Student Brands

I recently got my hands on the Legion Y540 by Lenovo, and to say that I was thoroughly impressed by its performance would be an understatement. With powerful hardware, more than capable gaming support, and the 230W fast-charging feature, the Legion Y540 is a beast of a machine. Even after 5-6 hours of continuously playing the action and graphics-heavy Red Dead Redemption 2 on the Lenovo Legion Y540, the laptop barely heated up or produced any lags in the gameplay. This 15.6-inch widescreen laptop weighs about 2.07 kgs and comes with the i7 processor. This makes the laptop incredibly fast and a powerful device for gaming with no lags.

While I have been using the 15.6 inch laptop for almost a month now, the Lenovo Legion Y540 is also available in a 17.3 inch model. Available at an affordable price of about ZAR 24,000, the Legion Y540 is a great laptop for both gaming and heavy computations (if you are looking to run heavy programs, such as machine learning or deep learning, on the laptop). Here’s everything I loved about this beast of a machine and a little something about what I did not like.

It’s light, slim, and isn’t like your average gaming laptop

The last gaming laptops I’ve had have been incredibly chunky, bulky, and, quite frankly, ugly-looking. Even though my gaming experience was superb, I always hated how the heavy fans would make an unbearable noise. Their incredible weight also prevented me from lugging them around. However, this has changed ever since I have been using the Lenovo Legion Y540.

It’s light, slim, easily portable, and even looks sleek. With a minimalist design, the Legion logo, and no heavy fans for cooling the hardware, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a laptop so sleek and spectacular-looking. Even with low weight and a sleek design, this laptop offers incredible heat management which is a big plus for me. An additional bonus that this laptop offers is that it’s display and keyboard have been designed by keeping gamers in mind.

Even after a month of heavy gaming (I tend to hit the keys pretty hard), the keyboard is still in a pretty good shape. However, since they’ve changed the positioning of the number pad, it did take me a little while to get used to it. Plus, the grooves on its surface tend to collect dust and it takes a little bit of an effort to clean it up.

Even though it doesn’t offer 4K colors, the display is quite crisp without any heavy RGB colors that tend to make browsing the Web or using the laptop for normal tasks quite painful on the eyes. This is mostly not found on gaming laptops but the Legion Y540 does a great job of taking care of it.

Powerful processor but an average battery

With the Nvidia RTX2060 GPU and 6GB of dedicated VRAM, the Lenovo Legion Y540 offers powerful performance. The cooling system is pretty good so your laptop won’t heat up even after hours of continued gaming. I further tested the laptop by opening a number of tabs on Google Chrome and several other desktop applications (Powerpoint, Photoshop, Spotify, Whatsapp), and even then I noticed no lags. Even with all settings, such as brightness, sound, resolution, etc, set at the maximum level, I noticed no problems. However, this superior performance doesn’t mean it doesn’t take a toll on the laptop’s battery.

I had to plug-in the charger quite often. Other than a lack of 4K color support, the Legion Y540’s average battery life was a bit of a downer since it means I need to always carry around my charger. If this isn’t a cause of concern for you, there is no reason why you shouldn’t consider buying this incredibly powerful laptop.

The final verdict

For me, the average battery life and lack of 4K display was a bit of a downer. However, when I look past these small issues, I find the Lenovo Legion Y540 to be an incredibly powerful gaming laptop with a professional touch. You can take it to your classes in school or college, and it won’t stand out like the other bulky gaming laptops. Plus, its sleek design and lightweight nature does make it a great gaming laptop for me. If the battery life doesn’t concern you, I see no reason why you shouldn’t get your hands on this beast-mode gaming laptop right away!

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