Lenovo Legion y545 Review: An Excellent Laptop for Gamers

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Lenovo Legion y545: At First Glance

In the year 2019, Lenovo launched its new entry-level gaming laptop – the Legion y545 – to add to its already existing gaming notebook lineups. Just like its predecessors the Y7000p, the Legion y545 comes with incredible hardware components.

As a result, the value this laptop tends to offer far exceeds the price at which it is sold. Even though it is one of the most affordable gaming laptops ($1,049.64 as of October 2021), its hardware configurations make it seem possible for the laptop to compete with other expensive mid-range gaming laptops.

However, the Lenovo Legion’s design might not be spectacular to everyone because of its simple look. Nonetheless, the remarkable CPU and GPU combination is what any gamer will love to have.

Does this laptop worth its price tag? Read on to find out.

Lenovo Legion y545: Design, Dimension & Weight

The Legion y545 is designed with clean, attractive lines that make it stand out amongst its flashier competitors. The understated styling of the laptop coupled with the aggressive vent at the rear and bottom makes it appear more unique.

The chassis of the Legion y545 is made of dark iron-gray aluminum which I find cool. Why I say it’s cool is mostly because it does not look like the regular boring gray color you may be visualizing.

Precisely, when light reflects on the gray chassis, there is a hint of blue in there somewhere. I know it sounds weird, but that’s the magic Lenovo somehow performed here.

Additionally, the white backlit Y-gaming logo on the lid is so delicately inscribed that it fits just perfectly. The branding on the laptop is different from what we mostly see on gaming laptops like the Acer Predator. 

What makes the Legion y545’s branding very cool is the RGB lighting featured on them.

There is a lot of lighting accent on all corners of the laptop. Aside from the lightning on the lid, there is also a strip at the bottom, in the keyboard, and on the cooling vent as well.

This RGB feature makes the capable of laptop lighting up a dark room.

When you open up the lid of the Legion y545, you will get a proper view of the laptop’s beautiful dark gray aluminum.

Focusing on the laptop’s display, you will notice its display bezels are thinner compared to that of the pricier MSI GS65 Stealth (2019). These thin bezels make the Legion y545 have a more modern look.

Surprisingly, Lenovo did not have room for a webcam at the top bezel. Instead, the 720p webcam weirdly sits on the thick bottom bezels just below the light gray Lenovo logo.

Due to its awkward placement, the video and photo quality the webcam produces is very poor. If you are going to be participating in many live video sessions, you should plan to invest in an external webcam.

Moving to the display, the Lenovo Legion y545 features a 15-inches FHD display. The laptop’s display has a 16:9 ratio and 60 MHz refresh rate.

This screen settles on the narrow hinge that joins the screen itself and the keyboard deck. You will need to be very careful not to put too much weight on the screen or the hinges to avoid damage.

Moving forward, Lenovo made use of the In-plane switching technology for the screen display of this laptop. With its anti-glare feature, the laptop can be used under heavy sunlight or lighting and still maintains its brightness.

When the screen color reproduction capabilities of this laptop were examined, the Y545 showed 99% brightness. Although, this score is below the minimum 100% and the 110% mainstream for a gaming laptop, it is excellent nonetheless.

Besides, the Legion y545’s offers better screen brightness compared to the Zephrus and Pavillion 15 that scored 71% and 66% respectively.

With that being said, let’s move to the keyboard deck and check out the input method of this laptop.

At the top of this deck, you will find a triangular power button that blinks with a white light when the laptop is shutting down or coming on. After that comes a full keyboard that utilizes the vast surface area that is available on the laptop’s deck.

In use, the keyboard keys seem too flat and shallow with a short travel speed of 1.35 mm. These keys require enough force (72 g) to actuate (register input).

Though the key travel is shallow, the keys have a surprising spring to them. They feel smooth and firm enough to give a satisfying typing experience.

Despite the keyboard stretching as wide as possible, there’s still enough room to accommodate a large touchpad. The large trackpad below the keyboard offers an even more satisfying experience.

It is sensitive to touch and it responds well to clicks, taps, and multi-touch gestures like two fingers scrolling.

On the sides of the laptop deck, you will find a set of well-arranged ports. The Legion y545 comes with sufficient ports that can transform it into a passable workstation.

You will find a USB 3.1 Gen 1 port on both the left and right sides of the laptop. On the left side, there’s a combination of a 3.5mm headphone/microphone jack.

Meanwhile, the back of this laptop looks like a typical port station. From the left to the right, there is a USB -C port, a mini display port, another USB 3.1 port, an HDMI video out, an Ethernet jack, plus the power connector and a lock slot.

Unfortunately, there is no port for a card reader and there’s no Thunderbolt 3 port.

For sound, the Legion y545 utilizes a perfect combo of the Dobly Atoms and Harman tuned speakers to produce brilliant sound quality. This laptop is loud enough to fill a room of 200 square feet.

It also has good bass that provides a good depth of sounds.

With a measurement of 361.1 x 266.7 x 24.7 mm and a weight of 2300 g, the Legion y545 is larger and slightly heavier than the HP 15 Gaming Laptop 15. The HP 15 Gaming Laptop 15 measures 361.9 x 257.6 x22.8 and weighs 2222 g.

The Dell G5 15, on the other hand, is a bit heavier and bigger than both laptops. It measures 365.7 x 274.3 x 25.4 and weighs 2540 g.

Coming to the end of the section I will rate the design of the Legion y545 an eight out of ten.

Lenovo Legion y545: Processor (CPU) Performance

The Legion y545 features a six-core i7-9750H with a cache memory of 12MB. In terms of the processor’s speed, it has a base frequency of 2.60 GHz and maximum memory of 4.50 GHz.

This processor is powerful enough to perform tasks pretty well.

According to the Geekbench 4.3 overall performance test, the Legion y545’s processor is an efficient performer. The Geekbench benchmark is a processor performance test program.

Geekbench 4.3 runs a series of tests on a laptop’s processor and scores the processor based on how well it is able to pass the test. The better the CPU performance, the higher the laptop’s Geekbench score would be.

On the Geekbench 4.3 test, the Legion y545 acquired an impressive score of 23,868 points.

When I compared this score with the scores of other laptops in its range, the Legion y545 performed better than most of them. For example, it also outperformed the Pavilion that shares the is equipped with its kind of processor.

The HP Pavilion scored 21,362 on the same Geekbench 4.3 test. The AUSU Zephyrus was the least performer.

The AUSU Zephyrus scored 14,106.

In conclusion, the processor performance of this gaming laptop is impressive. With this performance, the Legion y545 scores a nine.

Lenovo Legion y545: Memory (RAM) Performance

In terms of memory, this laptop didn’t disappoint.

With standard memory of 16GB, the laptop never struggles for a minute. There are even two extra memory slots with which you can expand the memory of this laptop.

So, if the 16 GB memory becomes less capable of handling your daily operations, you can easily upgrade to get better performance.

You can expand the memory on the Legion y545 to a maximum capacity of 32 GB. This should be more than enough for most activities you may want to carry out on the laptop.

In terms of performance, this laptop is capable of handling multiple tasks without hiccups. You can run up to 25 tabs at the same time on this laptop.

Out of the 25 tabs, you may decide to stream YouTube on some while you stream music on Spotify. With those activities, you can still work with Microsoft Word and Spreadsheet without any slow down.

For video editors, this laptop can also be extremely useful for your video and picture editing tasks.

I will offer you the benchmark tests results of this laptop’s memory performance test to give you a definite value of what you should expect in terms of performance.

The most common benchmark tool for testing memory performance on laptops is the PCMark. Hence, we considered the PCMark benchmark test tool for a reliable performance test result.

For clarity, the PCMark test tool evaluates the overall performance of a laptop. The higher the scores, the better the performance.

On the PCMark 10 benchmark test, the Legion y545 scored 5,720 points, leaving most of its counterparts far behind. The Legion Y545 surpassed the Acer Predator Helios 300 and the Dell G7 15 that scored 5,189 and 5,124 respectively. 

As a result, the Legion y545 gets an eight in this memory performance review.

Lenovo Legion y545: Storage Options and Performance

In terms of storage, the Legion y545 offers two storage configuration options. You either equip your laptop with the 2 TB 2.5″ HDD or 1 TB M.2 2280 SSD.

Our review unit features the SSD storage option.

In order to determine the performance speed of this storage on Legion y545, I examined how fast the Legion y545 can perform on a file transfer test.

On the test, the SSD took 27 seconds to copy 4.97GB of media files at a transfer rate of 188.5 megabytes per second. Comparatively, this transfer speed is lagging.

The Legion y545 did not only finish below the category average, 464.2MBps, but it was also not able to beat any of its competitors.

Specifically, the Dell G3 15 was faster with a rate of 299MBps. The HP Pavilion was even faster with its 351MBps rate,

The Zephyrus was the fastest amongst these laptops. It had a speed rate of 424Mbps.

In conclusion, the Legion y545 scores a six in this storage performance review.

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Lenovo Legion y545: Graphics Card Performance

The Legion Y545 is an all-purpose laptop but it’s majorly a gaming laptop. Hence, it offers two powerful dedicated graphics cards.

Firstly, the high-end VRAM configuration is the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, with 6GB GDDR6. This VRAM has a boost frequency of 1770MHz and a base frequency of 1500MHz.

Secondly, the mid-range graphics configuration is the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 also with 6GB GDDR6. Additionally, it has a base frequency of 1365MHz and a boost frequency of 1680MHz.  

These dedicated VRAMs by NVIDIA are capable of taking care of computing tasks, from basic processing tasks to high-demanding tasks like gaming.

Fortunately, our review unit features the high-end graphics card, the NVIDIA GeForce GXT 1660 Ti. To access the performance of this graphics card, a series of tests were carried out.

Specifically, these tests include both benchmark tests and real-world tests. In addition to this, the 3DMark fire strike will be used to analyze its benchmark performance.

3DMark is a benchmark tool that measures the gaming and graphics capabilities of a computer. Higher scores are always better.

On this test, the Legion y545 scored 12,898 points. Although this score is slightly beneath the 13,912 of the Dell G5 15, and the Acer Predator Helios‘ 13,194 points, it is impressive nonetheless.

Moreover, the Legion y545 still performed better than the MSI GS65 Stealth and the Acer Nitro 5 that scored 12,575 and 8,048 points respectively.

To determine the real-world gaming performance of this laptop, Far Cry and Rise of the Tomb Raider were used. We checked to see how well the Legion y545 can run these games.

At the highest settings, the Legion y545 ran Rise of the Tomb Raider at 97fps leaving most of the competitors behind. Precisely, the Acer predator Helios 300 and the Dell G7 15 ran the game at 90 and 91 frames per second.

Both the Legion y545 and the Acer Predator Helios 300 ran Far Cry at 81 frames per second.

Overall, one can say that the GTX 1660 Ti graphics card on the Legion y545 can push it to offer a triple-digit fps range if the laptop is required to play less demanding games.

Due to its excellent graphics card performance, I give the Legion y545 a nine in this graphic performance review.

Lenovo Legion y545: Battery Life and Performance

Lenovo powers its Legion y545 with the 57 Wh Li-Polymer battery. According to Lenovo, this battery can stay powered for 4hours 22 minutes without being plugged in.

Since most gaming laptops don’t usually offer impressive battery life, this battery life seems okay. However, we can’t totally depend on what the manufacturer promises.

To know the actual battery runtime, the laptop had to undergo some tests. This test involved activities like continuous web surfing and video streaming with Wi-Fi turned on and about 50% display brightness.

After a short duration of just 3 hours 38 minutes, the Legion y545 demanded to be plugged in as it was running out of power already.

In comparison, the Legion y545 performed way below most of its counterparts. On the same test, the ASUS Zephyrus lasted for 4 hours 48 minutes.

More impressively, the Dell G15 had a battery runtime of 6 hours 53 minutes.

In conclusion, the Legion y545 scores a six in this battery life performance review.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

The Lenovo Legion Y545 if judged by looks, does not look promising but it delivers well as a gaming laptop. Also, the laptop’s dedicated VRAM offers a surprising supply of power which makes it stand out among its competitors.

However, its battery life falls slightly short compared to some of its competitors. If you want a laptop with a better battery runtime you can go for the ASUS Zephyrus.

However, if you need a laptop with simple looks and spectacular gaming performance, then the Legion Y545 fits the occasion.

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