This is the Lenovo legion y545. It’s a lot like the 540, but it’s a little bit more money, but what do you get for that more classy look? This has an aluminum lid on it. I’m still maybe as plastic on the bottom, but it’s got a soft-touch black finish inside.
In fact a lot like a thing pad which Lenovo makes and a keyboard, which is a good thing. It’s a lot like a thing pads, and the good news is for a gaming laptop, this entry to mid-level depending on how you configure.
It starts at eight hundred and forty-nine dollars, such a deal intel ninth Gen 6 Core i7 CPU inside ours and you can have your choice of Nvidia gtx 1650 our gtx 1660 TI or in RTX 2060. The laptop has a 15.6-inch display because it’s not a high-end gaming laptop.
Lenovo does make those to your maximum resolution. Here is full HD. You have a choice of two different displays, 60 Hertz and for about $100 more 144 Hearts refresh rate, and that hundred forty-four Hertz makes sense mostly if you go with an RT X 2060.
Yeah, well depends on the game now. If you’re playing something like apex, where even on high, you can get pretty good frame rates on this. Well, if you’re playing apex, then the 1660TI is still a solid choice, which is what we have.
The base model is gonna get you a core i5 9300h eight gigs of ram. You know you’d like a dole channel you’d like 16 worth a little extra spend for that or upgrade it yourself. A 256 gig nvme boot SSD and a one terabyte fast 7200 rpm hard drive ours happens to be a Seagate Barracuda inside.
So that’s not that and the 60 Hertz full HD display. If you spend around eleven hundred and thirty-five dollars or so, you can have our model, the Core i7 9750h and that gtx 1660TI, instead of the base models gtx 1650.
He had 16 gigs of ram, the same 256 gig SSD and the same fast one terabyte hard drive, and still that 60 Hertz display. Do you want to go up, like I said, about 70 to 100 dollars to go up to that faster display.
Now, if you do want to go up to an RTX 2060 and if you can afford to hey, why not I would. That’s about $100. Right now, it’s on special for only $70 more if you’re moving up from the 1660ti. That is some you’re looking at something very affordable, and that’s what this is. This is a lot of bang for the buck and unlike a lot of entry-level gaming laptops.
That starts under $1000. This one doesn’t look so cheeseball plasticky or gamer either. Yeah, it has pretty aggressive grilles, and it does need to do a lot of ventilation other than the white Y logo on the lid that does light up. I haven’t found a way to stop it from happening.
It’s pretty sedate looking, and it’s pretty classy. It doesn’t look cheesy, which means it’s a good crossover laptop for those who are also really just doing some gaming but need a more powerful laptop or something else. You are doing maybe doing some CAD, some blender work, that kind of thing.
You know who you are. You shop crush up to gaming laptops because you need some more horsepower for whatever you’re doing video editing anything as we do. You get the idea now the cooling on this is pretty good.
One of the benefits of having a slim and relatively lights 5.2 pounds. Which is two-point three kilograms around an inch thick, If it’s not painfully thin like the premium laptops. You have room for a little bit more cooling, so we have two fans, two heat pipes.
One of them is shared. The other is not good to not share them all, and we also have a lot of heat sink action here covering things like VRMs. Which is pretty advanced for a budget laptop, and then it does help with cooling in some games.
Yes, these are hot-running CPUs. We hit 95 degrees centigrade on the core temperatures, but it wasn’t throttling on some other games like apex. We’re pushing very high frame rates running that on high Full HD resolution. Then it did do some thermal throttling, but it was running madly high fits on that game.
So hey, it’s fair and given what gaming laptops are these days. The cooling solution on this is pretty good. The fans you’ll hear them, but they’re not loud are not annoying. They won’t fill a room with noise either. There are 70 blade fans, and They’re pretty high-quality.
Again, punching above its weight certainly for a gaming laptop. Performance on this is exactly where you would expect it to a little bit better. Lenovo’s doing a good job of getting performance, particularly out of the CPU on this.
If we presented you the graph comparing it to other laptops with the same configuration, though. You wouldn’t see a whole lot of difference between them. Most manufacturers actually do a pretty good job of getting good performance.
Out of their laptops, that’s what it tells us. But I would say that here we’re looking at very good PC mark ten numbers. For example, which tells me that the thermal solution is helping without seeing thermal throttling.
Things like 3d mark gaming benchmarks, the CPU typically reaches into the low 90s only, not above, not thermal throttling you go Lenovo that’s nice again. We have the 1660Ti in ours, and that’s full 1660Ti. It has six gigs of VRAM.
If you go to the RTX 2060, you’ll get a little bit more heat inside the chassis. It might lead to a bit more thermal throttling, but it wouldn’t be so much thought and scare me away from buying it.
As I said, the keyboard on this is lovely for those who have to type a lot. Lenovo says it’s an anti-ghosting keyboard. It’s a lot like the Lenovo ThinkPad p53 keyboard, though, which is a good thing.
1.7 millimeters of key travel those smile shape keys nice it’s not super springy pushing back up at you, but it’s got a nice crisp feel to, and then it has that number pad like the p53 does.
Overall good stuff you have a Microsoft precision bad smile are not glass that’s fine for the price could you tell the difference if I didn’t tell you. When it comes to glass versus my alarm, I don’t think.
So we have Harman branded stereo speakers that are front-firing along with the bottom edge kind of down and forward-firing and W Atmos software. They’re pretty good speakers. They get reasonably loud. They have a decent amount of bass, which you would like to see for a gaming laptop.
But in the budget territory, you don’t always get that. Another plus we have a USB 3.1 port on each side, left hand on right-handed. You can find a place to plug in your mouse and a headphone jack on the side.
All the other ports are on the back, that’s good. If you like it tidy, it’s not so great if you’re always reaching around to the backside. You decide it’s up to you how much you like that or don’t like that.
We have Lenovo’s proprietary rectangular charging connector at the back, where the 231 charge on our is a lower-powered model. We have a hundred seventy Watt and also on the back way of HDMI 2.0, the mini DisplayPort 1.4 and USB see not Thunderbolt 3 though.
So yes, you could drive three displays if you wanted to out. There’s rj45 Gigabit Ethernet and Wi-Fi. It’s the usual Intel 9560 AC with Bluetooth. So now it comes to battery life, this hinges back on performance.
This is pretty interesting. This is a feature you don’t see much on gaming laptops. We wish that you did and certainly not on budget once you can switch between dedicated graphics all the time. And for whatever reason, that usually does result in better frame rates in games.
Even if the dedicated GPU is the only thing that seems to be engaged in fine frames per second or better, or you can switch to hybrid or switchable Nvidia Optimus graphics. Your battery life obviously will be different.
If you’re plugged in in gaming, I would turn off hybrid graphics and just run dedicated all the time. If you’re unplugged and you’re running on dedicated graphics, only expect about three and a half hours.
This is a 57 watt-hour battery, which is not that big, and this is the shortcoming a lot of relatively speaking of thin and light 15-inch gaming laptops, particularly the budget ones.
If you do have it on switchable graphics when you’re doing productivity and everyday work streaming your video, you can manage about four and a half to five hours. So this is not a class leader in battery life.
Technical Specification
Processor
- 9th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-9750H Processor (2.60 GHz, up to 4.50 GHz with Turbo Boost, 6 Cores, 12 Threads, 12 MB Cache)
Operating System
- Windows 10 Home
Memory
- 16 GB DDR4 2667MHz
Display
- 15.6″ FHD (1920 x 1080) IPS, anti-glare, 60Hz, 300 nits
Graphic
- NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1660 Ti 6GB
Storage
- 1 TB 7200 RPM HDD
- 256 GB PCIe SSD
Keyboard
- White-backlit
Networking
Wi-Fi
- Intel® 802.11AC (2 x 2)
Bluetooth
- Bluetooth® 4.2
Interface
- USB-C
- 3 x USB 3.1** (Gen 1)
- Headphone / mic combo
- Mini DisplayPort™ 1.4
- HDMI™ 2.0
- RJ45
- Kensington® lock
Weight
- 5.1 lbs (2.3 kg)
Battery
- 52.2 Wh (with NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1650 graphics)
- 57 Wh (with NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1660 Ti graphics)
- 57 Wh (with NVIDIA® GeForce® RTX 2060 graphics)
Audio
- Harman® speakers with Dolby Atmos® for Gaming
Dimensions (W x D x H)
- 14.22″ x 10.5″ x 0.97″-1.05″ / 361.1 x 266.7 x 24.7-26.6 (mm)
Color
- Iron Grey
Manufacturer Warranty
- 1 year Limited warranty (Include 1 Year Global)
Summary
So that’s a little Allegiant why 545 I like it a lot for the price. It’s really nice to see a gaming laptop that starts under a thousand dollars and you can get a decent configuration, more of a power user configuration even for 1150 or less.
That doesn’t look ugly. it doesn’t look cheap. It has a good sound and the cooling is pretty good on this. The graphics on this are pretty good that gtx 1660 TI really punches above. Its weight you don’t get ray-tracing but uh not you get a lot of good performance In games sufficient to play high at frame rates that will exceed the 60 Hertz display.