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In this article, I give you my Lenovo Legion Y545 review with specs included. This is the Lenovo legion y5 45. It’s a lot like the 540 but it’s a little bit more money. But what do you get for that? More classy looks. 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 this 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. Until ninth Gen 6 Core i7 CPU inside of ours.

And you can have your choice of nvidia gtx 1650 our gtx 1660 TI or in RTX 2060. So 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 16 16 TI is still a solid choice which is what we have.

So the base model is gonna get you a core i5 90 300 h eight gigs of ram. You know you’d like dole channel you’d like 16 definitely 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 ARMA which is the core i7 9750 h and that gtx 1660 TI instead of the base models gtx 1650. And 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 RT X 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 1660 ti 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 start under $1000 this one doesn’t look so cheeseball plasticky or gamer II 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 of you who are also really maybe just doing some gaming but you need a more powerful laptop. Or something else you doing maybe doing some CAD some blender work that kind of thing.

You know who you are those are you shop crush up to gaming laptops because you need some more horsepower for whatever you’re doing. Video ID anything like we do you get the idea. Now the cooling on this is pretty good. And one of the benefits of having a slim and relatively lights 5.2 pounds which is two point three kilograms around an inch thick.

I if it’s not painfully thin like the premium laptops is you have room for a little bit more cooling. So we have two fans in here two heat pipes. And 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 we these are hot running cpus we did hit 95 degrees centigrade on the core temperatures. But it wasn’t actually throttling. On some other games like apex we’re pushing very high frame rates running that on high Full HD resolution and 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 the solution on this is actually pretty good. And the fans you’ll hear them but they’re not loud are not annoying they won’t fill a room with noise either.

There’s 70 blade fans they’re pretty high-quality. Again punching above its weight certainly for a gaming laptop. Performance on this is really exactly where you would expect it to a little bit better actually. 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 10 numbers for example. Which tells me that the thermal solution is helping without seeing thermal throttling. And then 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 16 60 Ti in ours and that’s full 16 60 Ti and it has 6 gigs of VRAM. If you go at the arc TX 2060 you’ll get a little bit more heat inside the chassis. It might lead to a little bit more thermal throttling but it wouldn’t not so much though and scare me away from buying it. Like I said the keyboard on this is lovely for those who actually 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 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 budget territory you don’t always get that. So again another plus.

We have a USB a 3.1 port on each side left hand on a 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 back.

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 month.

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. And there’s rj45 Gigabit Ethernet as well. For Wi-Fi it’s the usual Intel 95 60 AC with Bluetooth and so.

Now it comes to battery life this hinges back to 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 actually 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 so better. Or you can switch to hybrid or switchable Nvidia Optimus graphics.

And 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 a lot of relatively speaking of thin and light 15-inch gaming laptops and particularly the budget ones. Now if you do have it on switchable graphics when you’re doing productivity and everyday work streaming your video then you can manage about four and a half to five hours.

So this is not a class leader in battery life. So take off the bottom cover which obviously has ample ventilation good to see that. Your remove Philips head screws. Yeah no torque screws or anything like that. So you work your way around the front with a guitar picker and then there’s these little tabs here.

So probably the front you can take it off. Note that there are two different links and screws along the back and the Y area here it basically are the longer screws. Just pay attention so you put them back the way you found them. And here we have our internals are two fans as 70 blade fans here.

Are heatsink area here and extended heat saying like I mentioned for cooling components. That’s a good thing to see. And if we lift up this stuff here this is where your RAM is underneath the little shield cover right here. A little annoying to pick it up into RAM slots here.

Takes DDR four to six six six megahertz Ram. Some upgradeable as you see fit. This is our SSD it’s an nvme SSD. Now I don’t think they’re using this anymore this is a half-height but there’s obviously enough length here and it fit a normal 22 eighty full length SSD.

Now the base models are 256 gigs when we got this it was 128 gig. So yeah you probably won’t see one like that. And here is our hard drive bay with the Seagate Barracuda Pro fast hard drive as they go. But you could put a two-and-a-half-inch SATA drive in there not too expensive to do that these days to speed up your big storage from where your games are your meanie or anything else.

And lastly over here here’s our Intel 95 60 AC Wi-Fi card socketed. You could upgrade it if you want but it’s a good card you probably don’t want to do that. And lastly the speakers are firing from right here. Here’s our 2 speaker drivers on the front edge. 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 good sound 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 nice.