Lenovo has always put out pretty decent multimedia laptops that’s good enough for gaming. It’s the cheaper alternative to more expensive gaming laptops. Today, Lenovo finally acknowledge the Y series as their gaming line, now rechristen as Legion.
Two laptops have been unveiled to be part of this new gaming push and are available now in Malaysia, namely the Legion Y520 and Legion Y720.
The Y520 starts at only RM3299, packing a 7th-gen i5, a 1050 GTX 2GB, 4GB of RAM and 1TB HDD. A pretty decent spec sheet for its price. The Y520 has several variants, with up to a GTX 1050 Ti, 4GB of RAM and 1TB of HDD space. It also has Harman certified speakers with Dolby Audio.
Here’s the full system specs for all four variants of the Y520 (Note: we only list the different components from the base model for subsequent variations):
RM3299 Variant
- Intel Core i5-7300HQ
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 2GB GDDR5
- 4GB DDR4 RAM, 1TB HDD (5400 rpm)
- Windows 10 Home
- 15.6″ 1920 x 1080 IPS Display With Anti-Glare
RM4219 Variant
- Intel Core i7-7700HQ
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 4GB GDDR5
RM4919 Variant
- 4GB DDR4 RAM, 128GB M.2 PCIE SSD, 1TB HDD (5400 rpm)
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB GDDR5
RM5419 Variant
- 8GB DDR4 RAM, 256GB M.2 PCIE SSD, 2TB HDD
The Legion Y520 is out now in most stores in Malaysia.
For its higher end offering, the Y720 comes at one price of RM6099 for the moment. The specs are not as beefy as other high-end offerings, with only the 1060 GTX offered (enough to be VR ready) but it comes with additional features. A built-in Xbox One receiver is neat, so you don’t have to plug a dongle to use it wirelessly. It is the first laptop to support Dolby Atmos. Multi-coloured LED backlit for keyboard is included. It will also support the Razer Core- a device that was intentionally to power Razer Blades with beefier graphics card via an external component.
Here’s the specs for the Legion Y720, available by the end of March:
- Intel Core i7-7700HQ
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB GDDR5
- 8GB DDR4 RAM, 1TB HDD (5400 rpm)
- Windows 10 Home
- 15.6″ 1920 x 1080 IPS Display With Anti-Glare
There’s only one variant of the Legion Y720 announced for Malaysia so far, with hints of beefier ones (with 4K resolution display and PCIE SSD) to come at a later date.
We also got some hands-on time with the Y520 (the RM4219 variant) at the media event and tried a bit of Resident Evil 7. Interestingly, included in both Legion laptops is the Nerve Sense app. This built-in software hosts some handy features like a higher speed fan mode, network settings of either favouring bandwith or latency and even a game recorder. This is akin to something like XSplit or NVIDIA Share. The laptop even has a dedicated button to start and stop recording, located to the left of the right Ctrl key.
Our short time trying out the the Y520 leaves a positive impression. Graphics quality is decent for a relatively new AAA game, and the game seemed to run at more than 30fps with settings on High by default. Though loading times may not be as great. We were running the Nerve Sense recording app alongside the game, and the 5400rpm hard disk could be its only weak point from an otherwise solid package. Heating issues should not be an issue with better placements of the CPU, GPU and heat sinks in both laptops.
Looks like a pretty solid refresh of the Y series. The low barrier of RM3299 sounds enticing, especially to those on a really tight budget, but their RM4000-RM5000 seems pretty solid from we see so far.