Lenovo Legion 5/5 Pro/7 2021 Discussion

Legion 5 Pro review https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenov...op-with-a-bright-165-Hz-display.554931.0.html

"The keyboard illumination offers two brightness levels and four areas where you can adjust the color. Since the transitions between the areas are not abrupt, they show mixed colors. The Lenovo Vantage application allows you to select among various illumination modes and effects."

Why can't I do that in my 7i instead of iCUE?

 

Because the Vantage software isn't designed to handle all of the Legion 7's RGB, especially on the keyboard, which is per-key as opposed to four-zone on the 5 and 5 Pro. The bolded sentence you quoted is also a bit misleading. The only effects available are a really annoying wave, static four-zone, and static single-zone - none of which take a ton of computational power.

 

Not that this is new information but for those considering 7 vs 7i (not much of a choice with current availability fluctuating so much)- these are identical tongfang clones with Jarrod running a fair head to head.



3-7% average advantage tiger lake intel over AMD 5000 series in FPS, including all important 1% lows in some games. AMD with better battery life. Add in a healthy undervolt and I'm not sure of any real advantage with AMD but the differences are very small.

 

Intel CPUs have the advantage in gaming with certain titles, plus having thunderbolt 4 and PCI-4 even though its pretty useless on laptops atm. AMD have the advantage of better thermals and battery life and sighly better performance in productivity apps. You cant do any wrong going with either one it depends of what you're going to use your laptop for.

Also there a good deal on Lenovo's website for the Legion 5 Pro with a RTX 3070 and 32GBs of ram atm
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptop...on-5-series/Legion-5-Pro-16ACH6H/p/82JQ0068US

I suggest not to wait because who knows when its going to be sold out again.

 

Better 'thermals' is non-specific and technically inaccurate. Additionally- the intel advantage is not just 'certain games' but more like 80-90% of tested benchmarked games. Non-gaming performance is better at 30W for AMD would be more accurate to say, but this I am unsure of as a big enough undervolt on the intel would negate that. The battery life even with undervolt is going to still be in AMD favor- probably chipset related. Most people here want a desktop replacement with as much performance per dollar as possible so battery life is rarely useful.

 

Intel CPUs uses more power especially in gaming, More power = more heat and worse thermals but you have the ability to undervolt which AMD CPUs does not. What i mean about certain games im talking about AAA games which works better with Intel CPUs especially the i7-11800H which has a 24GBs vs 16GBs cache advantage over the 5800H. Like i said you cant do any wrong going with either one it depends of what you're going to use your laptop for. If you're aiming for the best performance as possible in gaming plus taking of advantage of Thunderbolt 4 then go with Intel.

 

I would argue the typical power usage of 5000 series and tiger lake are almost identical while playing AAA games- around 30-40W. A watt is a watt.

 

Hello everyone.
Got a Legion 5 17 after my Clevo W370 from 2013 already showing issue with chassis, keyboard and some times instability.
Specs:
5800H RTX3600 16GB, 512SSD. i will be installing W10 Pro.

Some question I have 2 Samsung Evo in the Clevo does the Legion can accept one as an extra, - they are the laptop boxy form disk size- ?
The idea is to install also some Linux flavour like Pop!_OS. So another question is how is this Lenovo series with Linux in general, drivers etc, ok?

Any other general advice? i already got from this thread the steps how to install OS, driver etc. Thanks for that.

 

The Legion only has M.2 storage slots. Very few current laptops can accommodate a 2.5-inch drive.

 

I'm just glad Intel got some competition! Intel is a bit faster at some games, but not that much.. so no buyers remorse here with Legion 7 I wonder are the differences the same with 3080 or will it even out the field even more, especially in higher resolutions

 

Btw I activated overclocking in bios and CPU W jumped to 70W max and GPU W to 167W max. So it seems that even in benchmarking my machine didn't pull all the power it could and Lenovo has left some headroom. (GPU was at ~150W before)

I didn't have the power plans installed while I ran time spy, so now I have to test it again if it changes things. But it seems it's quite safe to OC if thermals are alright.

Next in line a small undervolt experiment

 

I disabled iCue from starting a while ago and now checked the services and they were still running! So the lights didn't spark up, but things were still happening in the background.. sneakysneaky

 

Yes...took over a decade for AMD to get their crap together. We are talking about less than 5% and in ~60% of games QHD at ultra is entirely GPU limited so there is 0% difference. I'm all for people who buy team red on principle- intel have been greedy for a long time... Wish the excellent 6800M was in more laptops since it has so much potential.

Post the timespy when you get it- score should be much, much better. My gpu stayed at 160-165W during the second GPU test, and >80W on the CPU test. 7 and 7i for most both seem to hit near 13k with mild OC.

 

#1 in Firestrike for the 7i specs

 

So any word on the advanced bios? Are people still trying key combos to get into it?

 

One of the Lenovo employees that comes by Discord said he is talking to an engineer about it but nothing yet.

 

100/200 bios overclock. GPU hit 169W peak. 5800h drags the score down a bit

 

Hi guys,

I received a notification saying there's a BIOS update for Legion 5 Pro - Lenovo - System - 3.7.0.50. Has anyone updated to it? How is it compared to the old one?

 

Does anyone have experience asking Lenovo support for a replacement system if a repair is going to take too long? I just checked and the date they expected to complete the repair on my touchpad moved from September 8 to the 26th. That will be almost 2 months since I opened the repair ticket. It's not super-critical that the work be done because I got an M1 MacBook Air for cheap ($800 brand new), and even with 8 GB of RAM, it's more than holding its own in my daily workflow even when unplugged.

 

Nice job! Solid score.

 

You need better ram on the 5800h. Here are my 5800h/3070/32gb dual rank HyperX Impact scores.

Time Spy: 11088 (GPU 11269 CPU 10041)
Firestrike: 24890 (GPU 28640 PHYSICS 24592 COMBINED 12675)

I only have 150+ Core +300 memory overclocks, it runs +200 +1500 if needed, but I don’t like to post benchmark numbers with too high overclocks I don’t use while gaming.

 

Thanks, someone else has already beat it.

 

Yea, maybe I'll buy be a pair at some point you got some nice scores with 3070!

 

Amazon lists a newer version in stock, this one looks identical to the older one, and is cheaper:

https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-Lap...7TM4C4S/dp/B097TM4C4S/ref=dp_ob_title_ce?th=1

 

Im not totally sure about real life performance difference.. different tests show all kinds of results from 3-10%. If I get few more fps in games, Im not sure its worth 200e benchmarking would have benefits but its sort of a dull game to play all the time

 

The combined score test seems a bit low on the i9/rtx3080 when compared to a 5800h/rtx3070

 

Thats true. I wonder if 5800H can pull more watts with 3070

 

I believe these newer ones are not dual rank. I’m not sure about that one you linked? Atleast the b2k2 variant wasn’t, if you believe ppl on forums. Mine is the older HX432S20IBK2/32 which is dual rank.

My laptop is the Legion 5 Pro btw. It came with the better memory 16gb from the factory. It was shipped from Netherlands to Finland. But I still swapped the memory as I wanted 32gb.

I have also changed the thermal paste to Noctua NT-NH1, which lowers idle temps by 5 degrees, so I believe it helps the computer to keep the clocks higher and provide more power to both cpu and gpu. The stock paste was dry and hard. You need to put a little more than usually, as the pressure is not high between the cooling system and chips. I put it like 5 times to find the perfect amount. It now idles with the lowest idle rpm (thermal optimization 1 from bios) at 35 degrees celsius (gpu) and 36 (cpu). The indoor temperature is as high as 25 at the moment, this building is still hot from the summer. I find these results good. At stock the gpu went to 39 and cpu stayd at 41.

 

The ones linked are dual rank.

KF432S20IB1K2_32 (kingston.com)

 

Appears so from the spec sheet.

 

Has anyone tried Battlefield 4 with 5800h 3060? I'm playing it and there are maps where the graphics card moves around 60%, can someone tell me why it works so bad in this game?
Battlefield 1 and Battlefield 5 are not so bad.
I also do not understand why the frequency of the cpu is so variable, it can stay around 4050 MHz and drop suddenly to 3850MHz having good temperatures.

 

Question in Discord: "any update on the advanced bios?"

Ben (Lenovo US)
"I got a BIOS file from the team, now trying to verify that it's safe to share with the community"

XMS hopefully soon. Maybe other goodies.

 

Yay!!

 

What kind of fps are you getting? I guess you get like 150fps and that means you are just cpu bottlenecked.

 

on the Hainan Resort map it works the worst, and I get fps from 90 to 130

 

Try putting the gpu to high performance from nvidia settings for that game. Maybe it doesnt give high clocks as the game is too easy on the gpu?

 

I have the igpu disabled through mux of the bios, I have the GPU with an undervolt at 1590 mhz, it is always powered by msi abterburner, I have a desktop pc with i7 10700 @ 4600 MHz and the minimums in multiplayer games are much higher than in this 5800h, because they vary so much the 5800h CPU frequencies and they are not constant like my i7 10700? I think this is normal for laptops, Thanks for the answers

 

Disable the undervolt on the GPU. Ensure the laptop is running in its high performance profile by pressing fn + Q until the power button glows red. If the latter doesn't work, switch the profile to balanced so the power button is white and see if that helps.

 

Thanks for your answer, it seems that it has improved somewhat, the cpu frequencies are more stable and remain at 4000 up, in the energy bar it had better performance to put maximum performance and improve, that foolishness ...
If in performance mode I have it in performance with the light in red, I will also try with undervolt as it says, thanks

 

Very nice scores for a 3070. Beats a 3080 i9 X17

You shouldn't be having issues with BF4. Always keep it in max performance mode for more aggressive fan profile, and also the GPU tdp and CPU profiles are limited in balanced. Maybe at WQHD the 6gb VRAM is being exceeded but I'd think it should be enough.

 

XMP will most likely only work on Intel based systems.

 

Will XMP benefit the stock RAM in the 7i or will the benefit only be for aftermarket kits?

 

The bios they are working on is only for the 7i right now since when we started getting it in hand no advanced bios was the main gripe. He has one now he is letting some people in Discord test if they want to.

 

Nope stock memory runs on JEDEC spec.
XMP is basically an built-in OC profile if your memory is equiped with this.

 

I don't know for sure but I'm guessing aftermarket ram. I'll find my stock ram I replaced and check the model number.

Okay, what @1990BW said.

 

In what channel/discord? I'm in the Legion 2021 Community (Unofficial) and missed that and have been unable to find it using Search.

 

Its in this one: https://discord.gg/lenovolegion He has the bios and is letting some people try it. He found out it is password protected though and needs to get that first. It is only for the new 7i right now.

 

So, I've got both the Legion 5 Pro (5800H, 3070, 32 GB RAM) and the Alienware M15 R5 (QHD, 5800H, 3070, 16 GB RAM, mechanical keyboard)
My initial thoughts are:

PROS
BETTER GAMER LAPTOP
Alienware M15 R5:

• noticeably better colour-accuracy
• higher refresh rate makes it smoother
• 1440p doesn't seem to have any scaling issues
• smoother (better response time)
• FX lighting is better
• mechanical keyboard is excellent
• definitively looks better
• performance and temperatures are great (well, at least no thermal throttling!)
• better build quality (panels are thicker magnesium vs thin aluminum; also no keyboard flex)
• thinner and more portable
• can get a smaller power adapter if I want
• Windows Hello is amazing and extremely fast (2 seconds to being in)
• fan control is a plus
• Timespy: 10643
• Call of Duty Cold War Average FPS: 110 (after HyperX RAM upgrade, 100 before)

BETTER Q.O.L. PICK:
Legion 5 Pro:

• MUCH bigger screen (1/2" taller doesn't seem like much but it's actually a big difference in terms of immersion)
• secondary keys are actually lit (why isn't the Alienware's?!)
• NUMPAD is great to have
• for a membrane keyboard, it's extremely accurate and nice to type on (also requires much less force)
• much cheaper warranty if I am to extend it
• slightly brighter screen
• overclocking in the BIOS is intuitive and easy
• MUCH quieter of a system
• more powerful (EDIT: swap had a massive impact on performance despite this having 32 GB)
• many more ports
• much easier to service (MOBO isn't flipped)
• Timespy: 10917 (10993 after HyperX change)
• Call of Duty Cold War Average FPS: 110 (145 after HyperX RAM upgrade, huge difference that surprised me)

I honestly don't know which one I prefer right now. The Legion is obviously getting much higher FPS, but the Alienware feels much smoother; it's just so much smoother. But that power differential is quite substantial. I like having the NUMPAD and I am already used to the keyboard layout but it's fairly easy swapping between the 2. The mechanical keys just are satisfying, but a little loud. I guess the Alienware is loud in general; fans, keyboard, RGB galore, sexy looks.

The Lenovo is the better choice as a wife, but the Alienware is that sexy girlfriend. Both are great laptops though for sure.

 

Yes alienware always looks pretty. But then you get to the trash hardware design from cooling in prior generations to many models with panels lacking MUX currently. Alienware always has a fatal, nearly game breaking flaw somewhere where Dell thought they could save 4$ a unit- varies each generation. Lenovo does not have such flaws. My old 17R4 with 1080 the GPU VRMs would overhead and cause constant microstuttering if the laptop was elevated even a few millimeters off a flat surface.

 

Hello Kalen, what do you mean by swap and why can't you replicate it in Alienware?