My notes on the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro [16ACH6H]

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My W520 thinkpad (series released in 2011) is finally starting to make its age felt. Having 4 cores/8 threads, and the ability to fairly easily replace the screen, keyboard and Wi-Fi cards went a very long way to keeping it usable well into 2022 for office duties. But it’s finally time to look into semi-retiring it.

After looking around at current options, a slightly used Lenovo Legion 5 Pro 16ACH6H caught my eye for the reasons below, and I couldn’t argue with the price.

  • 3.2 GHz AMD Ryzen 7 5800H 8-Core CPU
  • Replaceable dual DDR4 slots (can actually unofficially support 2x 64GB modules for 128GB total, were I inclined)
  • Has two NVMe M.2 slots
  • 16" 2560 x 1600 165 Hz 3 ms IPS matte Display holy fuck this is amazing
  • NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 (6GB GDDR6), pretty amazing for a laptop, don’t really see a point trying to create more heat with higher end models.
  • USB 3.2 Gen 1 & 2
  • Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax)
  • Bluetooth 5.1
  • For once an executive actually let an engineer put in a decent cooling system.
  • Historically I’ve absolutely hated trackpads to the point where I’ll physically disconnect them. But this one is actually really nice to use once adjusted to my preferences. I’m honestly surprised. I do wish there were physical separate buttons instead of the whole pad click thing it has going on.

Anyway, this is the thread I’ll put some of my findings so other people don’t have to wonder about the odd specifics I concern myself with.

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So my first observation is a bit of a letdown. While ECC sodimms will work, there is absolutely no error correction/detection active. This is after unlocking bios/uefi settings, which I’ll get into later, making sure hidden ECC settings were enabled.

I was hoping that even if the memory couldn’t report things to the OS, that it could still silently correct single bit errors and as such would only see two bit errors or more once unstable. Lenovo supposedly has some other thinkpads with xeons that actually support ECC supposedly so I was curious if there was some unofficial functionality in place on a ryzen mobile chip. Nope. It was a stretch anyways, but even amd “Pro” apu chips aren’t likely to work.

After using an external DDR3/4 SPD editor and totally trustworthy and properly licensed Chinese software running on a disposable windows 7 install to first unlock (requires the “plus” version) and then edit the timings to generate instability, it’s clear that single bit errors will happily occur.

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Looks great, very smexy!

Reeee, because I'm a a dik

even the nerfed laptop versions, are still good chips, it;s a shame they decided to mislead buyers by dropping m at the end, and sellers leave out the “laptop” differentiator. Some retailers that do have the laptop in the name, end up calling their devices like “new dell inspiron with 3060 laptop laptop” or whatever.

Looks great though.

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