LENOVO LEGION Y520
The Y520 was one of the rst notebooks to debut under Lenovo’s Legion gaming brand, and it has all the expected trappings of a laptop designed for gamers.
This includes things like a carbon beresque nish on the lid, red lettering on the keyboard and trim around the trackpad, and a sleek brushed metal segment above the keyboard. Overall, the design feels tasteful while still managing to retain a distinctly gamer-centric appeal. It also doesn’t hurt that it is one of the thinnest of the lot, measuring in at 25.8mm thick.
The dual Harman speakers sit on either side of the display’s hinge, and they project sound forward and above, a marked improvement from the speakers crammed on the edge of notebooks like the Aftershock or Gigabyte.
The Legion Y520 runs fairly cool, and we measured among the lowest CPU and GPU temperatures compared to the other notebooks.
One nice feature is something Lenovo calls Extreme Cooling, which instantly ramps up the fan speeds for intensive workloads. You can activate this through Lenovo’s Nerve Sense software, or with a customizable keyboard shortcut.
The resulting fan noise is quite noticeable, but you do get a nearly 10°C drop in peak GPU temperatures.
Another welcome inclusion is the use of a Samsung PCIe NVMe SSD; most of the others feature slower SATA-based drives. The Legion Y520 comes with a 2x2 Intel wireless module too, its competitors use still on a 1x1 conguration.
The keyboard itself feels nice enough to type on, and we have little complaints. But as on the Acer Aspire VX 15, there’s no way to change the color of the backlight, and you’re just stuck with red.
However, the left- and right-click buttons below the trackpad can feel a little di cult to click at times, and we’d much rather they lost their glossy nish.
Finally, the display could use some improvement, as colors could appear a little dull, and anything short of maximum brightness felt unpleasantly dim.
A(rac ve design with addi onal cooling features Dull display