Gaming power at a fair price: Lenovo Legion tested

You can usually tell when a notebook has been designed for gaming. Not so with the Legion, which looks more like a spruced-up Thinkpad. This makes it suitable as an office device, at least on the outside. The somewhat meagre battery life and the weight of 2.8 kg speak against it. When it comes to gaming, however, you can't go wrong thanks to the powerful graphics.

Notebooks

Lenovo Legion Y540

17.30", Intel Core i7-9750H, 16 GB, 256 GB, DE

Notebooks

Lenovo Legion Y540

17.30", Intel Core i7-9750H, 16 GB, 256 GB, DE

The technical data:

• Intel Core i7-9750H
• Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti
• 16 GB RAM
• 256 GB SSD
• 1 TB HDD
• 17.3" Full HD IPS display with 144 Hz refresh rate (anti-glare)
• Speakers, microphone and 720p front camera
• Lithium-ion battery with 57 Wh
• Windows 10 Home

Simple gamer design with many connections

A white illuminated element in the letter "O" is the only thing that indicates gaming in terms of design. Despite the plastic chassis material, the Legion doesn't look cheap. The surface of the lid is slightly ribbed, which gives your fingers a pleasant tingling sensation when you run your fingers over it. The fact that the notebook lid is not flush with the base is somewhat unusual. The display is offset by 2.2 cm on the chassis.

Another striking feature of the all-black notebook is that you can open the display up to almost 180 degrees. I also like the ventilation design, which channels the airflow through the casing from right to left. This ensures that it also cools sufficiently if you use it on your lap or on an uneven surface.

The Legion is 40 cm wide, 29 cm deep and has a height of 2.6 cm. In terms of connections, you get a USB 3.1 Type-A port and a 3.5 mm jack on the left-hand side. There is a second USB 3.1 Type-A on the right-hand side.

On the back are USB 3.1 Type-C, Mini DisplayPort, a third USB 3.1 Type-A, HDMI Type A, RJ45 LAN port, power connection and Kensington lock.

Gamer display with 144 Hz

The built-in 17.3-inch display has rather thin edges by today's standards. Only the lower edge is thicker - Lenovo has sensibly integrated the 720p camera there.

The IPS panel has a 1080p resolution and is anti-glare. You have to do without HDR - but the display comes with a refresh rate of 144 Hz, which my eyes wouldn't want to miss.

The display is bright enough. Only gaming or working in direct sunlight is not possible. But that's not really what the Legion is designed for anyway. Compared to other notebook panels, this one is fairly evenly lit. The luminosity is a little stronger in the centre and there is a slight drop at the bottom left. The irregularities are not visible to the naked eye. Although the display does not cover the colour space that would be necessary for a graphic designer, the colours still look extremely crisp for non-graphic designer eyes or gamers.

Keyboard and touchpad

The material around the keyboard and touchpad is rubberised, which my palms gratefully register. The chiclet keyboard is illuminated in two stages and has a rather unusually long key travel of 2 mm for a notebook of this time. You need comparatively little force to press the lightly rubberised keys. The typing feel is therefore rather soft, but the keys have a clear pressure point. The tactile feedback is therefore not comparable to a typical gamer keyboard. Nevertheless, it is still extremely comfortable to play on after a short familiarisation period. The keyboard layout also includes a number pad, albeit without a second Enter key.

The touchpad measures 10.2 × 5.2 cm and has a very smooth surface. The given surface offers enough space for multi-touch and gestures. The pad responds very precisely to my inputs. It is complemented by two dedicated mouse buttons, which have a distinct feel and also provide discreet acoustic feedback.

Good notebook speakers

The speakers are mounted on the front, but cannot be seen because the base is bevelled all around. The sound is surprisingly good for a notebook. The highs and mids sound very clean, although the latter are somewhat in the foreground. With the bass, it really depends on what you're listening to. Low tunes, such as "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" from the Crash Test Dummies, sound almost flawless. Electro sounds usually work too, but if you listen to something metal or industrial, this notebook will also give you ear cancer.

Low battery performance

The lithium-ion battery only has 57 Wh. However, since gaming notebooks usually don't last longer than an hour and a half without a mains connection, even with generous batteries, this reduction is not quite so tragic.

Battery life for continuous YouTube streaming

When streaming YouTube continuously, I set the brightness of the display to the medium level. The automatic shutdown comes after just 2 hours and 39 minutes. This is not much, but not surprising due to the weak battery. For comparison: MSI manages 6 hours and 5 minutes with the GS65 Stealth Thin and similarly performance-hungry hardware (Intel Core i7-8750H, Nvidia GTX 1070 Max-Q, 16 GB RAM) with an 82 Wh battery.

Battery life under maximum performance and fan volume

To push all the hardware to its limits, I run the stress test HeavyLoad and FurMark simultaneously with the screen set to maximum brightness. The battery dies after 50 minutes. This means that you can't expect more than an hour of battery life in a graphically demanding game.

A word about noise emissions: The notebook is not audible when working. Under full load, I measured 52 decibels from a sitting position - an arm's length away from the display. This corresponds to the volume of a rather quiet office, which is why I never notice the notebook in our editorial team. Directly next to the notebook's fan, it's 64 decibels. I measured this with a Sony smartphone.

Battery life for office work

When I use the notebook as a mobile office, the battery runs out after two and a half to three hours. However, the device is not designed for this purpose anyway, given its weight and bulky power supply unit (19.8 × 9.8 × 2.5 cm).

Processor

The Intel Core i7-9750H is a high-performance mobile 64-bit hexa-core high-end processor. It is the successor to the Intel Core i7-8750H and was launched as a refresh this year. Based on the Coffee Lake microarchitecture, Intel manufactures it with the improved third-generation "14 nm++" process.

When using up to two cores, the processor clocks at 2.6 to 4.5 GHz. If all six cores are used, the clock speed is 2.6 to 4 GHz. The power consumption is 45 watts TDP. The chip is also equipped with Intel's UHD Graphics 630 GPU.

Graphics card in the lower high-end range

The mobile Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is located in the lower high-end range and is based on the Turing architecture (TU116 chip). Compared to the faster RTX 2000 GPUs, it has no integrated ray tracing or tensor cores. Instead, it has 1536 shader units. It is manufactured using the 12 nm process. It employees at a frequency of 1455 to 1590 MHz and has 6 GB of GDDR6 video RAM (connection via 192-bit interface). The power consumption is 80 watts.

In terms of performance, the GTX 1660 TI is comparable to the mobile GTX 1070, although the 1070 has a TDP of 115 watts.

Good performance considering the price

Now it's time to get down to the nitty-gritty, because now it's time to find out what it was built for. I measure the performance with various benchmarks for the processor and graphics card as well as during gaming.

Processor performance: Cinebench

With Cinebench from Maxon, you can test how your PC performs when rendering Cinema 4D content. Processors with more cores will always deliver a better result here (except for single-core results). If you want to compare processors with Cinebench, this is only possible if both processors have the same number of threads.

As you can see one line above the orange result, the notebook performs almost as well as the reference system with the same processor in both the multi-core and single-core tests. This speaks in favour of Lenovo's cooling concept.

Gaming benchmarks

3DMark offers lots of benchmarks for testing gaming PCs and laptops. To give you an overview, I'm testing 1080p gaming (Fire Strike), WQHD gaming (Time Spy) and UHD gaming (Time Spy Extreme).

The Legion clearly performs better in all benchmarks than a mediocre gaming notebook with Intel Core i7-6820HK and Nvidia GeForce GTX 980.

Virtual reality benchmarks

I use the VRMark benchmarks to find out whether the notebook is also ready for virtual reality gaming.

The notebook only fails the blue room benchmark for future hardware. This means you can confidently play with the notebook using the latest VR glasses.

Gaming and FPS

Finally, I also test the performance with games. To do this, I run the in-game benchmark for Far Cry 5 and play Metro Exodus extensively.

For Far Cry 5, the benchmark only reflects a real game to a limited extent, as there are no quick turns. However, comparisons can be made with notebooks that have already been tested. I set the graphics quality to the highest possible level at 1080p resolution.

This result emphasises the power of the installed Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti. With the 72 FPS achieved, the gamer notebook outperforms some competitor products that have already been tested. With a Razer Blade 15 (Intel Core i7-8750H, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q), I only achieved 61 FPS with the same quality settings. With an MSI notebook with GTX 1070 Max-Q and Intel Core i7-8750H, I achieved 62 FPS. This shows nicely that a good ventilation concept for gaming notebooks sometimes gets more out of it than a better card.

When I game Metro Exodus at 1080p resolution (DirectX 12) at the highest quality level, the game always runs smoothly. However, I have to test for a long time, because when I crawl through the numerous dark underground corridors, the FPS rate visibly increases compared to areas above ground, such as the taiga.

Overground, I achieve an average of 64 FPS. Below ground it is 93 FPS. The display never drops below 37 FPS. This means you can easily game at the highest quality level, albeit without ray tracing.

Conclusion: The device is definitely worth the money

In terms of price-performance ratio, Lenovo is a real winner - you get value for money here. Thanks to the graphics power of the lower high-end range, a powerful processor and sufficient RAM, the Lenovo Legion should ensure long-lasting gaming fun. On top of that, there are enough ports and an eye-friendly 144 Hz display. However, you will have to do without G-Sync and HDR, which is understandable considering the price.

The only major disadvantage of this product is the short battery life. You will never be able to game for over an hour when playing a graphically demanding title. But gaming without a mains connection is not a good idea, even with the competition. I can therefore confidently give the product a clear buy recommendation.