and local people Eber here with Hardware Canucks and this
is the Lenovo Legion Y740 a heavily requested notebook that you guys wanted
us to check out it's finally here in the studio now this thing is on a crazy sale
right now in Lenovo's website actually this particular model is going for
around $1,600 with all the coupon codes applied and all that kind of stuff
because the spec that I have here comes with an RTX 2070 Max-Q a core i7
processor sixteenths of RAM you have nvme SSD and a hard drive it's a really
respectable II happen for a really good deal now full disclaimer Lenovo Legion
is one of our channel sponsors but that won't hold us back from giving them
critical feedback whether if it's good or bad since there is a lot to discuss
about the Y740 some of them that are really concerning so let's dive in right
after this damn what they provide the X system you run and this is an ATX
machine you mean micro idea no no full-size ATX components it's just a
small package they can still satisfy the Q 500 L by Cooler Master and affordable
and the pretty compact enclosure for all your regular hardware would perforated
exterior and PSU bracket the chips up and down flexible side IO and awesome
cable management's the Q 500 l a compact frame with full ATX satisfaction check
it out below okay so I love what Lenovo has done here with the y740 it has a
really nice industrial look to it rather than it's screaming gamer II the grey
sandstone iron gray finish on the front panel is very sleek and minimal with the
Allegiant logo on the side that gives it a nice low-profile look the same can be
said with the interior I'm glad that they didn't go with a brushed plastic
material like some other noble manufacturers do the build quality is
really good especially for the price you pay I mean you get a nice combination of
hard plastic and aluminum materials that gives it a nice robust feel and I really
love it Allegiant has definitely stepped up in
the design and build quality department especially with their notebooks right
now compared to what was being offered three or four years ago
so I'm really happy about that and from my little preview back in North Carolina
regarding their next-generation 50 series design again it's a complete
visual overhaul and I can't wait for you guys to take a look at it once they
launch sometime in 2020 the keyboard layout is pretty compact you don't get a
dedicated numpad but they've added additional keys on the left-hand side
that gives you instant access to the Vantage software game capture a few
macro keys and lighting adjustments the keys themselves feature a good amount of
travel distance they're almost identical to my razor blade 15 you get a really
nice solid feedback as you're typing but personally I still like the one on the
air 15X because it has a little bit more travel distance and that's my
preference overall RGB lighting has also made its way into the Y740 lenovo did
team up with corsair on the lighting department with the IQ software and it
certainly looks gorgeous you have a handful of lighting effects to play
around with the trackpad is pretty good it features Windows position drivers so
you can take advantage of all the gesture controls baked into Windows 10
but I'm gonna be very honest I'm actually really spoiled by the glass
surface found on the ways of late 15 because the surface on that is smoother
compared to the slightly more resistant surface that are getting on the y740's
the webcam is located at the bottom and the quality is not that impressive I
mean for one it is at an odd location of pointing at your nose but the other
thing that really surprises me the most is the quality because if you look at
smartphone cameras especially the front-facing cameras they are miles
better than what you can get on a notebook so I just don't understand why
brands don't dis tend to cheap out on webcams on premium gaming notebooks I
hope that changes sooner than later because you know people use webcams same
port selection is well thought out on the Y 740 in fact the majority of them
are located at the back so you get Kensington lock power in a couple of USB
3.1 gen2 unforce Gigabit Ethernet HDMI and a mini DisplayPort on the right-hand
side there's an extra USB 3.1 port and on the left you'll find a Thunderbolt 3
type C port and a headphone / mic jack unfortunately it does not have an SD
card reader now if you plan on hauling the Y740 to school and your workplace this is
definitely something that you have to be mindful about the power brick it's huge
it's like this this is a comparison to my s10 it's the regular size s10 and
it's math so it's almost half the size of notebook so yeah it's a 231 adapter
it's actually one of the biggest adapters that I've seen so yeah
just let's keep noted that the speakers are located at the bottom unfortunately
they don't sound that great especially when you compare to the front-facing
speakers on the blade 15 I was able to notice a few distortions especially
during the lower frequencies so from an audio perspective it's just not that
great moving on to the display and this is where things get a bit interesting so
it's a 1080p IPS screen with a refresh rate of 144 Hertz and the cherry on top
of that is that it features in videos g-sync technology so it gives you a
tear-free gaming experience when playing fast-paced titles the color reproduction
is excellent for content creation and consumption it's not a super bright
panel because it comes in at around 300 knits so outdoor visibility may be a bit
challenging but the faster refresh rate paired with g-sync really gave me an
awesome experience when gaming and doing other tasks but there are certain issues
with this configuration that needs to be addressed but before again to that let's
quickly go over the specs so the model I have over here comes with a 6 core
eighth generation Core i7 processor 16 gigabytes of RAM running in dual channel
mode at 26 66 megahertz it also has a 256 gigabyte nvme SSD that boasts read
speed above 3.4 gigabytes per second and writes around 1.7 gigabytes per second
and the star of the show is the RTX 2070 max-Q GPU in terms of upgradability
you can easily get access to the components inside so you can easily
access the two RAM slots that can easily be upgraded up to 32 gigabytes there's
also the two and a half inch hard drive bay right beside the battery that can be
swapped out for a standard SSD if you so desire and you can also access the nvme
SSD on the right-hand side speaking of the battery it's only a 57 watt hour
unit and the battery life is very poor as you can see I did a light
test essentially refreshing a Chrome web page on a loop until the battery
completely depleted and the system only lasted for about three hours switching
to a heavy load test I ran real bench on a loop and the system lasted for about
15 minutes so it's certainly disappointing especially compared to the
competition but you may be wondering why well there are a few things to consider
for one it is a smaller battery so that is one of the expectations short about
enough of course and the other thing is that out of the box lenovo has g-sync
enabled so it's basically running off the rtx 2070 for the most part because
Maximus is not turned on and by default you HD Graphics is also completely
disabled so you can't really take advantage of quick sync when you're
rendering a video and that is certainly something that raises some red flags
especially as a content creator now there is a hybrid mode built into the
engine software that disables g-sync and it basically enables Maximus switches
between new HD graphics and the RTX 2070 but I ran into a lot of instances
where quick sync with Adobe Premiere just wouldn't work at all I mean I tried
running this test multiple times and we started the system no luck it just
doesn't want to work so there's a lot of driver optimization issues at least with
my model so I mean if you are an existing 140 user and if you've been
experiencing some of these rendering issues especially with cling sync or
trying to get quick singh to work I'd love to know that in the comments down
below but I'm overall not really happy with the modes or the different
performance modes on this laptop the other thing that I wanted to mention is
that the clock speeds were consistently above 3.8 gigahertz regardless of the
scenario so whether if I was you know browsing the web or gaming that kind of
got me to thinking whether or not if intel speedstep technology was enabled
on this notebook and the fact the matter is I tried going to the BIOS I tried
looking for that setting and I just couldn't find it so basically if you're
on battery mode regardless of plugged in or plug without it having plugged in
it's gonna run those higher clock speeds that is definitely one of the factors
contributing to the lower battery life with that out of the way it let's
actually get into the performance segment so the six core twelve thread
CPU is a strong performer for rendering the
consistent four gigahertz clock speeds Thompson charts compared to the air of
50 next and my razor blade 15 now taking a look at rendering performance again
like I said before quick sync just does not want to work on the y740 so I took
the same 13 minute 4k project I exported it to the YouTube 4k preset and it uses
the RTX 2070 to render the entire video and it took over 24 minutes to
complete that task compared to you know less than 50 minutes that I get on the
air 15X and the razor notebook now gaming on your hand was as expected
really good you can easily push over a hundred pins per second in most triple-a
titles at the highest preset and again when you pair this up with the 144 Hertz
producing display there's nothing really to complain about now taking a look at
temperatures on a full synthetic load using i-264 the CPU did get relatively
warm at around 81 C with clock speeds at 3.8 to 3.9 gigahertz on all six cores so
firmly this notebook does a fantastic job cooling the chip at those speeds the
RTX 2070 max-Q did peak and semi 3 C which is a coolest that I've seen on
an R X no above and the clock speeds were shifting back and forth between
1300 and 1500 megahertz which does align really well within envyus spec sheet fan
noise is also surprisingly really good it doesn't you know sound like a jet fan
compared to the Aero 15X but the one thing that I do want to bring up is that
I wish of lenovo actually gave us a custom fan profiles to tweak within the
Vantage software because you know even during idle scenarios you can still hear
a little bit of that hum and I think that's again partly due to you know the
cpu running at 3.8 gigahertz consistently so it has to cool that
processor at that clock speed so I guess this brings us to the conclusion and
guys you know I was really excited when I got the y740 in the studio because I
thought this was gonna be the notebook that I would completely switch over to
because you know it the specs are quite amazing and I love the design it's it's
a really well-thought-out notebook but there are things like intel speedstep
and of course the hybrid mode and the switch to that it really does consume me
the most especially when quick sync if it doesn't work when rendering videos as
a content creator it's just really not going to benefit me at all so
that really does suck and the shorter battery life things like that but when
you look at the price of the Y740 it's actually one of the cheapest RTX
notebook that you can buy right now in the market with an RTX 2070 and with
that crazy sale going online I don't think you can go wrong with a notebook
like this but again be aware of all the limitations with this notebook and if
your existing Y740 user I would love to know your thoughts about your experience
with it I mean bar with harbor connects thank you so much for watching make sure
to check out some relevant content over here subscribe for more cool content I'm
signing off and I'll see you guys in the next one