In 2012, I decided to purchase a gaming laptop; the Lenovo Y580. It was mostly a great laptop that was able to play older games at high settings and newer games at lower settings. Nearly four years later I replaced the Y580 with the Asus GL702VM gaming laptop.
In July of last year (2021), I managed to find the "Walmart edition" of the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro (L5P). That might sound like a bad thing, but finding one of these laptops in store represented a crazy bargain. The normal online price was $1529, but if you lucked into getting one in store, they were $1399. I had a routine of refreshing the Walmart page each morning. One day, it showed one in stock at the store about a 5 minute drive from me. I jumped in the car and went straight there.
So let's take a look at what has changed.
Processor
The processor change from the Y580 to the GL702VM was not particularly notable. They were both four core/eight thread processors. The i7 6700HQ in the GL702VM was faster, but not in any meaningful way.
The AMD Ryzen 7 5800H processor in the L5P is so much faster. First, it is an eight core/sixteen thread processor. Second, with all cores loaded it operates at a frequency roughly 20 percent higher than the i7 6700HQ could sustain. There is just no comparison. This is a HUGE jump that I did not see in my last upgrade.
Memory
In the Y580, I had 16GB of RAM in dual channel mode from the start. I did eventually upgrade the GL702VM to 32GB of RAM in dual channel as well. The L5P shipped with 16GB of RAM in dual channel, but I upgraded that to 32GB of RAM in dual channel fairly quickly.
Though both the GL702VM and L5P use DDR4 memory, the speed increased from 2133 MHz to 3200MHz giving the L5P considerably more memory bandwidth. The Ryzen CPU in the L5P is known to be sensitive to good, fast memory so making sure the memory improved along with the processor was important.
Storage
The L5P shipped with a 512GB NVMe SSD, twice the size of the drives of the previous two laptops and quite a bit faster. Of course, 512GB today is not nearly enough if you plan on gaming so I ordered an additional 2TB NVMe SSD because the L5P has two NVMe slots. It lacks a 2.5" drive bay, but that drive format is becoming less and less common.
GPU (Graphics Chip)
As I experienced going from the Y580 to the GL702VM, the GPU improvement in the L5P over the GL702VM is huge.
From generation to generation, the GPU went from:
- 2GB @ 64GB/s to 6GB @ 192GB/s to 8GB @ 448GB/s
- 384 cores @ 0.84 GHz to 1280 cores @ ~1.6 GHz to 5120 cores @ ~1.7 GHz, with generational improvements in between as well
As with the GL702VM when I first got it, the L5P can play any modern game with relative ease, and even has ray tracing capabilities for improved in-game lighting.
Display
The display of the L5P is really good. It increases the resolution from 1920 x 1080 to 2560 x 1600. It is much brighter than the GL702VM, and the refresh rate has jumped up to 165Hz (the GL702VM had a 75Hz display). It is a 16-inch display, so actually smaller than the GL702VM. I am having to use scaling in Windows to make things a little bigger and easier to see. As with the GL702VM, the L5P does have G-Sync, enabling an adaptive refresh rate.
The bezels around the L5P display are tiny relative to the previous laptops. Though I haven't checked exact overall size differences, the L5P doesn't feel much different.
Other Stuff
The L5P is amazing in so many ways. I have always wanted a laptop with ports at the back. This makes for a very tidy desk setup. The L5P has almost all of the ports on the back, with a couple on the sides for things like USB drives. The top and bottom of the laptop are metal and are a far cry from the fingerprint magnets that my previous two laptops were. Some people do not like the lighted Y logo on the top, but I am a fan.
It lacks a Thunderbolt port, but as it turns out this wasn't as exciting as I had hoped it would be back in 2016. There is a USB-C port that allows me to connect to a monitor that has USB-A ports. By plugging in this single cable, I get my monitor, keyboard, mouse, and webcam connected to the L5P. The only other plug needed is power.
Speaking of power, despite how much more powerful the L5P is than the previous models, the battery life has improved substantially. I used to struggle getting 2 hours out of the GL702VM. With the L5P I can normally manage 3 to 4 hours without much effort. I know I could stretch that out if I played around with the power settings.
All told, this is a much more significant upgrade than my previous one.
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