Lenovo Legion Y520 Review

The gaming laptop segment is now on a trend that's why mainstream PC brand including Dell, HP, Acer, and Lenovo including component makers such as ASUS and MSI are trying to push gaming laptops into this market. All theses brands have their own gaming series such as Acer has Predator, Asus has the Republic of Gamers, Dell uses Alienware and as the same, the Lenovo pushes its Y series laptops under its gaming banner called Legion. So, today we have Lenovo Legion Y520 under the same banner for review. Let's see whether it can full fill your extreme gaming desires or not.

Build and design

It’s a gaming device, so you can’t think of slim profile. But it is designed for gamers those wants a portability, the Legion Y520 has an aluminum-brushed body and weighs less than 2.5 kgs. It might feel heavy, but It’s actually not that much, one can carry along comfortably. The lid is all black, with a matte carbon-fiber-textured finish and a stealthy embossed Lenovo logo in one corner. There are also red lines around the trackpad and power button, and a small red Legion logo in the lower front corner.

Since most gamers prefer gaming at night, the Legion Y520 laptop has an optional red backlit keyboard that provides 1.7 mm of key travel for crisp, accurate, and responsive keystrokes. The right Windows shortcut key has been replaced with a Lenovo's screen recording software button.

The trackpad has a trapezoidal shape which designed in such a way that it seems to merge in the laptop body and looks really nice.  It's comfortable enough and accuracy is not a problem at all.

The left side of the laptop comprises the Ethernet port, USB 2.0, 3.5mm audio socket, pin hole reset button to reset the BIOS and flat power connector. While on the right side it uses the space for HDMI output, 2-USB 3.0 ports, Type-C 3.0 port and SSD card slot. The good thing is the heat sink fans vent is directed towards the back side of the laptop.

The display and sound

Legion Y520 has a Full HD LED Backlit Anti-glare IPS Slim Display with a matte finish which is good and reduce the reflectiveness. The contrast ratio and black levels are the best and it produces rich colors and has the good amount of brightness levels. I enjoyed playing dark theme games on it as well as the black is deep delivering awesome image clarity. The vivid 1920×1080 resolution screen is among the best displays I have used in gaming laptops with wide viewing angle. The device allows gamers to custom tune audio with the 2 x 2W Harman speakers and Dolby Audio Premium for an outstanding audio quality even without headphones.

Performance

The Y520 features an Intel Core i7 7700HQ CPU, an Nvidia GeForce GTX1050Ti 4 GB graphics card, 16 GB RAM, a 128 GB PCIe SSD, a 1 TB HDD and a 15.6-inch 1080p display. 2x 2-Watt speakers provide the audio.

The laptop hybrid combination of storage 128GB of PCIe SSD + 1TB HDD, ideal for reducing bootup time and in-game loading.

We played games like Thief, Shadow of Mordor, NFS and some other titles on it. The Legion handled all the games quite easily. While playing these games we didn’t notice any visible performance lag. With about 100 fps it was able to render the graphics beautifully. To go beyond, we ran all four games at the same time and played one while running rest in the background. Still, there was no issue with the performance.

While using with the laptop, we got about more than 5 hours of battery backup with moderate usage. But when we played some intensive games, it lasted for about 1 hours. In our video loop test, the battery was able to play video for about 2 hours and 23 minutes over Wi-Fi with full brightness and volume.

Benchmark scores:

Cinebench R15: 678

PCMark 8: 3878

3D Mark: 

Fire Strike Extreme test -3561

DirectX 12 Time Spy test -2415

There is nothing unique but it is one of the most powerful gaming laptop coming at the price of  Rs 92,490 price in India with this configuration. If you want a laptop for gaming as well as for your regular productivity work then you definitely can go for the Leniov Legion Y50.