The Lenovo Legion 5 Pro manages to stand out from other laptops, not because it does any one thing differently, or really well; rather it does pretty much everything well, leaving little to complain about. Featuring a list of specifications that belong on a truly high-end system, the Legion 5 Pro does it all with performance in mind, because of that, it could be one of the best laptops of 2022 so far.

First we are met with high-grade aluminium and magnesium, making the chassis, strong, yet light. Add in strangely capable cooling and the result is a fast and light laptop that demands the rest of the features fall in line, and they do. The battery life is pretty awesome, as is the 45 minute charge time with the 300 W power adapter, one that can still charge the Legion 5 Pro while you game, although that will make it take a bit longer to charge. Flexibility seems to be what the Legion 5 Pro is all about.

Not many laptops these days provide user accessible options when it comes to how you engage the display adapters; nor do they fully support NVIDIA's Optimus, yet the Legion 5 Pro does. The 165 Hz screen can be powered by either the built-in iGPU of the Intel i7-12700H, or by the discrete RTX 3070 Ti. Your choice. The 2560x1600 resolution of that screen will need that added grunt if you want to game, and the RTX 3070 Ti mobile GPU is a decent match for this resolution, although I wouldn't mind seeing a 150 W 3080 Ti in this chassis.

With a base power of 115 W for the 3070 Ti, working with a standard 45 W for the i7-12700H, you've actually got a decent pairing that is hugely capable, yet manages to use less than 160 W in total, in intensive tasks such as gaming. The large heatpipes of the cooling design are more than capable to meet this sort of demand, so the fans aren't blasting at their highest possible speed, leaving the Legion 5 Pro cool and quiet under pressure. I pushed this test system as hard as I could, and it held up pretty well, all things considered. Even the keyboard felt great.

There are a couple of aspects here that left me wanting more, however. The paltry 16 GB of ram and a rather meager 512 GB of storage meant I spent a fair bit of time swapping data on the drive as I ran through the test suite; Borderlands 3 and SPECviewperf easily take up half that space. Fortunately there is an open M.2 slot for additional storage, and that just makes me want to find a drive to add to my testing toolkit. I don't think you should typically look to immediately spend more money when you buy a laptop, yet here I was.

Speaking of price, I had spent some time looking for this specific model on the Lenovo website and could not find it, although I did manage to find a similar model priced at just under $2000 USD. That's significant value, hard to ignore, and makes the small RAM and drive sizes that much easier to swallow. Yet I'd still be looking for upgrades, and the end user may do so too. This class of laptop deserves 32 GB of RAM with a 1 TB SDD, and a sub-$2500 price tag, I think you can get yourself exactly that.