The gaming fanatic in me would always get excited at the idea of gaming laptops and there’s 3 things I look for in a gaming laptop. Performance, value for money and aesthetics. While the third requirement isn’t exactly a requirement for some people, the RGB monster in me also constantly wants to be appeased.
At first glance, the Lenovo Legion Y740 gaming laptop seems to be able to fulfill all those requirements quite easily. With a starting price of RM7529, it can be hard to argue the second requirement. But to me, considering the specs as well as the size, it’s not a very bad price. I’ll explain further in our review below.
The light up Legion logo
The side vents have RGB too. The back juts out a little as well.
You're not gonna run out of ports with this laptop
Let’s start off with the design. When off, it looks like a simple looking laptop. The Legion logo is placed on the light on the left of the device. The inside looks like any other normal laptop as well. However, turning it on was the moment my RGB addicted self felt excited. The keyboard lighting system is done in collaboration with Corsair iCUE. Unlike other gaming laptops, the keyboard, the Y shape on the Legion logo as well as the air vents (I’m freaking out!) will light up. Not only that, the lighting is completely customizable (I’m in love with the Rain lighting).
The laptop comes with very skinny bezels except at the bottom which is possibly done to accommodate the webcam that is placed there. The back of the laptop juts out as well to accommodate the cooling system as well as the many ports the laptop has to offer.
The skinny bezels add to the immersiveness while gaming
One negative to the laptop (which is kind of a dealbreaker to me) is the keyboard. While the aesthetics of it is great, the keyboard itself, not so much. The first qualm I had was with the placement of the keys. There are dedicated macro keys placed on the leftmost side of the laptop which include an M1 and M2 keys, a recording key as well as a swap window key. Now that those keys are there, the keyboard is shifted to the right, which caused me to mispress a lot of keys while gaming most of the time. However, you can remap those keys. In addition, the keys are chiclet keys which give little to no feedback when pressed. This resulted in me pressing on the keys a lot harder than I should have sometimes.
As for the touchpad, this gaming laptop comes with one of the most accurate feeling touchpads out there so far. It was very pleasant to use. The touchpad buttons are placed at the bottom of the touchpad instead of under which is a plus in my books. However, the buttons feel kinda flimsy.
Keyboard layout. Wasn't a big fan of the macro keys on the left side
A closer look at the touchpad. The buttons are a little flimsy
The webcam placement is sort of odd down there
Tech specs for the laptop is extremely beefy with the Nvidia RTX2060 GPU, the 8th gen Intel Core i7 processor, 256GB SSD, 1TB HDD, 16GB of RAM and more. Playing Destiny 2 on the laptop on the highest settings still managed to give me between 95-110(ish) fps which is really impressive when you think of how graphic intensive the game is. To get high fps does require some tinkering on the Nvidia Control Panel instead of it coming straight out of the box though.
The only drawback to extreme power is the loud sound that comes from the fans when it is hard at work. It can get pretty hot but not enough to scare me as the cooling system does a pretty good job on keeping the temperatures from getting too high. Named Legion CoolFront, the cooler is a dual-channel thermal system with 4 thermal vents placed around the back of the laptop.
The Corsair iCUE lighting software
Check out how many frames this laptop can pump out on Destiny 2 with high settings
Game and laptop optimizations can be accessed via Lenovo Vantage. The app automatically adjusts the laptop’s resources to ensure a better gaming experience. You can even monitor your laptop in-real time via the app. However, this didn’t feel like it added much to my gaming experience.
In conclusion, this is a pretty solid gaming laptop with a decent price tag for its specs. In the same playing field you can find the Acer Predator Triton 500 laptop (RM8599) and the HP Omen 15 (RM7999). Based on these prices, you can now understand why I highlighted the price tag of this Lenovo gaming machine.
Here are the complete Lenovo Legion Y740 Tech Specs and Features list:
- Up to 8th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-8750H
- Up to 512 GB PCIe NVMe, Up to 1 TB HDD 7200RPM
- 16 GB DDR4 2666 MHz
- 15.6" FHD (1920 x 1080), 72% color gamut, NVIDIA® G-SYNC, Dolby Vision-enabled, 144 Hz, up to 500 nits
- NVIDIA® GeForce® RTX 2060
- USB 3.1 Gen 2,2 x USB 3.1 Gen 1, Mini DisplayPort™ 1.4, HDMI™ 2.0, Ethernet, AC adapter, Kensington Lock slot, Thunderbolt™ 3 Type-C, 3.5mm microphone/headphone combo, NOVO button
- ~2.2KG | 361.42mm x 267mm x 22.45mm
- Windows 10 Home
Pros and Cons
Pros - I absolutely loved the RGB lighting on the laptop! In terms of performance, the laptop was able to do some extremely heavy lifting when it comes to gaming, pumping out some decent FPS while playing graphically intensive games
Cons - The keyboard layout is a dealbreaker for me. You can get used to the keyboard if that is your only machine. However, if you have 2-3 different machines like me, you would probably end up getting frustrated every time you hop on the Legion Y740.
Summary - One of the lower priced gaming laptops with extremely beefy specs. Love the RGB aesthetics and very impressed by how smoothly heavy games can run on it. Very sad about the keyboard layout.
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