Lenovo IdeaPad 5 Pro Review

The Lenovo IdeaPad 5 Pro is an incredible laptop for the price. It’s powerful with a great blend of a 5th gen Ryzen processor and GTX 1650 GPU. Battery life is also great for such a powerful machine, too. Just note it’s a little heavy and the ports are a tad lacklustre, but in the grand scheme of things, they’re small issues for such a marvellous machine.

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Introduction

Lenovo has often made some pretty beefy laptops within their long-running IdeaPad line, and the all-new IdeaPad 5 Pro certainly looks to prove my point.

It’s got an impressive sheet for an ultrabook, with an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H processor, discrete Nvidia GTX 1650 graphics card, as well as a 16-inch 2560×1440 2.5K QHD panel.

This can all be yours for the princely sum of £999.99, putting it firmly in the frame of mid-range ultrabooks, as well as the more affordable canon of gaming laptops. But is the Lenovo IdeaPad 5 Pro worth a pickup? Let’s find out. 

Design 

• Stylish, dark grey frame
• Tactile keyboard and large trackpad
• Thin chassis, but skimps on ports

The Lenovo IdeaPad 5 Pro looks pretty classy. A dark grey outer shell makes it look almost like a bigger MacBook, and it’s also well built, with its all-metal construction providing a smooth finish.

A 16-inch display is on the bigger size and gives you loads of screen real estate to work with, and with small bezels all round, the screen-to-body ratio of the IdeaPad 5 Pro is pretty good too. Unfortunately, it isn’t a flip-down panel, or a touchscreen, but considering what this laptop is designed for, that isn’t too much of a hardship.

With a bigger frame comes more weight, and the IdeaPad 5 Pro clocks in at around 2kg, which makes this one of the heavier laptops I’ve tested and can make it a little difficult to carry around.

Lenovo’s speakers are downwards-firing and for the laptop’s price, sound pretty good. They do also feature Dolby Atmos, so with a few clicks in the associated Dolby app, sound from the speakers becomes an awful lot richer.

As for ports, Lenovo look to have been pretty generous. The IdeaPad 5 Pro features HDMI out, one USB-C, 2x high-speed USB-A, a headphone/mic combo jack and a full-size SD card reader. There’s enough here to get by, although a second USB-C would have provided some more flexibility.

Support for Windows Hello is present, although only thanks to the 720p webcam Lenovo has fitted into the small screen bezel. You won’t find a fingerprint sensor here, which is a sore miss. 

Given this is a bigger laptop, the IdeaPad 5 Pro makes use of a full-size keyboard, albeit with a couple of odd layout decisions. Most notably, the right-hand side feels a little squished with a smaller number pad and enter key, which did occasionally result in me pressing the number 7 instead of Return.

But the keyboard itself feels nicely tactile and responsive to use, and it’s also backlit, so you can use it for after-dark working. The backlight is more of an under-glow style, which looks pretty suave, and also offers some more even coverage than other laptops. 

As for the trackpad, it’s of a decent size and tracking is accurate. The buttons feels nice too, it must be said. 

Display 

• 16-inch display is large
• 350 nits of brightness ensures images are vibrant
• 16:10 aspect ratio works well

For the IdeaPad 5 Pro, Lenovo has adopted a 16-inch 2.5K QHD panel. A 2.5K display gives you a resolution of 2560×1400, which means you get substantially more pixels than a standard Full HD screen to ensure images and videos still look sharp, even on this stretched-out screen.

It offers an incredibly large amount of screen real estate for both day-to-day working and gaming. I found it a lot easier to have multiple apps or web browsers open simultaneously, something you’ll struggle to do with a squashed-down 13-inch panel.

The 350-nits of quoted brightness ensures the panel has an above-average max brightness for a laptop, with colours looking bold and vivid – although there is noticeable warmth, which distorts the colour ever so slightly.

The Lenovo IdeaPad 5 Pro also has a squarer 16:10 aspect ratio, which is in keeping with other ultrabooks, and gives you a great space to work with newer apps and for web browsing, too. 

Performance

• Ryzen 7 5800H CPU provides beefy multi-core performance
• Nvidia GTX 1650 GPU allows for entry-level gaming
• SSD speeds are nice and quick

Given its £1000 price, it’s easy to expect the Lenovo IdeaPad 5 Pro to perform well across day-to-day tasks and the odd bit of gaming.

Inside, it packs an octa-core AMD Ryzen 7 5800H which walked our benchmark tests and offered up some great multi-threaded performance. I found the IdeaPad 5 Pro to be lightning quick for basic productivity tasks, while also being capable of more intensive tasks such as photo or video editing. It’s of course not going to challenge the likes of the MacBook Pro, but it’s not intended for such intense workloads.

	Lenovo IdeaPad 5 Pro	Dell XPS OLED 13 (2021)	Apple MacBook M1
Processor	AMD Ryzen 7 5800H	Intel Core i7-1185G7	Apple M1 Chip
Geekbench 5 Single Core	1430	1465	1731
Geekbench 5 Multi Core	7126	5424	7308
PC Mark 10	6040	5042	N/A

Inside, you’ll also find 16GB of DDR4 RAM, offering you a load of headroom to work with, whether you’ve got loads of Chrome tabs open, or you’re spending hours playing Football Manager 2022.

As for graphics, the IdeaPad 5 Pro makes use of an Nvidia GTX 1650, which means it’s well-specced against some of the more affordable gaming laptops and should mean you can get some great-looking games at 1080p, especially when combined with the super-speedy Ryzen 7 5800H. 

The 512GB SSD for the price isn’t bad, and compared to other laptops at this price, could be seen as generous. The SSD also boasts some snappy with SSD read and writes speeds of 3606 MB/s and 3281 MB/s respectively, which means it can load and save files on the physical drive just as quickly as the very best productivity laptops.

Battery Life

• Lasted 10hrs 51 minutes in our battery test
• Capable of lasting between one and two working days

As for battery life, the IdeaPad 5 Pro lasted for 10 hours and 51 minutes within our testing, which includes dialling down the brightness to halfway, and running the PCMark 10 benchmark that simulates office tasks until the battery tank is empty.

This means it fends off competition from the likes of the Dell XPS 13 OLED (2021). It hasn’t got the best stamina, with other similarly priced laptops lasting a few additional hours. But you have to remember that the Lenovo IdeaPad 5 Pro is packing a discrete GPU, which are known for sapping the battery at an accelerated pace. With that considered, it’s an impressive result.

In day-to-day use, the IdeaPad 5 Pro lasted comfortably for a day when I used it before needing to be charged, which was rather handy. Battery life isn’t the best in class, but it should be good enough for most people.

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