Review Lenovo Legion 5i Pro Gaming Laptop (Intel Version)


hey everybody it’s lanzibe and we’re taking a look today at the legion 5i pro from lenovo this is very similar to the 5 pro with the amd processor we looked at a little while back but this one has the intel inside and we’ll see how this one performs versus that one in a little bit but i do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that this is on loan from lenovo so we’re done with this it goes back to them all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own no one is paying for this review nor is anyone reviewed or approved what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this laptop is all about now the price point on the review loaner that we’re looking at today is around fourteen hundred dollars but there are some that cost a little less and there are some configurations that might cost a little bit more the one we’re looking at here has an intel i7 11 800 h processor that’s the current generation chip it has 16 gigabytes of ddr4 3200 ram on board and it has a 512 gigabyte nvme ssd a little bit earlier i took it apart you can upgrade the ram by opening up that square in the center and swapping out the two ram modules additionally you can swap out the storage there are two nvme slots on this but these are pci express version three not the newer version four but i think for its place in the market it’s adequate for the task of playing games and doing other

types of creative work on it now there are two gpu options available on this one at least at the time i’m recording this video this model comes equipped with a 3050 from nvidia that’s one of their rtx cards it runs at 95 watts and has four gigabytes of gddr6 memory there’s also a 30 70 available that will deliver better graphical performance i think if you’re looking to play some serious games you probably want to try to get into that 30-70 but the 50 will be very well suited for video applications in production and some of the other non-gaming tasks and speaking of creative work it’s got a great display that can be useful for more than just games it’s 16 inches running at 2560 by 1600 this is a 16 by 10 aspect ratio so it’s a little bit taller than many of the other gaming laptops we’ve looked at over the years with a 1080p 16×9 aspect ratio the one issue you’ll run into with it though is that if you’re watching a 16×9 1080p video like this one is that you will get letterboxing top and bottom but beyond that i think it’s a great display for both gaming and productivity it supports dolby vision hdr for media watching it looks great it’s not washed out it’s not over saturated the refresh rate is 165 hertz so for the gamers i think you’ll get a lot out of that

as well and it runs at up to 500 nits of brightness too so it is really nice and bright the unit overall feels very well built this is kind of the mid-range of lenovo’s gaming laptop lineup the display here is very balanced so as you’re lifting the display up it doesn’t take the rest of the laptop with it the keyboard deck is plastic but the top of the display lid here along with the bottom is metal and it’s really tightly put together it just got a nice solid feel to it it weighs 5.07 pounds or 2.36 kilograms these gaming laptops do tend to weigh more uh but it is i think a very nice compact unit given its performance and price now this one has a bunch of ports on it and there is a notable difference from the amd version on the port selection so let’s go to my overhead view here and have a look as you’ll see here we’ve got a thunderbolt 4 port on the left hand side the amd version just has a usb type c port you also get a headphone jack over here this port will do video out and data but not power in but there’s another thunderbolt 4 port here on the back and this will do power in along with video out and of course support data devices i do though suggest if you are plugging it in to use the included power adapter because you can’t get enough power over thunderbolt to power everything this laptop can do so the included adapter here runs at 230 watts and that is needed for the best performance but if

you are just plugging it in to do light duty stuff with a docking station you can get enough power out of that port for that and keep the battery topped off you’ve got gigabit ethernet here on the back as well along with two usb 3 ports an hdmi output another usb 3 here and your power cord goes in there and then on the right hand side you’ve got another usb port and a switch here for the webcam to turn it on and off there’s no physical shutter on the webcam on this one but it does allow you to disable it by hitting that switch now unfortunately you’re not going to become the next great content creator with this webcam as you can see it’s very cloudy in its image quality it only supports 720p but it does have one and i guess that’s adequate for zoom calls or something but you’ll definitely want to pick up another webcam if you intend to do some kind of live video production with this one now like other lenovo legion devices it’s got a great keyboard with a ton of key travel these keys go down really far they’re nice and firm nice and big and well spaced just a really nice typing and gaming surface you also have these enlarged arrow keys down here at the bottom along with a full number pad the keyboard is backlit and you can change the color scheme around a bit one thing to note though is that you cannot set individual keys so as you can see here as i’m browsing through their

vantage software you can only do the keys in zones but beyond that it’s a very nicely lit keyboard you can have it animate or just stay at a static color if you want it’s nice and bright in most environments with the exception of my studio lights here there’s a nice big track pad on here too you can disable that if you are worried about games getting interfered with here but if you have work to do on the laptop it’s nice to have a regular track pad here this is a click pad it’s very accurate a little bit larger than the prior generation legion 5 and it feels great here to use this along with the keyboard now i want to jump back here real quick to the lenovo vantage software because there’s another setting that’s really important that is its thermal mode and as you can see right now i’ve got it set to performance mode because the laptop is plugged into power and i want to get as much power as i can out of this thing the one disadvantage to performance mode is that you’ll hear the fans a lot more because it is running everything at full blast all the time and that of course will result in the need for more active and aggressive cooling so if you don’t mind fan noise go for it you’ll get the best performance out of this thing and for gaming i think you definitely want to leave it in that mode because it will be slightly faster especially on benchmarks when you’re measuring performance here the power button will also indicate what mode it is in so in performance mode it’ll light up red and if you switch over to balanced mode which will be more of a mix of

performance and quietness of the fans you will see that turn white and then if you put it into its quiet mode where it tries to keep the fan off completely or keep it at a very low level so you can’t hear it that will turn this blue the balanced mode and the quiet mode will be available when you’re on battery but performance mode is only available when you are plugged in but again i would definitely enable performance mode when you are gaming here the fan noise isn’t bad on this even though it’s got some big fans and a big gpu and cpu to keep cool even when i’m gaming it’s not sounding like a wind tunnel it’s got fairly large fans so they can spin a little slower perhaps than a laptop with smaller fans so i didn’t find the fan noise offensive but you do have the option to turn it off if you don’t need all the horsepower that the laptop can deliver now as far as battery life is concerned if you keep it in the balanced or the quiet mode and keep your display brightness down and stick to the basics you should be able to get about six or seven hours of useful productivity life out of the laptop it’ll likely run through the intel graphics for that but if you are gaming on it that of course will consume a lot more battery life you might be able to get an hour or two depending on what you’re doing and what performance settings you have in place so like any gaming laptop if you plan to play games take the power supply with you because it won’t last long on its battery but i do think for productivity kinds of things it does provide an ample amount of battery life for its place in the market here all right let’s take a look now and see how well this does playing games for all these games we had it plugged in running in its performance mode we’re going to begin with red dead redemption 2.

this is running at their lowest settings at the native resolution of 2560 by 1600 and as you can see here it’s running pretty nicely at about 60 frames per second it would dip down here and there if there was a complex environment in other areas it would go into the low 70s but for the most part the average here was about 60 frames per second at the lowest settings and of course you could run it with higher settings and you’ll just see a lower frame rate next up is apex legends this one was run at highest settings at the native 2560 by 1600 and we were getting between 70 and 100 frames per second on this one everything looked and played great on apex legends next we’ll look at a couple of older games here this is the witcher 3 which can still challenge hardware these days this is running at ultra settings again at the native resolution 2560 by 1600 and we were getting about 40 to 55 frames per second on this one so you may want to adjust the resolution down to get that frame rate higher next up is gta5 this one again native resolution at the highest settings and we were getting between 65 and 90 frames per second that’s probably to be expected given the age of the game here but i still think it looks great last one here of course is fortnite you have to play some fortnite this is running again native resolution epic settings and we were getting between 45 and 55 frames per second so a settings adjustment could very easily get you running this

game at the native resolution at or above 60 frames per second all in for what it has on board the gaming performance here is quite good and on the 3d mark times by benchmark test we got a score of 5663 that compares to 10 406 on the amd variant of this laptop we looked at recently but that one had the 30 70 gpu so our cpu performance is very close between the two models but the graphics performance as you can see is much better on the 30-70 so if you’re a serious gamer that might be the gpu you’ll want to put in this laptop if you can afford the increase in price also of note the 30 60 on the slim 7 there comes in right in between so that should give you an idea as to which gpu should work best if you are looking to price one of these out and on the 3d mark stress test we got a passing grade of 97.6 percent that test runs one of these gpu benchmarks over and over again to see if there’s any drop in performance and although you might see a little blip in performance here and there it should be able to stay fairly consistent all right one last thing to check out and that is its linux performance we’ve got ubuntu 21.10 running on the laptop right now and everything seems to be detected just fine it picked up the audio properly the wi-fi the bluetooth uh the display here is running at its full 165 hertz so altogether i think it is probably going to be a good solution for linux if you are going that route audio quality on it is not bad it’s got downward firing speakers on the left

and right hand side of the laptop they are very loud and crisp and clear just not a lot of bass to them but i think it’s adequate for doing conferences and spoken word stuff but i think for games you’ll probably want to attach some headphones and certainly you’ll want to attach some headphones for music but overall i think this is a super nice gaming laptop i think the 3070 equipped version will give you better gaming performance so that one might be worth looking at but the 3050 i think is well suited for doing some of the creative work like video editing or live streaming or something along those lines and this compares very closely i think to the amd version with the big difference being that you get two thunderbolt 4 ports on this one versus usbc on the other that’s going to do it for now until next time this is lon seidman thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the london tv supporters including gold level supporters hot sauce and video games brian parker chris allegretta tom albrecht thomas anfang jim tannis and handheld obsession if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to lawn dot tv support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe

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