Lenovo Legion Y545 Hands-On

Written by Alejandro MaquintoPublished • October 8, 2019

The Legion is Lenovo’s line aimed at gamers. Today we’re taking a look at the Lenovo Legion Y545 – a capable laptop with a sleek and stealthy gamer aesthetic. Lenovo offers different variants with different specs to suit the user’s budget.

It only comes in iron gray, with slightly angled edges instead of curves. We have a fondness for its design as this could definitely be used in a professional setting without being too loud. The lit Y logo at the back gives it a slight wow-factor without grabbing too much attention from the room. The body is made with slightly textured plastic which feels smooth to the touch. A word of caution, though, is that the textured body makes the laptop an oil magnet.

At the back you can find a USB Type-C port, mini DisplayPort, a USB 3.1 Type-A, an HDMI port, RJ45 Ethernet port, charging port, and a Kensington lock. You can also find two large exhaust grills for heat dissipation.

On the left side, you get another USB 3.1 Type-A port and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Unfortunately, you need a shared headphone&mic combo because there’s no dedicated mic input. On the right, you get another USB 3.1 Type-A, power, and LED indicators.

At the front, you can find the two Harman speakers situated under the top plate. This design works great when you set the laptop down on a table so the audio bounces back up, but for when you have it on your lap, or on the bed while watching videos, these might not be as great.

Beneath the laptop, there are 2 tall rubber feet toward the back, and 1 long rubber foot towards the front. We tested on glass and wood surfaces, and they do a great job of keeping the laptop steady. Moving the laptop requires you to lift the laptop in order to reposition it. What I really like about the feet is that they elevate the laptop high enough to give enough room to breathe in the fresh air. Speaking of breathing fresh air, there are two fans located on the bottom of the laptop.

While the keyboard is full-sized, with dual functioning F keys. The Legion’s keyboard uses the typical scissor switches with chiclet caps. Typing on the Legion feels great as I’m into short-travel keyboards. The numpad is redesigned so that it fits on top of the arrow keys.

The trackpad is standard, located at the lower left side of the laptop instead of in the middle.

The display is connected to the rest of the laptop via a single hinge. Unfortunately, the Legion Y545 can only tilt up to 135 degrees.

Turning on the laptop, you need to press the Legion logo situated at the top of the keyboard. This lights up while the laptop is on, and has a breathing effect when the laptop is in “sleep” mode.

The Legion Y545 has a 15.6-inch IPS display running at 144hz capable of 300 nits of brightness. While the top and side bezels are slim, the bottom one is large as this is where the Legion logo, webcam, (and mics) are located. It’s an IPS display so the viewing angles are great, and it can get bright enough to battle glare when you’re out working in coffee shops. I saw no ghosting or tearing when running the UFO test as well.

In terms of performance, our model of the Lenovo Legion sports a 144hz IPS display, Core i7-9750H, an NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1660ti, 16GB of 2667MHz of RAM, and 1TB SSD. It’s definitely a capable gaming machine. Stay tuned for our in-depth review to see just how well this laptop performs in both synthetic and real-world games.