Ruan Bronkhorst
We are going to take a quick overview of Lenovo’s Legion Y540 which is their mid range gaming laptop. The one we are testing today has a i5 9300h 8Gb of ram and a RTX2060.
Price
We could not find pricing on the exact model that we have here. But the starting price on amazon is on an I7 unit for around $1100 and starting price in south Africa is on a I5 unit with a 1660ti is around R21000
Specs
Specs wise the Y540 comes with a choice from a 1050 to the 2060 that gets paired with either the 4 core i5 9300h or the 6 core i7 9750h. Memory wise it can go up to 32GB at 2666hz or 16gb at 3200mhz. The Y540 Has 1x NVMe slot and 1x 2.5” sata port.
The Y540 is a 15” model that is 26mm thick, the back of the screen has a black rough coating that feels like those plastic 3D pictures and the rest of the laptop has a smooth black rubberized coating. The Y540 outer shell feels and looks very nice and is defiantly one of the better builds that I have used. Also it doesn’t really show fingerprints which is really nice to see or should I say not too see.
IO
For IO on the left side you get a USB 3.1 Gen 1 port, headphone/mic combo port, on the back side you get USB-C, mini display, USB 3.1 Gen 1 HDMI, Ethernet, AC adapter and a Kensington lock slot, on the right side you only get a single USB 3.1 Gen 1 port.
Keyboard
When open it up you get a full sized white only backlight keyboard with silent but a bit sharp keypresses. You also get a medium sized trackpad with very good tracking and nice separated buttons.
Speakers
The built in speakers was quite decent as it does feature 2x 2W Harman speakers with Dolby atmos for gaming.
Display
As for the screen it is a full HD IPS display that runs at 144hz and has pretty thin bezels. You also have a 720p nostril viewing webcam that helps keep the bezel nice and thin at the top. The quality isn’t great but it’s good enough for zoom or teams. It’s definitely great to game thanks to that 144hz in games like CSGO. But its also great to do some productivity work like photoshop or video editing, if you go for the i7 model.
Performance
As for performance the RTX2060 model I had here was able to play any game I threw at it with some reduced settings to play at that 144hz refresh rate. It did lack some power for productivity with only 8GB of ram, and the i5 9300H might be a little on the weak side.
The Legion did pretty well. With it being able to hit over 60fps in every single game. Except horizon zero dawn which sucks currently. You will have to drop the settings down a bit if you want to hit those 144 FPS. We did put it against other laptops that we have benchmarked before. Although those are all running on i7’s and at least 16gbs of RAM.
Even though the Legion is quite thin it did still do a decent job with cooling. The GPU went up to about 70 degrees. The i5 9300H did jump to the high 90s, where it thermal throttled from 4Ghz to around 3.3ghz under a heavy blender stress test. The fans were also not overly loud compared to some other gaming laptops, but I’m not sure how the i7 would do though.
Power adaptor
Finally power you get a quite large flat 230W power adapter and a 52.5 Watt hour 6 cell battery that will last up to 5 hours of casual use and less than an hour when gaming. Which isn’t the greatest really.
Conclusion
So in conclusion the Legion Y540 has a really good build quality. It does look professional and not so focused on the gaming look which might make it more attractive for people that’s looking at a work and gaming combo laptop. However the i5 with 8GB of ram might be on the weak side. It didn’t do too bad in benchmarks compared to some more powerful laptops, but in this price range there is some very stiff competition.
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