Lenovo Boosts Legion Gaming Line At CES 2019

CES 2019 showcased a multitude of PC gaming announcements from many different vendors, including Lenovo . Lenovo has been building up its Legion line of gaming hardware for the last few years and is starting to refine it, with new gaming laptop, desktop, and monitor offerings. PC gaming is growing at such a fast rate that no major PC manufacturer wants to be left out of the market. Let’s look at the newest from Lenovo.

New Systems

The first products Lenovo announced at CES 2019 were updates to its Legion Y-Series of laptops. Lenovo introduced the Legion Y740 and the Y540 17” and 15” laptops, with the latest processors from Intel and NVIDIA NVDA -13.87%. The Y740 is Lenovo’s top-end gaming laptop, featuring an NVIDIA GTX 2070 or 2080 GPU and MAX-Q design for proper cooling to ensure for a sustained gaming experience. The Y540 has the same 8th Gen Intel INTC -0.7% processor offerings but is restricted to an RTX 2060 GPU design—which makes sense, because it’s harder to dissipate that much heat in a smaller chassis with less cooling capacity. That being said, some of Lenovo’s competitors have managed to squeeze GTX 2070s into 15” notebooks without issue.

Both versions of the new Y740 laptop come with up to 32 GB of RAM running at 2666 MHz, and an RGB backlit keyboard powered by Corsair’s iCue (a good call on Lenovo’s part, to rely on a trusted PC brand). The Y740 also has options for NVIDIA G-Sync 144 Hz display and comes standard with Dolby Atmos speakers for immersive sound. The Y540 features a more simplified white backlit keyboard and Harman Kardon speakers, which also support Dolby Atmos. Available in February, the Lenovo Legon Y740 will start at $1,949.99 for the 17” model and $1,749.99 for the 15” model. The Y540 will start at $929 and be available in May. This, in my opinion, leaves quite a gap in Lenovo’s gaming laptop product line, and between the 15 and 17” versions of the Y530, Y540, Y740 and Y730, makes the entire product line a little confusing.