We have plenty of gaming laptops, but most of them are maybe on the more expensive side. But thankfully, more manufacturers are making laptops under RM5,000 but with the right spec for gaming.
Enter Lenovo’s challenger for this price range: the Lenovo Legion Y7000. The Y7000 is a formidable mid-ranger gaming laptop, that can sometimes punch above its weight.
Hardware
The Y7000 sits between the lovely Y540 and the minimalist Y740, borrowing a little bit from the two, design-wise. It’s a compact chassis with a 15.6″ screen like the Y540, but with hinge design of the Y740- a simpler, maybe less robust one.
It has a good, comfy feel to it thanks to its tight packaging. Very little room from the end of the keyboard to the edge of the laptop side. And slim bezels for the screen (with a big chin bezel where the Legion logo and webcam reside).
But that doesn’t mean the Y7000 doesn’t stand on its own. For one, it brings back the gamer red in full force. Red trimmings on the keyboard caps. Only red lighting (no RGB). Instead of the Legion typeface, you get a big red Y at the lid of the laptop again, like the Y series of the old days.
Interestingly, the red Y is surrounded by two circles, which incidentally makes it look like a Mercedes logo when it’s upside down, if the Silver Arrows embraced gamer red, that is.
The red may be tacky, but at least the lid texture, a spiral pattern surrounding the Y circle, looks and feels nice.
As for the keyboard, it’s not a mechanical keyboard but it’s decently clicky for those that type a lot (or want to use it for work). Though the key sizes feel a bit wider than you would expect.
Software
The Legion Y7000 comes with your usual suspects of pre-installed software. There’s the Lenovo Vantage hub that updates your Lenovo-specific drivers and shows simple CPU, GPU, and storage telemetry. It also comes with a McAffee anti-virus pre-installed.
And like most Lenovo Legion products, it comes with Dolby Atmos for your 3D spatial audio needs.
Gaming Performance
For the review, we are using the Lenovo Legion Y7000 2019 PG0 (81T0001HMJ ) which has this spec:
- CPU: Intel Core i5-9300H
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 4GB GDDR5
- RAM: 8GB
- Storage: 256GB SSD
From the spec alone, you can guess where we will nitpick, if you read enough of our past laptop reviews.
But first, the good parts. The GTX 1650 and 9th-gen Core i5 combo is actually pretty decent. It can run Forza Horizon 4 with a solid 60fps on Medium. And on High.
And it could reach 60fps on Ultra.
And of the games we benchmarked, the Y7000 can run at medium with ease, and sometimes can go for that 60fps on high. The CPU benchmark on Civilization VI has a solid 8.71 seconds to process all the AI turn- a decent time. Our Cities: Skylines stress test- a fully-built metropolis- drops the fps to 30 in the densest areas.
As for more recent titles, the Y7000 can run them pretty decent too. The Division 2 can run on medium around 60fps, and high floating on the 40-50fps realm. Control plays smoothly at 60fps on medium. The recently-released Resident Evil 3 demo on the balanced settings can hold a constant 60fps.
As for thermals, the Y7000 does get a bit hot, but the hotspot is the middle-top of the keyboard surface, well away from the WASD keys. It has the now conventional four thermal ports- two at the back and one on each side, and it proves to be decent. Not the best in the market, but it’s decent enough in keeping the laptop somewhat cool.
The Y7000 has Harman-tuned speakers, and oh boy is it booming. Sounds from the speakers are loud and crisp, which is cool for those that don’t use headphones for gaming.
There is no G-Sync or AMD Freesync for the regular 60Hz screen, however. So if you don’t have V-sync on in some games, screen-tearing can be pretty obvious.
The big issue? Storage, of course. It is an expected growing pain as all gaming laptops transition to SSDs as default, but 256GB for gaming is barely enough. A reminder that Destiny 2, Red Dead Redemption II, and Call Of Duty Modern Warfare are among the games that will hog up over half of that default storage size alone.
Thankfully, there is a slot to put a hard drive for future upgrades.
Value
The Lenovo Legion Y7000 is very reasonably priced. A lot of sellers, including the Lenovo online store, are selling this spec of the Y7000 around the RM3,000 mark. Which is crazy value-for-money. And it’s probably not that too expensive to add on an extra 1TB hard drive.
For example, the Lenovo online store is selling the Y7000 with this spec plus a 1TB HDD for RM3,757.34, which is not bad of a price point, to be honest.
There is another variant that has an i7 CPU instead of the i5 for a bit more. But if you’re just here for gaming, the i5 version here is good enough for most uses.
There is some decent competition within the RM3,000-RM4,000 price range, like the Acer Predator Triton 300, but that has less RAM to start with.
Verdict
Overall, the Lenovo Legion Y7000 is an excellent mid-range performer. It can run titles from 2019 onwards on medium settings at respectable performance and totally blaze through older releases with ease. A shame that some models still have way too small of a hard disk size as default.
Outside of some little gamer red accents, it looks pretty sleek too.
Gaming laptops that don’t break your bank do exist. And if you’re looking for a decent one under RM5,000 (or under RM4,000), consider the Lenovo Legion Y7000.
Review unit provided by Lenovo Malaysia
Lenovo Legion Y7000 Gaming Laptop
Gaming laptops that don't break your bank do exist. And if you're looking for a decent one under RM5,000 (or under RM4,000), consider the Lenovo Legion Y7000.
- Hardware 8
- Software 7
- Gaming Performance 8.5
- Value 8.5