Lenovo Legion 5 15ACH6H Laptop: Ryzen 7 5800H, 15.6" 1080p, 16GB DDR4, 1TB SSD Expired

I have this laptop, recently bought a little less than a month ago, and had it price adjusted. Ran 3dmark's Fire Strike Extreme for a little bit, it indeed goes to 130w. Running nvidia driver 471.96, global settings at max performance, igpu disabled. See screenie below.
https://i.imgur.com/ZVwEG5v.jpg

A single run of 3dmark's Time Spy - 8319.
Desktop 3700X + RX 5700 XT supposedly gets 9216, according to their info.

Some other things to note..It's pretty hefty, around 8lbs together combined with the huge power brick. Gaming benefits however, it has a mux switch, which allows for more performance on the discrete gpu because it bypasses the igpu. Pretty sure the Thinkbook also has one, but can't confirm because I don't own one. I think the ram on Microcenter's Legion 5 (2021) isn't soldered also, which is nice because laptops/prebuilts lately come with the slowest ram possible cause cheaper production. This Microcenter particular config has: 16GB of DDR 3200 1Rx16 CL22, lower density. Being able to swap out to 1Rx8 or 2Rx8 (both sides have chips) with better timings ekes out a bit more performance. Just be careful since most laptops, including this one, does not have a BIOS that supports enabling of XMP, so besides finding ram that is 1Rx8 or 2Rx8, running at 3200MHz has to be default through plug and play.

Other than that, it does allow for 1 more m.2 nvme upgrade (no SATA bracket like in some other Legion configurations) in addition to a larger battery. Pretty noisy on performance mode, acceptable on Auto mode, but it won't thermal throttle since the cooling is pretty good.

Edit: just cracked open the laptop to double check whether ram was soldered or not, has 2 populated sodimm slots, it's not. https://i.imgur.com/rIhVZSB.jpg

I got it to work. In case anyone is wondering, setting it to Performance or what not in Windows power setting doesn't help. Neither does any adjustments in the bios. I had to go into the Legion software to set it into performance. It defaults to balanced. I guess the Legion software overrides everything else. It's now running at the full stated power.

Likewise, if anyone wnats to offset the cost of this laptop with for the last few months that Eth mining is still viable, it gets 40 Mhash out of the box. Overclocking it didn't yield much of an improvement. Even in Performance mode, and memory @ +650 it barely went up 2 Mhash. That improvement isn't worth the extra 35 watts of power used.

In any event, I'm happy. Problem solved and I hope it helps someone else.

Judging from your concerns it seems that you have been out of the laptop market for a while. For gaming laptops a card reader is rare. Some include them but most don't. An optical drive is even more rare. I haven't seen an optical drive on any laptop for a while. Most people would use an external drive if needed. The old school battery replacement where you just detach it from the bottom is gone. I would assume because of consumer preference for thin and light laptops. I have the 2020 version of the Legion 5 and the battery is replaceable. You just need to remove the back cover and detach a cable and some screws. The good thing about the Legion 5 is that you can remove the battery and replace it with a higher capacity battery if you don't plan to add an SSD. You can still use the second M.2 slot for an additional NVME drive. If you want a laptop check out the YouTube channel Jarrod's Tech. He specializes in laptop reviews. If you don't need a laptop immediately, I would wait for the Black Friday deals to start dropping which should start in 5-6 weeks. Maybe even sooner.