The reason why people like me have never fancied owning a gaming laptop, despite reviewing a lot of them, is that most of them aren’t too suitable for our line of work. To get the job done, not only we require a laptop that is portable, it needs to have a great keyboard, at least 3-4 hours of battery life on a single charge, and most importantly, it needs to be fast enough to get some processing work done on the go, in my case – video editing. Two weeks back, I received the Lenovo Legion Y920 and was tasked to review if it can ever become my portable workhorse. Sure enough, I put away all my lightweight laptops and set eyes on this huge and heavy gaming laptop, and I’m sure going to miss it when I return it.
Lenovo Legion Y920 Hardware Specifications (as reviewed)
- CPU: Intel Core i7-7820HK, Turbo Boost up to 3.6GHz
- RAM: 32GB DDR4-2400, upgradeable to 64GB
- Storage: 256GB PCI-e Gen4 x 2, 2TB Hybrid SATA HDD
- Display: 17.3″ Full HD IPS, anti-glare, 75Hz refresh rate and NVIDIA G-Sync
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 8GB
- Connectivity: 4 x USB 3.0, 1 x USB-C 3.1 with Thunderbolt 3, 1 x Killer Gigabit Ethernet, 1 x DisplayPort 1.2, 1 x HDMI 2.0, 1 x 3.5mm Microphone, 1 x 3.5mm Audio Out, 1 x 4-in-1 Card Reader, Killer 1535 802.11ac Wireless.
- Battery: 6-cell 90Wh
Design and Hardware
The keyboard layout is a good one, though I would prefer the volume and brightness control keys to be on the F1-F4 keys instead of the numpad, Lenovo has made some useful shortcuts on the numpad, such as muting the laptop’s microphone, launching the Lenovo Nerve Center software, and dedicated math function keys. The directional keys have the similarly size keycaps as the rest, and there’s a dedicated ‘Screen Record’ button that lets you record any action on your screen at 1080p up to 50 frames per second.
Since this is a rather huge laptop, Lenovo made a lot of sense by including a decent sized trackpad that is well distanced away from the keyboard, this effectively eliminates any accidental touches as you type on the keyboard while resting your palm comfortably. Lenovo uses Synaptics drivers for the trackpad, which is one of my favourite when it comes to tracking precision and sensitivity, I have been very satisfied with the performance and there’s no need to connect a mouse if I am merely using it for work and web browsing.
User Experience
I have no complaints about the laptop’s overall performance during my two-week review period, as I’m using it to write this entire review. My initially complain was transporting this 4.4kg behemoth around, and I have challenges finding a table that is large enough to fit the laptop with my cup of drink next to it, however I got used to having it in my backpack after a while, with things such as an external hard drive, an iPad Pro and a couple of cables, it merely feels like my usual traveling backpack, though I won’t entirely suggest that it is lightweight, I consider this to be manageable if you seriously need powerful computing on the go.
In most cases, the laptop will stay plugged into a power source if I had the chance to spot one, but if you were to depend on battery to get some work done, I’ve found it to last a combined usage of up to 3-hours if I’m doing stuffs like e-mails and web browsing. All thanks to NVIDIA’s Battery Boost, I could do some casual gaming at 40 frames per second on GTA V and Tomb Raider on battery with up to 90 minutes of gameplay time, expect that time to go lesser if you are doing video rendering, as it uses both CPU and GPU power.
As a powerful gaming laptop, I appreciate the Turbo Mode to be automatically enabled by Lenovo’s Nerve Center whenever I launch a game, however with a 500MHz increase in CPU clock speed and 100MHz increase in GPU memory clock speed, I haven’t noticed much difference in gaming performance, you’d probably get a 5-8 frames per second increase, however the CPU gets really hot and I recorded a maximum temperature of 95-degree Celsius, though there isn’t any serious performance throttle and it doesn’t affect the palm area, I would advise putting the laptop on a table for that, and disable Turbo Mode if you don’t need that extra clock speed.
I’ve always find gaming laptops to not have a great sound system, despite many of them claiming that they have dedicated audio chips onboard and probably having speakers that are tuned by some popular companies. You won’t find any audio branding on the Lenovo Legion Y920, but it uses a pair of 2W JBL-tuned speakers and a 3W subwoofer, combined with Dolby Atmos sound enhancement, this speaker system produces loud and clean audio that you won’t find the need for an external speaker if you are gaming in your room.
Synthetic Benchmarks
Gaming
3DMark
PCMark 10
Storage Speed Test – CrystalDiskMark
The Lenovo Legion Y920’s solid state drives perform extremely fast in both read and write transfer tests, and the use of a hybrid hard drive for the system’s secondary storage is very commendable, as this would improve load times in games and applications stored on the drive.
Verdict
The Good
- Impressive performance
- Reasonable battery life
- Competitive price point
- Decent I/O port placement
- Mechanical keyboard and trackpad
- Best gaming laptop speakers I’ve ever heard
- Display has accurate and vivid colour reproduction
- Easy to access internals for upgrading hardware
The Not So Good
- Heavy and large footprint