Lenovo Legion 5 - 5800H + 3070 gaming laptop

[porina]

 

Please note this review is a work in progress, and there will be an ongoing updates as I get new understanding. I've had it for about a week when this thread was started and there is still much I want to try tinkering with. I can try to answer any questions about its functioning.

 

Legion 5 - 15ACH6H - Type 82JU
Model 002YUK

 

Main specs:
AMD Ryzen 7 5800H (8 cores, 16 threads)
Nvidia 3070 Laptop 130W
16GB 3200 ram in dual channel
512GB NVMe SSD
165 Hz 1080p IPS panel
Intel AX200 Wifi

 

Price around £1300 at time of purchase (approx. US$1500 excl. tax.)

 

First impressions and hardware externals

Out of the box you get the laptop and power brick, and nothing else of note. The power brick is rated at 300W. Given the CPU+GPU combined is under 200W, that's a bit of potential headroom for powering connected devices or charging the internal battery.

 

It is a 15" gaming laptop, not designed to be thin or light. This is my chosen form factor as I don't gain by paying more for going smaller.

 

On the left is a 3.5mm headphone socket, as well as what looks like a USB C connector that is unlabelled.

 

On the right is a small mechanical switch I'll have to look up at some point. It has an icon of what looks like a camera with a line through it, so it might be a physical override for the webcam. Next to that is a power LED which seems redundant to me, as there is also one built into the power button above the keyboard. There's also a USB A port.

 

On the back is the power socket, three USB A ports of which one has a little battery logo on it. There is another USB C looking port with USB-PD written on it. There's also a HDMI out, ethernet, and yet another power LED. They really want you to know when it is on.

 

There are no obvious panels to allow hardware upgrades. To access the replaceable components you have to remove the base of the case. More on that later.

Software loadout

As common with big name devices they try to provide additional value through software. The Microsoft Store is keen to tell me I get a free one month of XBox game pass. Lenovo's software is actually quite minimal, with a general purpose utility and another showing battery status in the system tray area while also giving quick access to some laptop functions.

 

It comes installed with Windows 10 Home which is fine for a gamer. On first boot you get the usual user setup stuff. I don't know if it is a limitation of Home or something Lenovo did but after adding a network connection, I couldn't find an option to use a local account, which I'm sure is present in other Pro installs recently. I reluctantly let it use one of my existing MS accounts to get past that part, and created a new local account after.

 

The only 3rd party software was McAfee, which I quickly exorcised.

 

I let Windows get through whatever updates it wanted to do, then tried to find similar in the Lenovo Vantage software. There you could also customise some of the hardware and I finally found the update button. It reported there was nothing to update. There was a setting in Vantage that lets you reduce the battery charge level to "55-60%" while plugged in. This conserves the battery lifespan, while obviously reducing run time possible. Given this is a gaming laptop that will mostly be used plugged in, I enabled this setting.

 

I manually installed the latest nvidia GPU drivers. While doing something else I noted the Wifi and Bluetooth in the laptop were provided by Intel. Sure enough, when I installed Intel DSA it reported an updated driver was available for both. At the time of writing I have not checked if there is any AMD chipset or APU driver updates also.

 

If I go to Lenovo's website there is a firmware update for the laptop, which I later installed.

Display

This has an IPS panel rated at 165 Hz. According to AMD Radeon Software this has a FreeSync range of 60 Hz to 165 Hz. The minimum being 60 Hz is a bit poor, but with a 3070 also fitted the occasions when you can't maintain 60 fps at 1080p should be rare.

 

The IPS panel is good but not high end. Testing was by observation using test patterns which should be representative for gaming uses. It has a good dynamic range and there was no obvious colour banding in gradients. Viewing angles are not the best for an IPS but far better than lower end TN panels. There is some brightness shift when viewed from the side, but if you keep your head within the width of display there is no problem. Vertically it is also good. There is only a very slight shift with angle and it is unlikely to affect normal uses.

Sound

The laptop has built in speakers and they produce not a bad sound. Maybe amongst the better ones I've heard from any laptop, although that isn't setting the bar too high. Basically it is good enough you wont be reaching for external speakers to watch media content or game assuming you're not disturbing those around you, or even want to share content.

GPUs

 

The laptop uses both the Vega cores in the APU and the 3070 in an Optimus configuration. As such, it suffers the weirdness that any Optimus laptop does, especially as Microsoft has taken over GPU selection from nvidia. There is a setting in the laptop's bios to set the 3070 to be the only GPU, more on that below.

 

The APU reserves 2GB by default of system ram, which becomes unavailable for other software to use. My old laptop with Intel CPU and 1050 didn't reserve that much ram. There is a bios option that lets you reduce that amount to 1 GB or 512MB, but there is a warning against doing so.

 

The 3070 is the laptop version, which gives and takes against the desktop version. Power limit is reduced from 220W to 130W in this case, and the number of shaders are also lower going from 5888 to 5120. So expect performance to be somewhat lower. Due to limitations of the APU, the 3070 is only connected by PCIe 3.0 x8 lanes. This has been shown by other's testing to have a tiny impact on performance in gaming use cases. Resizable BAR is enabled in the system.

 

In the bios there is a selection on how the built in display is connected, either in dynamic mode which connects it to the APU and switches to nvidia as required, or another setting the name of which I can't recall. In that 2nd setting, the display is connected to the 3070. As shipped it is in dynamic mode. I saw some Optimus weirdness. In old implementations the data from the high performance GPU is passed internally to the low power GPU which is connected to the display. This newer version of Optimus seems to support switching the display connection between the GPUs. However when it does so, I don't know if it is a Windows thing, a driver thing, or both, it gets a little weird. It looks like it is trying to switch modes but loses connection so you get static on the screen for some seconds. Windows will do some weird stuff, although once the 3D application or game is running, it is fine. When you exit you seem to be stuck in some odd state, where looking at Windows display settings has most things empty.

 

Switching it to the 2nd setting where the 3070 is connected to display seemed to work better, although I still need to use it more to check. In Windows, the AMD graphics control panel is gone. Only nvidia settings remain. If I use 3D apps/games now, it works pretty much as you'd expect the system to. It just works. A long time wish list item for me has been to not have Optimus but just use only the higher power GPU. Gaming laptops are rarely used in anger without power connected. So just give me that performance without the headache of broken complexity trying to save a little power. It looks like we might have that finally! Also in this state, the 2 GB of ram reserved for use by the APU is freed and you get almost the full 16GB available.

 

Following is a test indicative of the power consumption, and implicitly the battery life. I don't have the time to charge it to full and drain it multiple times. Basically the battery drain rate is reported so that is system power consumption. I used the same display brightness setting for both tests. A USB mouse is connected. Just an office mouse, no RGB or high DPI/polling rate stuff.

 

Discrete mode (3070) - Idle 20W, playing youtube video 23W

Dynamic mode (optimus) - Idle 18W, playing youtube video 20W

 

So for my laptop I'm looking at around 11 to 15% increase from Optimus tech. However, I wonder if there is a software element to this that skews my results. I was also looking at the CPU, iGPU, dGPU powers in both cases. It looked like the dGPU was enabled in both cases, reporting >10W. The dGPU did not entirely shut off. If it did, that could result in more like a ball park 2x battery life extension.

 

Currently the laptop is equivalent to around 4h from full battery life regardless of the setting. That's actually better than I'd expect for a gaming laptop.

Keyboard and touchpad

The keyboard is a decent layout. One of my pet hates are so called UK keyboards that are actually US layout but with different printing on the keys. The difference in key shape between ANSI and ISO styles is enough to annoy switching between the two. Fortunately Lenovo did use a proper UK layout in this case. It can be seen they allowed for this in their design if you look around the return key, or left shift. The feel of the keypress is... ok. I don't have anything to praise about it, nor do I have any complaints. I can use it fine. It is also impressive to me they have included pretty much everything I'd want from a keyboard layout. The cursor keys are a decent size and not packed too tightly in with other keys so you can find them by feel. As a minor negative, it is a bit more to the left than I'd like, but I'm sure I can get used to this. The number pad is compact which is typical. Fine for occasional or light use. I have to give bonus points for physical page up and page down keys. These make navigating webpages and other documents by keyboard a bit more easy. Minor downside is the return key is slightly thinner than normal, so will take a little getting used to.

 

The backlight is zoned, not per key. This is fine. Out of the box it was an annoying wave effect but once set to static I'm happy.

 

The touchpad is a reasonable size and feels responsive. It works pretty much like others. You can two finger scroll, and tap to click, or press harder for an actual click if you want to be sure. As a minor downside there is acceleration going on and no obvious way to stop it. This seems unrelated to the mouse setting.

 

Storage

There is a single 512GB NVMe SSD from SK Hynix. A search for the reported part number came up with nothing. CrystalDiskMark gave sequential speeds of 3.5 GB/s reads and 3.0 GB/s writes, which is decent for a PCIe 3.0 SSD. 4kQ1 random reads were unremarkable and about expected for a mid range NVMe SSD.

 

512GB isn't a lot of storage for gaming. After pulling off the bottom cover another unused M.2 slot can be seen, and I have now fitted another 1TB SSD for game storage.

CPU and ram

 

Ram is dual channel 3200 CL22. This is the mid bin of the JEDEC standard timings. Enthusiasts might expect tighter timings with perhaps CL16 typical on an XMP module, but it isn't expected to have too much impact on gaming. Using an older version of Aida64 which does not fully support newer CPUs, the memory bandwidths are around 45, 33, 38.5 GB/s for read, write and copy respectively. Theoretical max bandwidth is about 50GB/s so read isn't far off, but writes and copy are lagging somewhat. Latency is a whopping 81ns.

 

The CPU might be Zen 3 but we get a somewhat cut down version in the Cezanne APU. The caches are smaller overall. The desktop counterpart gets 32MB of L3, but here we get 16MB. Still a decent amount, but like the ram for most use cases it is hopefully a small difference in practice.

 

Cinebench R23 scores 12139 from cold. It may be expected for scores to be lower once heat has soaked in. The only comparison point I have on hand right now is my Rocket Lake 11700k in my TV gaming system. When that is run at fixed 125W power limit, it scores 11431.

Temperatures and cooling

If you let the CPU run a sustained load, it doesn't matter too much what the load is since it runs on power limit which is easily hit with 8 cores going at the same time. Temps in this scenario seem to be typically in the mid to high 70's, peaking around 80C. By observation, the CPU seems to run around 55W early on for a sustained duration load dropping to around 45W as heat soaks in and temperatures creep up. The cooling system copes with this well. The fans are not silent by any means, but the noise they make is not too objectionable. It isn't the pure whoosh of air, nor is it the whine from smaller high RPM fans.

 

If we introduce a GPU load, things get more complicated. Running Time Spy once, the CPU goes up to 90C, whereas the 3070 only reaches 70C. Here we see the negative effects of using 7nm process once again as even though the absolute CPU power is low, the heat concentration shows up. For reference, the highest peak power observed through the runs was 60W on the CPU, and 120W on the GPU. Noise was obviously louder since the thermal system has to cope with two heat sources now. As the fan speeds increase the whine does also, although it still doesn't become too objectionable.

 

Running the FFXIV Stormblood benchmark, this shows 65W peak power on the CPU peaking at 84C. The GPU similarly logged peaks of 120W and 74C. Average 127 fps, and for my personal gameplay that is excessive. I'll have to look for a cap at some point where even around 80fps is plenty, which should reduce both power usage thus heating.

 

Internal expansion potential

 

There are 10 screws holding the base cover in place. After that, you have the epic struggle of getting the clips detached. Given I saw some small plastic bits come loose in the process, I assume there are now fewer plastic clips to get in my way next time. There are three metal covers which have been removed for the above shot.

 

One was to the left side where there is a free M.2 slot. That cover was held in place by 3 screws, and there was some thermal pad on the underside to assist with cooling.

One covered the ram, where we have two SODIMMs in the two slots. This is good for performance as you run dual channel, but if you want to go above the included 16GB you'll have to replace both modules. The ram modules are manufactured by Samsung. The metal lid over the ram wasn't screwed into place, but was held in place by friction clips around it. It would not help with cooling and would seem to be provided for shielding.

 

To the right we see the wireless module and the included SSD. This also has thermal pad applied for more cooling.

 

I didn't try to disassemble any further than shown. There was not any other obvious parts that could be added or replaced.

 

Ram upgrade

Replaced the 1Rx16 modules with 2Rx8. It significantly improved most things tested. More in link below.

 

 

 

Change History

 

20 May 2021 - Initial version, add Optimus observations, add battery conservation setting observation

21 May 2021 - Update Optimus operation in 3070 only mode.

25 May 2021 - Further observations on power consumption in dynamic vs discrete GPU mode.

22 Feb 2023 - Update ram, link to test results

[jaslion]

5 minutes ago, Benji said:

https://psref.lenovo.com/Product/Legion/Lenovo_Legion_5_15ACH6H?MT=82JU

Just leaving this here for you, should you want more tech specs

It's an AMD laptop, so it obviously doesn't. It's a regular USB 3.2 Gen 2 with DisplayPort Alt mode.

Given the power consumption and TDP settings of the CPU and GPU, I really wonder what the point of the 300W power brick is, given the fact that (according to Lenovo's spec sheet I linked above) lower-end configurations can come with a 230W one that would've been totally sufficient. Maybe they'll introduce a version with the Ryzen 9 5900HX or 5980HX and RTX 3080 in the future, who knows?

 

Does it have coil whine or an obscenely dark screen? Because usually on "budget gaming" laptops like this, the screens are high refresh rate but really dim.

I think it is also with a bit of safe room ahead for the future. Whilst 230w is good enough now it might give issues in the future as the laptops power brick ages just like any other psu. I do think this is the case as Lenovo does often offer up to 5 years warranty and it would just be simpler and cheaper for them to include a higher end brick than to have to replace it later on. It's not uncommon to do so and I've seen a couple companies change their ways about this in the past to also include more than needed because of these reasons.

[porina]

19 minutes ago, Benji said:

It's an AMD laptop, so it obviously doesn't. It's a regular USB 3.2 Gen 2 with DisplayPort Alt mode.

I vaguely recall reading somewhere that Thunderbolt had been made more open and that AMD devices with it were starting to appear. I don't know what I saw where to think this one had TB3. For now, I have striked out that comment in my writeup and will adjust it more later.

 

19 minutes ago, Benji said:

I really wonder what the point of the 300W power brick is

What are the limits on power delivery though the various ports? Maybe they add up if you assume a worst case scenario.

 

19 minutes ago, Benji said:

Does it have coil whine or an obscenely dark screen? Because usually on "budget gaming" laptops like this, the screens are high refresh rate but really dim.

No coil whine that I can hear. There is a whine that seems to be from the fans. I only noticed it yesterday so I wonder why. I made two changes in a short time so it could be either the firmware update or me opening up the base shifted something. Maybe it was always there and I didn't notice. Now I've noticed I'm fixated on it. When the laptop is idle I wish it was a quieter, but when the fans are running under load that is normal noise.

 

Display is bright enough for me. The bios screen has a white background and displays at full brightness. I need sunglasses for that. Maybe the overall contrast is more than I'm used to, if anything I feel blacks might be a bit too black. On a desktop monitor I'd reduce contrast but that is not an option here. Doing a test at low black levels I can make out the different levels so it isn't clipping early.

[Ultra Weeb]

Hey, considering getting the laptop but have a question. Does the observed 90C on the cpu persist throughout your normal gaming sessions or was it only in time spy that you got that result?

[porina]

7 hours ago, Ultra Weeb said:

Hey, considering getting the laptop but have a question. Does the observed 90C on the cpu persist throughout your normal gaming sessions or was it only in time spy that you got that result?

See the FFXIV comment below it, it wasn't that much below 90C. Even if it stayed at 90C, that's just about ok. CPU temps probably could be reduced further on demanding games if you limit frame rate or GPU power limit a bit. Both from direct reduction of load on CPU, and also from lowering GPU usage which shares the same cooling system.

[Nav87]

I just got this Laptop too, FYI you can overclock the panel to 2560x1440 165hz by creating a custom resolution via Nvidia Control Panel and then actually changing the resolution through Windows Display Settings (it doesn't like to load via Nvidia Control panel for some reason even though the test works when creating the custom resolution).

 

Happy Days :)

[porina]

3 hours ago, Nav87 said:

I just got this Laptop too, FYI you can overclock the panel to 2560x1440 165hz by creating a custom resolution via Nvidia Control Panel and then actually changing the resolution through Windows Display Settings (it doesn't like to load via Nvidia Control panel for some reason even though the test works when creating the custom resolution).

I haven't tried via custom resolutions, but did similar using DSR. Those resolutions also show up for Windows desktop. I didn't find it useful in either gaming or windows, since the native resolution of the display remains unchanged. I was hoping it might help give better look in games, but at least in the limited testing all it did was make the fan noisier.

[Nav87]

Yeah it wont help with gaming too much but its nice if you are doing work on your laptop, more desktop space is always good for that

[porina]

In more regular usage, I encountered another annoyance. Sometimes I accidentally clip the numlock key which is located immediately to the right of the backspace key. Since my typing sucks, I need the backspace key more than I should, as I hit nearby wrong keys. This not so much a problem on a real full size keyboard since there is a gap between it and whatever is nearby. Also both the enter and backspace keys are a bit narrower than normal, which is contributing to my mistakes.

 

The problem with this laptop was that there is a bit of lag when I hit numlock, before I get an OSD icon showing the state of numlock. During that lag, things go a bit weird and I'm not sure what I typed has happened or not, leading to making more mistakes. After further investigation, the culprit was Lenovo Hotkeys app. I disabled this from startup, and the problem goes away. Now, I was concerned, what does that app do? It doesn't seem needed for the Function key modifiers so they all still work without it. If you manually launch the app it gives a few extra shortcuts which seem rather pointless so can be safely ignored. Another classic case of trying to provide more value, and in the process making things worse. Less is more.

[porina]

A small update on the sound from the laptop. It seems the perceived speaker quality was due to software processing by Nahimic. How I found out is that occasionally, Nahimic software would update itself, and force a restart. Bad software there! After it happened a few times I just uninstalled it, and the sound from the built in speakers degraded noticeably. Now it sounds kinda cheap and boxy. I'm now wondering if I reinstall it, would it pick up where it left off? Is it a custom setting tuned for the laptop? Maybe I should have checked further if there were options to prevent the annoying behaviour of the software before I just removed it. Generally speaking, I'm not a fan of software layer modifying of sound playback, as it has been the causes of other problems in the past.

[ShrinkSmile]

I know its an old thread, saw the blue screen on this laptop got me to thinking. If anyone gets a blue screen problem on this laptop, found out the Lenovo Vantage program kept causing it. idk maybe someone see's this and don't know how to check crashes. :)

[porina]

27 minutes ago, ShrinkSmile said:

I know its an old thread, saw the blue screen on this laptop got me to thinking. If anyone gets a blue screen problem on this laptop, found out the Lenovo Vantage program kept causing it. idk maybe someone see's this and don't know how to check crashes.

For what it is worth I've had no problems with crashes on this laptop. Vantage software I just use to update bios now and then, and it does that fine.