What are the differences between the Y540, Y545 and Y7000 gaming laptops from Lenovo?
In this video I’ll compare all three against each other, showing how they differ, to help
you decide which one is best for you.
In the specific configurations we’re looking at today, all three have the Intel i7-9750H
CPU with Nvidia graphics, GTX 1660 Ti for my Y540 and Y7000, however my Y545 has RTX
2060, but they’re all available with different options. All three also have 16gb of memory
in dual channel, but again like most components you can pick and choose what you want when
ordering from the Lenovo website.
For the most part, the Y540 and Y7000 are essentially the same chassis design, the Y545
is a bit different from the other two though, which you’ll see as we go.
The Y540 and Y7000 are all black plastic on the lid, while the Y545 is more of a grey
metal which felt a bit nicer, so a slight edge in build quality there. On the interior
they’re all matte black with a smooth sort of rubberised texture.
In terms of dimensions, the Y540 and Y7000 are exactly the same, again they’re the
same design, while the Y545 on the other hand was a little wider and thicker, but not by
much.
For the weights the Y540 and Y7000 were quite similar again at around the 2.2kg mark, however
my Y7000 was a little lighter. The Y545 on the other hand was more than 100g heavier,
probably due to the metal build, and all three were weighed without a 2.5” drive installed.
All three laptops have precision touchpads, and the Y540 and Y7000 have the same smaller
size one with physical buttons, while the Y545’s was larger and better to use.
The keyboards were otherwise the same, at least in terms of layout and how they feel
to actually type on. The main difference is the lighting, the Y540 and Y545 both have
white backlighting, while the Y7000 has gamer red. All three light up all keys and secondary
key functions, and can be adjusted between two brightness levels or turned off by holding
the function key and pressing the spacebar.
All three laptops have 15.6” 1080p IPS screens, and are available with different options.
This may vary by region, but these are the options available for me here in Australia,
so only the Y540 and Y545 have the option of going for 144Hz, which I think would be
ideal when paired with a 1660 Ti or above. They have 300 or 250 nit versions, and the
dimmer displays have lower colour gamut, so if you’re doing something like photo or
video editing definitely go for the screen upgrade.
All three laptops have the 720p camera placed below the screen.
The Y540 sounds ok but doesn’t look great, the Y7000 looks a bit better and sounds similar,
and the Y545 is just crap.
None of these three laptops has G-Sync, however they all have the option of disabling hybrid
mode through the Vantage software, which is the control panel for the laptop. Basically
this disables the Intel GPU after a reboot, so no Optimus, which results in higher performance
in games, but at the expense of battery life when not gaming. I think it’s great that
you have the option of selecting the mode you want to run it in, rather than being stuck
to one or the other which is what most other laptops do.
Let’s check out I/O next, starting on the left all three have a USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A
port and 3.5mm audio combo jack.
On the right there’s just a second USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A port. It’s worth noting that
the Y545 in the middle of the laptop sandwich is missing side air exhaust vents.
The port selection on the back is exactly the same throughout all three too, from left
to right all have a USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-C port, no Thunderbolt, mini DisplayPort 1.4, third
USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A port, HDMI 2.0 output, gigabit ethernet, power input and Kensington
lock.
The Y540 and Y7000 have icons above the rear I/O so you can easily see where you need to
plug your cable in when standing in front of it without needing to turn the machine
around or look over it, however the Y545 was missing these handy icons.
On the lids they all have some part that lights up. The Y540 on the left just has the subtle
part within the text, the Y545 in the center has a huge logo, while the Y7000 on the right
is red and right in the middle. All three laptops let you turn this light on or off
by pressing function and L.
Underneath they’ve all got air intake vents towards the back, again like many aspects
the Y540 and Y7000 were the same, while the Y545 had a bit of a different design. All
three have the speakers along the front on the left and right, and in my opinion, the
Y540 and Y7000 were equal and better than the speakers in the Y545.
In terms of latencymon performance, the Y540 was the only one that gave me an acceptable
result.
Inside the designs of all three are essentially the same in terms of layout. They all have
a single 2.5 inch drive bay, single M.2 slot for storage, L shaped battery, dual channel
memory underneath the metal cover in the center, and WiFi card above the battery, closest to
the bottom in this clip. The cooling looks similar, however note the Y545 in the middle
doesn’t exhaust air out the left and right sides and that there are no heat sinks there
as a result, as that will be important later.
As for battery life, all three have the same 3 cell 57Wh battery, the only possible exception
is the Y7000, which has a smaller 52.5Wh battery if you get the GTX 1650 configuration. The
Y7000 had the best battery life, though it wasn’t too far ahead of the Y540 with same
specs. The Y545 had a fair bit less, but that’s likely due to the higher tier 2060 graphics,
it would probably be quite close if they were all the same.
The vantage software in all three laptops let’s you choose between quiet, balanced,
and performance modes. These primarily control power limits to the CPU or GPU, as defined
here, and they’re meant to control fan speed too, but as you’ll hear next there wasn’t
much difference.
Let’s look at thermal differences. Because my Y545 has a different GPU compared to the
rest, we’re only looking at CPU only performance here, as I can fairly compare those. If you
want to see way more thermal info with the GPU going, check out the full reviews linked
in the description.
This testing was done with an ambient room temperature of 24 degrees Celsius with the
Aida64 CPU stress test. I used the default four options, so stress CPU, FPU, cache and
system memory were all checked. In this test only the Y545 was hitting thermal throttling
at 94, while the Y540 was 4 degrees cooler, and the Y7000 was a further 4 degrees cooler
than that.
These are the clock speeds during the same tests. I found it interesting that the Y7000
was similar to the Y545, given the Y7000 wasn’t having thermal issues. The Y540 was achieving
best performance in terms of clock speed in this test.
The Y7000 and Y540 were both hitting the 70 watt power limit, the Y545 wasn’t quite
able to hit it in this test as it was being held back from thermal throttling. It’s
interesting that with the same power limit though the Y540 was hitting higher clocks
than the Y7000, but I guess the Y7000 was cooler as a result.
I’ve used Cinebench to test out the CPU only performance. The Y545 is in last place
due to the thermal throttling discussed, and as we saw the Y540 was able to hit higher
clock speeds than the Y7000, so it’s scoring higher in this test, though as we saw it was
running a little warmer to achieve this.
Here’s how hot the keyboard area actually gets while running combined CPU and GPU stress
tests. The Y540 and Y545 both got to 51 degrees Celsius or so in the center, while the Y7000
was noticeably cooler comparatively in the same workload.
Next let’s see how they actually perform in a few games. Keep in mind that both my
Y540 and Y7000 have the GTX 1660 Ti, while my Y545 happens to have an RTX 2060, so we’re
expecting that to put it ahead, so I’ll only look at a few games.
Battlefield 5 was tested in campaign mode at ultra settings, and the Y545 was ahead
as expected due to the RTX 2060, while the Y7000 was a little ahead in average FPS over
the Y540 with same specs, though its 1% low was down, possibly due to the better CPU performance
from the Y540.
Control was tested at high settings, and the results are within one to two FPS of each
other, so it’s not really going to be a difference that you notice on a practical
level while playing.
These are the results of Shadow of the Tomb Raider with the game’s built in benchmark
tool at max settings, and there was just a couple of FPS difference between the laptops,
though again interesting the Y7000 was ahead of the Y540 with same specs.
You can see more games in the full reviews, linked in the description, but when testing
the 2060 in the Y545 I found that in many games it was struggling to beat the 1660 Ti
in the Y7000 that I tested at the same time, due to the previously mentioned thermal throttling
in the Y545. Without throttling, on average the 2060 should perform around 14% better
than the 1660 Ti, but when its in the Y545 it doesn’t really seem worth paying more
for as we didn’t see big gains.
Storage options will vary based on what you select when buying, however all three laptops
I’m looking at here had the exact same model of 512GB NVMe M.2 SSD, so I was looking at
similar speeds. Don’t forget all three also have a 2.5” drive bay if you want to install
another SSD or hard drive.
As for pricing differences, you can find updated prices linked in the description. At the time
of recording, in the US with the same specs, so i7, GTX 1660 Ti, and dual channel memory,
both the Y540 and Y545 are the same price, $1150 USD on sale at the moment.
For the rest of the pricing discussion I need to focus on my Australian pricing, as the
Y7000 doesn’t currently appear to be sold in the US.
In these examples I’ve specced them all to the same i7 CPU, 16GB of dual channel memory,
512GB SSD, best screen available, so 144Hz for the Y540 and Y545, and GTX 1660 Ti graphics.
The Y540 with these specs is currently less than $2000 AUD, which is around $1200 USD
if you remove our taxes, however it is currently on sale, without the sale it’s over $2300
AUD.
The Y545 isn’t currently on sale, and was the same price as the Y540 with the same specs.
The Y7000 on the other hand was at least $300 more for the same thing as the others, and
that’s with a 60Hz screen, as 144Hz wasn’t an option like the other two.
So to conclude, the Y540 appears to be the best option out of the three, here’s why.
First off the Y540 and Y7000 are essentially the same chassis, but the Y7000 has the red
keyboard and red logo on the back, so more of your typical gamer laptop aesthetic. That’s
going to come down to personal preference, and while I personally prefer the cleaner
look of the Y540, in my country the Y7000 costs more money for the same specs, which
doesn’t really seem worth paying when there are so many similarities. If the Y7000 is
cheaper in your region though and you don’t mind the red design, then that would be a
better pick.
To be fair, the Y7000 did seem to perform a little better than the Y540 in games, I’m
not exactly sure why that’s the case as they had the same specs. As we saw in the
CPU only performance though like Cinebench, the Y540 was coming out ahead, so must be
some slight GPU difference.
Just quickly I’ve tested the Heaven benchmark on the Y540 and Y7000 as they’ve both got
the GTX 1660 Ti, and although both ran at 80w with similar clock speeds, the Y7000 was
warmer in that regard, but yeah similar clocks so not sure why the Y7000 does better in games.
The Y545 shares a lot of similarities with those other two, including same port layout,
same battery and same internal layout. The main differences with the Y545 were that it
had a larger touchpad than the others, which was nice. It’s also got a metal lid, but
as a result weighed more than 100g extra.
The Y545 doesn’t have the handy icons on the back above the I/O like the others though,
the speakers didn’t sound as good as the others, and as you heard the built in microphones
were probably the worst I’ve ever used in any laptop.
The Y545 also has a single hinge in the middle of the screen, giving it a bit more flex compared
to the others which have hinges towards the edges.
The Y545 also had thermal problems that the others didn’t. Another difference was that
the Y545 doesn’t have air exhaust vents on the sides, which means it’s also missing
extra heatsinks on the sides, so I believe that explains that. It’s hard to say for
certain that that was the issue, but it was the only difference I could see, and the others
ran cooler with the same stress test going.
Despite the Y545 costing the same as the Y540 in my example, I think it’s got more negatives
associated with it when comparing the two.
All three are pretty decent options, but in the end, based on what we’ve seen here I
think the Y540 is the best option for the money.
So with all of that in mind, which gaming laptop would you pick? The Lenovo Y540, Y545,
or Y7000 gaming laptop? Let me know which and why in the comments, and if you’re new
to the channel consider getting subscribed for future comparisons and tech videos like
this one.