The 2023 Lenovo Legion 5 Pro has a slightly beefier design with more details that make it look a bit more like a gaming laptop. Still, next to brands that plaster RGB LED strips all over the chassis, the Legion Pro 5 remains "too tame," and that is part of what defines this line. The Legion 5 Pro 2023 focuses on performance and cooling rather than flashy extras.
If you want something more colorful, you can still go for the Legion 7 or Legion Slim 7, which are ultra high-end gaming laptops with plenty of RGB LEDs, no question. I used a Legion Y530 for a long time in the past, and it was a gaming laptop with excellent performance for its price at the time, also one without a flashy, aggressive look.
A simple design with a bit of an edge
The Legion 5 Pro 2023 no longer comes in a pure black version like the old Y530. Even though the current color is still nice and understated, I like the black on the Y530 better. It looked cooler and tougher. This year Lenovo still calls the color Onyx Grey, and it leans more toward gray.
Lenovo Legion has 4 different gaming laptop lines: Pro, Slim, the 5 series and the 7 series (according to the Lenovo US website). The Legion 5 series and 5 Pro have 16" screens, while the 7 series has a 17" screen. That is why the laptop in this article is the latest Legion 5 Pro 2023.
The 2023 Legion 5 Pro has a rounded overall design with more heavily rounded corners, especially around the cooling vents on the underside. Compared with the Legion 5i Gen 7 (2022), the Legion 5 Pro (2023) is a touch beefier, and the design details differ slightly to convey the Pro identity.
Ultra-thin bezels on all 4 sides, a sturdy design and a solid build are what you notice as soon as you touch the Legion 5 Pro.
On this Legion 5 Pro 2023, the A cover (lid) is still finished in aluminum and the rest is ABS plastic. The lid still picks up quite a lot of sweat and fingerprints if your hands tend to sweat. This year, the Gen 8 generation (so far only on the Pro series) brings a 5th-generation Coldfront cooling system and an upgraded Legion AI Engine+ management system. The LA1 chip manages performance and adjusts in real time based on a set of internal sensors, which promises to give the Legion 5 Pro strong performance and good cooling.
After spending some time "fiddling" with this laptop, I really like the design of the Pro series. It is squared off yet rounded, it is very well finished in the small details, and overall it looks better than the Legion 5 series.
As for ports, this machine has plenty. There are 2 USB-C ports with the 3.2 Gen 2 protocol, one of which supports data and DisplayPort, while the other also supports PD 140W, though under Lenovo's own standard. Next come 4 USB-A ports, 1 of which supports Always On charging, plus 1 HDMI 2.1 port, 1 RJ-45 port, 1 3.5mm jack and 1 webcam on/off switch.
A sharp display with high color coverage
With this model, Lenovo gives users 2 display options. Both are 16", IPS QHD+ panels with a 16:10 aspect ratio, but 1 option has 300 nits of brightness and a 165Hz refresh rate, while the other has 500 nits and 240Hz.
The version I have is the 165Hz, 300 nits one, and it also supports Anti-Glare and Low Bluelight.'
These specs are plenty for gaming. For me, 165Hz versus 240Hz matters less than brightness and color gamut coverage. The 500 nits version also has DisplayHDR 400 certification as well as Dolby Vision. Fortunately, both versions offer 100% sRGB, which is more than enough for gaming. The Legion 5 Pro 2023 also supports a 1080p webcam.
The Legion keyboard is one of the things I like, especially compared with other laptops. The Legion 5 Pro layout gives a confident typing feel with deep key travel and good bounce, plus 4-zone RGB LEDs. Overall, I have no complaints about the keyboard. The touchpad, however, has a lot of friction because it is covered in plastic rather than glass. Tracking is still accurate, but without a glass surface, moving the cursor does not feel truly comfortable.
Powerful specs
My unit has a fairly high-end configuration for the Legion 5 Pro 2023. The Core i7-13700HX and RTX 4060 8GB GDDR6 are enough to handle every current game with complex graphics effects. The RAM is 16GB DDR5 4800MHz, and the SSD is 512GB PCIe 4.0.
The Raptor Lake Core i7-13700HX has 16 cores and 24 threads, with a PBP of 55W. It has 8 P-cores and 8 E-cores, plus 30MB of Smart Cache. In theory, the Core i7-13700HX is not much weaker than the higher-end i7-13850HX. I will test it more thoroughly and share the results later.
As for the GPU, NVIDIA's RTX 4060 Laptop is the 4th most powerful graphics card in this year's RTX 40 Laptop series. According to NVIDIA, its TGP ranges from 35-115W, but Lenovo sets it to a maximum of 140W. The RTX 4060 Laptop has 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM and uses the AD107 chip with 3072 CUDA cores, 256 GBps of bandwidth and a 128-bit bus.
On CUDA core count and bandwidth, the RTX 4060 falls behind the RTX 3060, but thanks to upgraded RT cores and Tensor cores, the RTX 4060 is about 10% faster than the RTX 3060 in some 3DMark FireStrike tests.
I tried 3DMark FireStrike as well as Port Royal and Blender, and the RTX 4060 delivered fairly impressive results. I will make a more detailed comparison with the RTX 3060 Ti and report back later.
With the Legion 5 Pro 2023, Lenovo always puts its newest technology on this line, most notably the new configuration and the Coldfront 5.0 cooling system, with larger vents, larger fans and thinner fan blades... which deliver good cooling. In practice, when I ran a GPU stress test, temperatures topped out at only 85 degrees C, while the CPU hit around 90 degrees C. The C cover (keyboard deck) stays very cool and comfortable, which is a strength of gaming laptops with a thick chassis.
The PCIe 4.0 SSD in the Legion 5 Pro 2023 is also a high-speed drive. Lenovo uses an OEM Samsung drive, model MZVL2512HCJQ, with sequential read speeds of more than 6500MB/s and sequential write speeds of around 4900 MB/s.
Battery & connectivity
The Legion 5 Pro has an 80Wh battery. According to Lenovo, the Legion 5 Pro 2023 supports fast charging: 10 minutes of charging for the first 40%, 30 minutes for 60%, and 60 minutes for a full charge. The Legion 5 Pro's charger is rated at 300W. Lenovo also states that this laptop can last 6.5 hours of video playback and 5.3 hours in the MobileMark test.
The Legion 5 Pro also has a dual-microphone system and 2W x2 stereo speakers, tuned with Nahimic Audio. For wireless connectivity, the machine comes with Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.1. In my check, the Legion 5 Pro uses an Intel AX211 Wi-Fi card and a Realtek ALC3306 audio chip.
I really like the Legion 5 Pro 2023 this year. It keeps a mainly simple look, but with accents that show the strength a gaming laptop needs. The performance and display are enough to play AAA games at QHD resolution right now, and the keyboard is a joy to type on. The reference price for this laptop is around 40 million VND.
- Lenovo Legion 5 Pro (2023) DiscontinuedView
