Maximum value is the aspiration of every entry-level gaming laptop.
Take Lenovo's new Legion Y545.
This 15.6-incher starts at $899 with an Intel Core i5-9300H CPU and a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 GPU.
Our $1,149 review unit propels it into the bigs with a Core i7-9750H six-core chip and a GTX 1660 Ti, for excellent gaming performance at its native 1080p screen resolution, matching or even slightly topping the 2019 Acer Predator Helios 300.
It also offers better battery life and is no slouch on build quality or features.
It has its share of oddities, like a webcam that looks up at your chin and a wonky number-pad layout, but they aren't deal-breakers.
All told, only the hot-running chassis keeps it from taking the Editors' Choice laurels away from the Acer.
It's still a very good entry-level gaming machine.
Redefining Entry Level
The Legion Y545 sits alongside Lenovo's own 15-inch Legion Y540 in its lineup, an early 2019 debut that was a technology refresh of 2018's Legion Y530.
The Legion Y545 is mainly a design change, as it shares its general specifications, pricing, and even port layout with the Y540.
Unlike its Acer and Asus competition, Lenovo allows factory customization of the Legion Y545, so you're not limited to preconfigured models.
(Lenovo has plenty of those, too.) Our review unit is sensibly equipped with 16GB of RAM, a 128GB solid-state drive (SSD) for the Windows 10 operating system (Lenovo has sensibly since upped that to a 256GB option), and a 1TB hard drive for storage.
The fact that this machine can take a hard drive is a big plus, as it's a more economical way to add mass storage than relying on M.2-format SSDs, or you can swap in a 2.5-inch SATA SSD.
For graphics, Lenovo offers a 6GB GeForce RTX 2060 card as the top option, a $100 upgrade over the GTX 1660 Ti on configurable models.
Adding it arguably takes the Legion Y545 out of entry-level pricing territory, at which point the flagship Legion Y740 (15-Inch) becomes a more attractive choice.
Its fancier features include an RGB-backlit keyboard, Nvidia G-Sync technology, dedicated gaming macro keys, and a sleeker chassis.
Not Quite Deja Vu
The Legion Y545 is an all-black slab, but not all plastic.
The lid backing is smooth aluminum that wraps around the sides of the display...
Stealthy exhaust vents and chiseled chassis edges exude an aggressive look without overdoing it.
The backlit Y-gaming logo is less prominent (or should I say polarizing) than Acer's Predator branding, though it's still impossible to miss.
The Legion Y545 delivers acceptable build quality for the money.
Priced much further north, though, and I'd start to look for more premium materials.
Aesthetically, the soft-touch palm rest is a step up from hard plastic, if less stylish than the brushed aluminum on the Acer Predator Helios 300.
At least it's easier to keep clean.
The chassis has plenty of strength.
It barely budged when I pressed down on its surfaces or torqued it by its corners.
I induced a creak or two when I picked it up by one corner, but that's a bad practice that any user should avoid with any notebook, especially one this large.
The chassis is reasonably trim for a 15.6-inch gamer, at around an inch thick and with a footprint of 14.2 by 10.5 inches.
Its side screen bezels aren't as thin as those of the pricier MSI GS65 Stealth (2019), but they're skinny enough to give this Lenovo the modern vibe.
In pursuit of thin-is-in, though, Lenovo didn't make an accommodation in the top bezel for a webcam, instead demoting it to the thick border above the display hinge...
The under-the-chin views it provides are awkward, not to mention grainy.
The cam's picture quality and relatively low 720p resolution aren't better or worse than we usually see from gaming notebooks at this price, but don't interpret that as an excuse.
Plan to invest in an external webcam for livestreaming.
The available hardware in the Legion Y545 is well-suited for gaming at its 1080p/full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) screen resolution.
Even the base 4GB GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card can produce around 60 frames per second (fps) in AAA games and esports titles on this screen.
The 6GB GTX 1660 Ti in our tester is leagues faster, so it's a bummer that the display on our test unit has the standard 60Hz refresh rate.
(It can only display up to 60fps at once.)
Lenovo offers a different 1080p panel with a 144Hz refresh rate as a steep $100 option on configurable models.
The upcharge is worth swallowing for an ultra-smooth experience in esports titles like Fortnite and CS:GO, if those are your favorites.
The Legion's screen otherwise rounds the bases.
Its anti-glare surface keeps down reflections, and in-plane switching (IPS) technology grants it good visibility from all angles.
Colors don't exactly pop, but they're not lacking for saturation.
The maximum brightness is plenty.
I dialed it down to about three quarters for use in darker rooms.
The only complaint I have about the screen has nothing to do with its quality, but the fact its hinge only lets it open about 45 degrees past vertical.
Good Keyboard, Strange Number Pad
A flex-free keyboard deck and a soft, yet precise up-and-down movement make typing on the Legion Y545 a satisfying experience.
Its two-level white backlighting is bright even during the daytime.
My quibble is the keytop typeface, which is the same as Lenovo uses on its regular IdeaPad notebooks.
A bolder font would give it more of a gaming feel.
The layout of this keyboard has surprising bonuses, including a full-size function row (F1 through F12, plus Delete) and full-size arrow keys.
The number-pad layout, though, is a head-scratcher.
The numeric keys and the period key are in their expected places, but the others are pushed around and, in some cases, undersize to make the number pad fit above the arrow keys.
Getting used to this layout would be tricky if you regularly use other number pads.
The Legion Y545's buttonless touchpad replaces the traditional two-button touchpad of the Legion Y540.
It's left of center in the palm rest to line up with the keyboard area, keeping your hands on either side of it while typing.
The pad is correctly sized for a 15.6-inch display.
With a smooth surface and solid clicking action, it's an intuitive mousing experience.
The preinstalled Lenovo Vantage app has a convenient feature that automatically disables the Windows key and, assuming an external mouse is plugged in, the touchpad, while gaming.
You can temporarily enable them by using a configurable keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+2, by default).
There's a toggle to turn this feature off entirely, of course.
Forgetting your headphones isn't a crisis with the Legion Y545.
Sound from its speakers emanates from beneath the palm rest.
There's enough volume, clarity, and bass for a reasonably immersive gaming or movie-watching experience.
I had no trouble hearing the finer details in games over the noise of the cooling fans.
(More on cooling later.)
Well-Placed Ports
Something the Legion Y545 gets more than right is its port placement.
The left and right sides of the laptop have just one USB 3.1 Type-A port...
The other feature on the right edge is a headphone/microphone combination jack.
The side-mounted ports are located more than halfway back, so plugging in a cable shouldn't get in the way of your space for using an external mouse.
Look to the rear for everything else.
Left to right is a USB 3.1 Type-C port, mini-DisplayPort video-out, another USB Type-A 3.1 port, an HDMI video-out, and an Ethernet jack.
There's regrettably no flash-memory-card reader.
There's no Thunderbolt 3 port either, but that's not expected in a gaming notebook at this price.
The included power brick connects via Lenovo's proprietary rectangular connector next to the Ethernet jack.
A Kensington cable-lockdown slot sits further over, an important feature if you're going to use the Legion Y545 in a public place.
The standard Intel 9560AC wireless card provides 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5 connectivity.
It doesn't support Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax), but that technology is only just hitting the market, and it'll be some time before it's mainstream.
(And you need a premium-priced supporting router to leverage it.)
Let's Get Testing...
The charts below show how our Legion Y545 review unit stacks against some of its competition.
The MSI GS65 Stealth ($1,699 as we tested it) and the Dell G7 15 (2019) ($1,803) are more expensive, while the Acer Predator Helios 300 is about the same price, and the Acer Nitro 5 (2019) is the least expensive ($879).
Here are the fundamental specifications of each unit...
The Acer Nitro 5 has the same processor and graphics card as the entry-level Legion Y545, so it can give you an idea of what to expect if you don't get the pricier configuration I'm testing.
The Dell G7 15 configuration is the opposite; its Core i7-9750H and 6GB GeForce RTX 2060 combo is the most potent you can get in the Legion Y545.
Our Legion Y545 review unit sits mid-pack when it comes to hardware in this lot.
Productivity, Storage & Media Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark).
The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows.
We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet work, web browsing, and videoconferencing.
The test generates a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.
PCMark 8, meanwhile has a Storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the boot drive.
This score is also a proprietary numeric score; again, higher numbers are better.
What was I saying about our Legion Y545 being mid-pack? It runs away with a 5,720-point leading score in PCMark 10 while the others fall several hundred points short.
(For reference, we consider 4,000 or more points to be an excellent number in that benchmark.) Meanwhile, the PCMark 8 Storage scores for these units plateau around 5,000 points, an expected result for systems with fast SSD boot drives.
Next is Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads.
Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image.
The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
The Legion Y545 finished on the tail end of the Core i7-equipped units, although it's in the ballpark for a Core i7-9750H processor.
The Core i5-9300H processor in the Acer Nitro 5 has two fewer cores and less aggressive clocks, leaving it way in the back.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark.
Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image.
We time each operation and, at the end, add up the total execution time.
As with Handbrake, lower times are better here.
The Photoshop test stresses CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost.
The Legion Y545 squeaks past its rival, the Acer Predator Helios 300, to complete this test with the lowest time of the bunch.
The other Core i7 units are close enough to almost call this one a toss-up, though.
The Core i5 chip in the Acer Nitro 5 again held it back here.
Graphics Tests
3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting.
We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems.
Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff.
The results are proprietary scores.
Let's focus on the Fire Strike results with these machines.
The Legion Y545 reassuringly kept pace with the Acer Predator Helios 300, while both finished just north of the MSI GS65 Stealth, all three being equipped with the 6GB GeForce GTX 1660 Ti graphics card.
The Dell G7 15 didn't do much better with its 6GB RTX 2060.
The Lenovo Y545 was nearly 60 percent faster than the Acer Nitro 5 and its 4GB GTX 1650.
Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp.
Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes.
In this case, it's rendered in the company's eponymous Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload scenario than 3DMark, for a second opinion on the machine's graphical prowess.
The relative differences between these laptops mirror the Fire Strike results we just looked at, although the Dell is now practically tied with the Legion Y545 and the Acer Predator Helios 300.
The MSI GS65 Stealth may have been throttling its performance for some reason, as it's consistently slower than the latter two (and shouldn't be).
Real-World Gaming Tests
The synthetic tests above are helpful for measuring general 3D aptitude, but it's hard to beat full retail video games for judging gaming performance.
Far Cry 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider are both modern, high-fidelity titles with built-in benchmarks that illustrate how a system handles real-world video games at various settings.
These are run on both the moderate and maximum graphics quality presets (Normal and Ultra for Far Cry 5, Medium and Very High for Rise of the Tomb Raider) at native resolution to judge performance for a given system.
The results are also provided in frames per second.
Far Cry 5 is DirectX 11 based, while Rise of the Tomb Raider can be flipped to DX12, which we do for the benchmark.
The Legion Y545 makes excellent showings in both games.
Given the frame rates well over 60fps on these demanding titles, the 144Hz screen option is indeed an upgrade worth considering if you are a competitive gamer or esports hound.
Given these titles are graphically intense, the GTX 1660 Ti should have no trouble pushing into the triple-digit-fps range in less-demanding esports titles at 1080p.
Also illustrated here? It may not be worthwhile to get the GeForce RTX 2060 as an option if the Dell G7 15's numbers are any indication, at least if you're after more raw frame-rate performance.
The benefits of the RTX 2060 lie...
