Lenovo Legion Y540 15 inch: an efficient laptop at a fair price

Presentation

On the official page of the Legion Y540, you will find a slogan which does not seem like anything, but which summarizes rather well the philosophy of Lenovo: "Clean, compact and ready to do battle".

A credo that materializes in a machine without much external fantasy, certainly, but with solid specifications: Core Intel i7-9850H, GeForce Nvidia RTX 2060 graphics circuit and IPS panel 144 Hz, all offered in a budget envelope contained - about 1 € 500 at the time of writing. A figure which very clearly represents the lower end of the range for this type of service.

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Screen

As we underlined in the introduction, Lenovo has taken the decision not to underestimate the visual comfort by offering a matte IPS panel from BOE brand capable of supporting a native definition of 1920 x 1080 px and a maximum refresh rate of 144 Hz. The purists will be sorry for the absence of G-Sync, but the technical sheet is rather raised.

With a brightness of 320 cd / m² and an average contrast measured at 1195: 1, the panel of the Y540 is in a good average. In parallel, the color temperature is quite close (6,897 K to be precise) to 6,500 K of the video standard, while the average delta E reaches the value of 3.5.

Two points to end our analysis of the display. First, the remanence of 6 ms is perfectly sized for an intensive video game activity and guarantees that no effect of drag or blurring on moving objects will spoil your games. Then, the ratio between the size of the chassis and that of the slab is 78%, which is completely correct. From our point of view, we are on wise technical choices on the part of Lenovo.

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Performances

Intel Core i7-9750H (6 cores / 12 threads / Max Boost Frequency at 4.5 GHz), GeForce NVIDIA RTX 2060 graphics circuit, 32 GB of DDR4 memory clocked at 2667 MHz and distributed over two slots and a 1 TB NVMe SSD. Obviously, our copy was particularly well equipped for our tests. However, for the sake of consistency, the potential buyer will be more likely to choose 16 GB of RAM and a less expensive storage system, such as an M.2 + HDD SSD combo.

All this being specified - and consistent with what we mentioned on the cooling part -, the CPU performance index of this Y540 remains very high (96 points). It should be able to absorb your most demanding calculations without real difficulties.

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Games

Again, almost everything was said when we raised the issue of cooling. The RTX 2060 is pretty well exploited and provides access to very satisfactory video game experiences on the latest titles on the market: 70 fps on Monster Hunter World, 72 fps on WRC8, 62 fps on The Witcher 3, all these games being configured with a very high level of rendering.

Support for a refresh rate of 144 Hz also ensures optimal rendering on more nervous and competitive titles, such as CS: Go or Overwatch. The RTX 2060 is also able to process raytracing effects. There is reason, however, to keep in mind on this subject: on such a card, activating these in-game effects causes the display bit rate to drop drastically, which forces compromises in terms of rendering and which may not be worth the counterpart of raytracing. From our experience, the RTX 2070 remains a more credible entry point for this technology.

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Mobility / Autonomy

With a footprint of 36.5 x 26 x 2.59 cm and a weight of 2.3 kg, the Legion Y540 is not really one of the featherweights, especially if we take into account the power supply (730 g, remember it). The overall volume is obviously due to the power of the on-board components which require a lot of cooling, but also to the presence of a 52.5 Wh battery.

An element that makes the Legion Y540 rather enduring compared to other laptops in its class. It lasted just over 5 hours before asking for mercy (Netflix in Chrome, headphones plugged in, backlight off and brightness set to 200 cd / m²). For comparison, the average of gaming laptops is between 3 and 4 hours.

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Audio

We suspected that the location of the speakers would not allow this Y540 to ambience our evenings, and we were not mistaken. Whether we're talking about music, video or gaming, the speakers can only act as a backup. They broadcast muffled, imprecise sounds marred by strong dynamic compression. Worse, when typing text, our wrists are placed just above the audio outputs of the chassis, creating an even greater obstacle to the propagation of sound.

Another point of dissatisfaction: Lenovo automatically imposes Dolby Atmos software processing on its audio outputs. It has little to do with the surround processing of the same name and only adds to the sound rendering of rather unsightly phase processing. Disabling this "feature" does not save the rendering on speakers, but it allows to enjoy an honest headphone output. The latter thus delivers sufficient power for most uses, just as it reproduces the sound signal with low distortion and negligible noise. On the other hand, we note that the current withstand is not very well managed when the volume reaches 90% of its capacity.

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Conclusion

The Legion Y540 makes a multitude of small compromises that prevent it from shining against more ambitious competing models. We are talking about a somewhat fair cooling system, small design elements that limit general ergonomics, an unsuccessful software suite, or a correct audio part, but nothing more. Compromises which should not however make us forget two important points: first, the essential is mastered, whether it is the display, performance or comfort. And this control is done within a reasonable budgetary envelope on this market. From there to conclude that the Y540 is a rational and efficient machine and a good gateway to the RTX era, there is only one step, which we cross serenely.

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