Lenovo Legion Y740 (9th Gen) review: A gaming laptop that looks all business
The Lenovo Legion Y740 may be a gaming laptop, but it hardly looks like one.
By HardwareZone Team -
Dressed up for business
Lenovo's Legion laptops aren't the flashiest notebooks around, but they stand out for precisely that reason. While I think gaming laptops today are generally a lot more tasteful than they were a few years ago, there's still no mistaking them for anything else other than a machine made for gamers.
The Legion Y740 walks a fine line between keeping it subtle and being, well, plain boring. If not for the lights that illuminate the Legion logo in the lid and the vents, there's not much to show that this is a gaming system. That said, the default is a cool, blue light that actually looks a lot better than the red that many other systems favour, and I think the Legion Y740 could do a good job of appealing to a specific type of customer that doesn't want a machine that will be noticed.
Here's an overview of its specifications:
- 15.6-inch 1,920 x 1,080-pixel IPS 144Hz G-Sync display
- Intel Core i7-9750H processor (2.60GHz, 12MB L3 cache)
- 32GB DDR4-2666 dual-channel RAM
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q
- 512GB PCIe SSD + 1TB HDD
- 361.42 x 267 x 22.45mm
- 2.2kg
The above will cost you S$3,599, a rather competitive price tag, especially considering that you get a whopping 32GB of memory. It's a few hundred dollars cheaper than many of the other options on the market, an important consideration given how crowded this space has become.
Is the laptop worth your time? Read on to find out.
Okay, what's to like about it?
It's a gaming notebook, but it doesn't really look like one.
I've actually reviewed the Legion Y740 with the Intel Core i7-8750H, so you can head over to that article for a more in-depth look at the laptop. The Legion Y740 with me today is the exact same laptop – it's just been updated with Intel's newer Core i7-9750H – so I'll just be going over the key points of the notebook here.
As I mentioned in my earlier review, the Legion Y740 is really a gaming laptop with ThinkPad DNA. Turn the lights off, and it could blend into a board meeting with little trouble at all.
Other than the Legion logo, the lid is completely plain.
The Legion Y740 stands out for me in a couple of key ways – design and price. It's still not that easy to find a gaming laptop that isn't screaming for attention in some way. And when they do exist, such as with the ASUS ROG Zephyrus S GX502 and Razer Blade 15, they're also more expensive while offering less. For instance, the GX502 ships with just single-channel memory, while the Blade 15 only comes with 16GB of memory.
The muted look on the Legion Y740 is also its most unique selling point, and when you combine that with its very attractive specifications and price, it's clear that Lenovo has come up with quite an interesting formula.
It's not just about the hardware specifications though. Lenovo has also included features and a wide range of connectivity options that are quite nice to see at this price point. One of these is support for NVIDIA G-Sync, which when used together with the 144Hz refresh rate should provide a really fluid and tear-free gaming experience. Then there's the Thunderbolt 3 port, which is useful for outputting to an external dock, high-res screens or a speedy external storage array (even a separate graphics enclosure is possible, but we doubt you'll need one with a GeForce RTX mobile GPU in the Legion Y740).
The Thunderbolt 3 port is located on the left.
Elsewhere, you're not lacking for USB ports or display outputs either, and the Legion Y740 also comes with one USB 3.1 (Gen 2) Type-A, two USB 3.1 (Gen 1) Type-A, one Mini DisplayPort 1.4, and one HDMI 2.0 output.
There's just one Type-A port on the right.
Finally, the speakers support Dolby Atmos, and you can play around with different sound profiles, such as Dynamic, Movie, Music, Game, and Voice. I wouldn't take the Dolby Atmos label too seriously given that these are after all still laptop speakers, but they are one of the better ones I've tested, and I think they'll fare well enough for things like watching a movie.
What's not so hot?
Build quality is one area that could really be improved. While the gunmetal aluminum body is solid enough, with no concerning areas of flex, the display is an entirely different matter altogether. It almost feels flimsy, with obvious flex at the bottom even when just pushing against it quite lightly. I'm still able to operate the hinge without needing to hold the base down, but that amount of flex really isn't a good look for the laptop.
There's a lot of flex in the area around the webcam.
The display was also a little on the dim side, and I had to constantly run it at maximum brightness all the time.
I'm also not a fan of the extra row of utility keys on the left. These comprise two macro keys, two for keyboard brightness, one for recording game footage, and a dedicated half-height key for launching Lenovo's Vantage software. Honestly, do you need dedicated keys for adjusting the brightness on your keyboard? It's not as if you get a ton of brightness levels to work with either, and there are just three. The backlighting on the keys with secondary legends is also very obviously uneven, so I'm not sure why you'd want to have dedicated keys to control a feature that isn't particularly well-implemented.
The row of extra keys at the left isn't particularly useful.
The other keys don't serve much purpose either, and I almost never had to launch the Vantage software beyond checking out what it had to offer. One glaring thing that's missing from it is the ability to manually set your fan speed, a feature I think should be present on every gaming laptop.
I should also point out that while the rear-facing ports are great for when you want to use the Legion Y740 to output to an external monitor, they're less convenient when you're on the go and actually need to access the rear ports frequently. And you will, because most of the ports are in fact located at the back. The illuminated legends do make things easier, but the fact remains that rear connectors are still harder to reach than ports at the side.
A look at the ports at the rear.
While I said that the Legion Y740's plain design is one of its key strengths, it isn't perfect either. I definitely appreciate what Lenovo is trying to do here, but the design could still use a little finesse and refinement. The overall look of the keyboard and touchpad does feel a little dated, and I think Lenovo could have achieved a more modern look if it went for more angular keys and opted for a larger glass trackpad and integrated click buttons. Who knows, a jet black colour instead of gunmetal gray might have worked better as well.
And then there's the size of the power brick. Put simply, the thing is crazy large. It's nearly as long as the laptop is wide, and it's only an added encumbrance for a laptop that doesn't have great battery life to begin with. Furthermore, the poor battery life means you'll definitely need to bring the adapter out with you, an unenviable task.
The power brick is absolutely enormous.
Test setup and performance
Here's a full list of the notebooks we're looking at:
- Lenovo Legion Y740
- Acer Predator Triton 500
- Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED XA
- Gigabyte Aorus 15 XA
I've chosen a mix of GeForce RTX 2070 and 2070 Max-Q laptops to compare against the Legion Y740 so you get an idea of how it stacks up against the competition.
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I ran the notebooks through the following benchmarks:
- PCMark 10
- AS SSD
- 3DMark
- Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
- Far Cry 5
- Metro Exodus
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider
- Tom Clancy's The Division 2
How good is it for work?
PCMark 10 Extended evaluates systems based on workloads that can be categorized into four distinct groups, comprising Essentials, Productivity, Digital Content Creation, and Gaming. This includes tests such as app start-up times, web browsing, word processing and spreadsheets, photo and video editing, and rendering and visualization tasks. Finally, gaming performance is evaluated using the Fire Strike benchmark.
Unsurprisingly, all the GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q laptops performed very similarly, although the Legion Y740 did inch ahead by a small margin. That said, I doubt you'll notice much difference in regular productivity applications with these notebooks.
What's the storage performance like?
The Legion Y740 comes equipped with a Western Digital PC SN720 NVMe 512GB M.2 SSD and a Seagate Barracuda Pro 1TB HDD. The WD drive held its own across all the benchmarks, but it did particularly well in the higher queue depth workload.
How fast is it in games?
The Legion Y740 does pretty well overall in our gaming benchmarks. It trails slightly at times, but it also manages to snag the lead in other instances. It performed well in line with expectations though, which is to say that it'll comfortably run just about any AAA title at 1080p.
How good is the battery life?
I tested the battery life using PCMark 10's new Modern Office and Gaming battery life benchmarks. All the notebooks were set to 100 per cent display brightness and had Wi-Fi enabled. The keyboard backlight was disabled.
Given the Legion Y740's small 57Wh battery, it's not really surprising that it didn't fare too well in our battery life tests, lasting barely over two hours in PCMark 10's Modern Office benchmark. That said, power consumption was also on the higher side compared to the Acer and Gigabyte laptops, which were also equipped with the GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q.
Furthermore, since the Lenovo laptop also didn't the slimmest or lightest machine around, it didn't do too well in our portability index, which takes into account things like battery life, weight, and chassis dimensions. It is considerably less portable than the Acer Triton 500 and Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED XA, and only marginally better than the Aorus 15, which isn't even a Max-Q laptop.
Clearly, you won't really want to rely on the Legion Y740 if you don't know when you'll next be able to find a power outlet.
Is the cooling performance good?
The Legion Y740 is cooled by a total of three heat pipes, which isn't the most impressive setup I've come across. For instance, the ROG Zephyrus S GX502 has a total of six heat pipes. In this case, the CPU and GPU each have their own dedicated heat pipe, but the third is shared between the two of them.
Here's a look at the laptop's innards.
Cool air is drawn in through the bottom of the laptops by the two fans and expelled from the sides and back. One thing to point out is that the Legion Y740 is surprisingly quiet for a gaming laptop, even after selecting the highest performance mode in the Vantage software. As I mentioned earlier, there's no way to manually adjust the fan speeds in Vantage, and it seems like the fan curve works pretty conservatively.
The good news is that this doesn't seem to have affected performance, and surface temperatures, particularly the palm rests, were more or less in line with the other laptops. It does get warm to touch of course, but it never got excessively toasty. That said, CPU temperatures are on the high side, although they're still better than on the Aorus 15.
A no-nonsense laptop
My conclusion in my previous review of the Legion Y740 (8th Gen) still stands. This laptop does its job well enough, even though it's not the most exciting thing around and honestly kind of boring. Still, its simple and plain design remains its strongest point, and it's definitely one of the more unique offering in a sea of notebooks with more aggressive designs and flashing lights.
There are a couple of other points in its favour as well. At S$3,599, the Legion Y740 comes with a generous 32GB serving of RAM and support for G-Sync. It also features a Thunderbolt 3 port, a feature that is still not as common as I'd like.
Yes, there are of course better alternatives to be had, but you'll also have to pay more. The biggest problems I have with the Legion Y740 are its middling build quality and subpar battery life (not to mention that ridiculously large power adapter). I don't think the Legion Y740 is a bad laptop, but it kind of feels like I'd just be settling for less if I bought it.
After all, Lenovo already has the IdeaPad L340 and Legion Y7000 if you want an affordable, nondescript gaming laptop. I'd get one of those if I were on a budget, and if I wasn't, I'd be willing to pay a few hundred dollars more for a laptop that feels better in hand and lasts longer. While the Legion Y740 may be cheaper than the competition, it's hardly chump change, and it's still competing against a range of notebooks with far better build quality and battery life. At this price point, it probably makes more sense to shell out a bit more for a more well-rounded option like the Razer Blade 15.
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