Benchmarks: Vitals and Battery Life
Lenovo's cooling setup is particularly adept at keeping temperatures in check, but the noise profile could be better.
We use a pair of PCMark 10 benchmarks to gauge battery life; Modern Office, which intermittently uses the writing, web browsing and video conferencing workloads from the main PCMark 10 benchmark; and Gaming, which uses the common Fire Strike test to stress the GPU until the battery is drained.
In order to make the results comparable between laptops, each system is configured with a purpose-built power plan, wireless radios disabled, and screen brightness set as close to 200 nits as possible using a calibration device.
It is worth noting that by default the Legion 5 Pro is configured to use the dedicated GeForce GPU at all times. In order to maximise battery life, Hybrid Mode (aka Nvidia Optimus), needs to be activated via BIOS or the Vantage app to allow the laptop to switch between RTX 3070 and onboard Radeon graphics depending on workload. The process requires a full reboot, and Hybrid Mode was enabled for the purpose of our battery tests.
Even so, battery life is a weak point. A runtime of six hours and 22 minutes isn't terrible, but we consider eight hours to be the absolute minimum for any modern laptop.
