re interested in Ray-Tracing, that RTX 3070 Ti will deliver as well. Realistic lighting and shadows, but yet with still really great frame rates, no less thanks to DLSS 2.0. This holds true for both 1080p and 1440p. All of the games are just really enjoyable.

Regarding thermals, you needn’t worry much especially if you’re just going to game. Both the CPU and GPU will however around 80 degrees celsius for the most part on the Performance power profile, which is really good. As for creative workloads, take it with a grain of salt since we’re using Cinebench R23 to put a full 100% CPU load here but in essence, you’re going to see roughly mid 50 degrees celsius on Quiet mode, the mid 70s for Balance and just about 92 to 93 for Performance mode.

Now does it get loud? Personally, I would say it’s within reason. On both Balance and Performance mode, the fans will spin up and you’ll hear them whirring away, but it isn’t obnoxious or high-pitched. It’s all right.

Lastly, we come to the price and this is where it isn’t as great as last year.

For this exact configuration, it’ll set you back just under $3,500 Singapore Dollars (3,499 SGD) which translates to roughly 2,500 US Dollars thereabouts. That is about 20% more expensive compared to both the AMD and Intel variants last year. Now with this new sticker price, we would say that it is still very much worth it. Intel 12th-Gen is quite a lot better, with new features and more and the RTX 3070 Ti is a welcome upgrade for sure. Not to mention that Lenovo really squeezed all the performance they can while still achieving great thermal performance. It is really a darn good gaming laptop.

Moreover, it would seem that the price increase was not just because of Lenovo, but rather the industry as a whole. So despite the increase in price, it is still the more affordable option for the configuration amongst the popular gaming laptops out there.

In any case, we really like the Lenovo Legion 5i Pro and safe to say, Lenovo’s done it again.

This is a high performance gaming laptop that’s properly cooled, for a price that’s really reasonable. It is simply a great experience.