Lenovo Legion Y740S – gaming laptop without a dGPU?

Rating

Gaming laptops in a thin body often suffer from two flaws – overheating and short battery life. What to do if you want high processor performance, but in a thin body, with good battery and at the same time not lose graphics performance when you are at home or at work? A gaming notebook with dedicated graphics card will always be heavier than an ultrabook and will not offer such battery life. On the other hand, ultrabooks lack CPU performance. The Legion Y740S resolves this dilemma.

Rating

Legion Y740S-IMH 81YX0013CK is a very unconventional laptop, it can be said to be the only one of its kind. We can also say that no manufacturer had the courage to make something like the Legion Y740S. Personally, I have been looking for such a device for a long time. The Y740S represents meeting the very specific requirements I had for my work laptop. Compactness, low weight and a thin profile are important in the first place. The new Legion deserves an A+ for this, not even a 1.7 kg and 15 mm body is a real success with a 15″ laptop.

Performance was also important to me, and since I needed high portability, I always ended up with an ultrabook with a 15W U-series processor, which unfortunately was not enough for the classic H-series 45 W in gaming laptops. I don’t need a dedicated graphics card for my work, and at home/at work I can connect to the TB3 dock, if necessary. The Y740S combines high portability with the performance of gaming notebooks in terms of processor, as it also uses a 45 W H-series processor, unlike ultrabooks.

Good port selection without the need to use adapters always helps on the road, which the Legion meets almost perfectly. I praise the pair of TB3 and classic USB type A. A surprise is also the SD card reader, which will be appreciated by many creators. Only the HDMI connector for easy connection to a monitor is missing, fortunately a USB-C adapter is included in the package. Since I write a lot on a notebook, a very good keyboard is also needed. The Legion will only surprise you in this area, its high quality almost reaches the legendary ThinkPads. So, I insist that Lenovo is currently making the best laptop keyboards. It is also nice to have the ability to expand the internal storage thanks to the second M.2 slot. Unfortunately, RAM is not removable. What didn’t fascinate me so much is the display with average parameters, but you can choose the 4K version, which already offers significantly better properties. A small disappointment is also the 60 Wh battery, although the battery life over 5 hours is quite decent. However, it does not match ultrabooks.

The most controversial topic is, of course, the absence of dedicated graphics and the need to use eGPU. But of course, this depends on your needs. I don’t need a GPU for work, but I do need CPU performance. So for me, the absence of a graphics card is a good compromise for lower weight and better battery life. A surprise for me was also the price of the device, which in the tested configuration is about 1,350 euros. When you add 300–400 euros for the dock and another 400 euros for a GPU, we’re moving somewhere around 2,000–2,100 euros, which is roughly the price of laptops compared. eGPU configurations used to be significantly disadvantaged, but with the Legion Y740S, this is already beginning to make sense in terms of finances. You can change the graphics card for a better one, which you will not be able to do in the case of a gaming laptop. Keep in mind, however, that you leave certain percentages of GPU performance on the table when using an eGPU dock, but we’ve talked about this several times.

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