Gaming laptops are usually thicker and this can make them difficult to carry, and also unattractive. There are many brands that have managed to make them sleek, but the prices of these laptops end up being invariably high.
The Legion Y530 isn’t the first gaming laptop offering from Lenovo. The brand, which is popularly known for their iconic ThinkPad series and budget laptops had made their Legion gaming series inaugural with the Lenovo Y520. To overcome the bulky design of its predecessor, the Lenovo Y530 adapted completely new aesthetics which are unarguably the best in the segment. With a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 graphic card, it can handle most gaming titles with ease. Also, with an edge-to-edge display, this laptop can bring most of your favorite games to life.
But can it really justify a price of nearly Rs.1,00,000? To know more, continue reading our review.
Design and build
The Legion Y530 has a strong and sturdy polycarbonate body. The laptop weighs in at 2.3kg, which is considerably lower than other gaming laptops in this segment. It has an aluminium chassis that eliminates all sort of creaky noises that are usually observed in traditional laptops.
The top of the laptop has a textured finish, sporting the Legion logo. The logo itself has a small LED engraved in it, giving the laptop its gaming characteristics. The palm-rest area on the Legion Y530 is made up of a plastic finish with a rubberised-like feel that also makes it a fingerprint magnet for sweaty hands. Opening the lid on the laptop gives access to a gorgeous 15.7 inch, edge-to-edge display. The bottom of the display holds in a webcam along with two noise-cancelling microphones. The hinge on the laptop is strong and feels durable. It also gives the ability to tilt the display all the way up to 180 degrees.
The Legion Y530 has a full-sized keyboard with a numerical pad, which is rare to find these days on a 15-inch laptop. The keys have a rubberised finish to them, which adds some amount of grip to them. Though it’s a backlit keyboard, it doesn’t sport RGB lighting which may disappoint some users. The keys are generously spaced, making gaming or typing a fun experience.
The Legion Y530 might have a generous sized keyboard but it lacks a generously sized trackpad. The trackpad on the Legion Y530 is small. It does have physically separated clicks, but they hardly enhance the trackpad experience. The trackpad supports Microsoft Precision Touch technology which is great for casual browsing and work. We highly recommend using a good gaming mice for an uncompromised gaming experience.
One of the best design elements the Legion Y530 has to be the placement of the ports. Most of its ports are placed at the back of the laptop keeping the sides free. Lenovo has also included USB 3.1 ports on both sides.
Features
The Legion Y530 is powered by Intel’s 8th generation Core i7 8750H processor (clocked at 2.2GHz) with Turbo Boost up to 4.1 GHz. It is a 6-core processor, one of the first to be seen on laptops so it’s pretty exciting stuff. This should give the Y530 extended capabilities as far any range of computing tasks go. To handle high-end gaming, the Legion Y530 comes equipped with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 graphic card which will be a delight for gamers. In terms of storage, it has a meagre 128 GB SSD drive but you also get 1TB of hard disk storage. The Legion Y530’s stock configuration comes with 8 GB of RAM but Lenovo gives you the option to upgrade both, storage and memory, making this laptop a very futureproof option.
The Legion Y530 has a 15.4-inch Full-HD IPS edge-to-edge display with a resolution of 1920x1080. The display has a refresh rate of 60Hz, however if you go for version with the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics card, you get a display with a refresh rate of 144Hz. Lenovo claims the display to have 300 nits of brightness, which should make it easy to use in bright-lit outdoors. The display can be tilted up to 180 degrees which is appreciable but it’s hardly of much use, as the display isn’t a touch-screen.
Lenovo has made sure that the Legion Y530 does not run out of connectivity. It has three USB 3.1 ports. It also has a USB-C port for faster data transfer, but sadly, it cannot be used to charge the device. It comes with a HDMI output making it easier to connect the device to projectors or bigger screens. Most gamers will be delighted to know that the Legion Y530 has a 1000Mbps Ethernet, RJ45 connector to have low-latency, multi-player gaming experience. WiFi connectivity is of the 802.11ac standard and if you ever wish to upgrade to a more powerful Wi-Fi-card, it can be easily done by accessing the back.
The placement of the webcam on the Legion Y530 is odd and most users will find it funny using a bottom-mounted camera. The laptop also misses out on a memory card slot which is still manageable considering it is a gaming laptop. Lenovo could have put one in anyway. It has a headphone jack, but lacks on a dedicated mic slot which will bother many users. This means you need to buy headsets that use a single connector.
Performance
Whenever we buy expensive laptops, it is obvious to expect them to keeping us excited every time we use them. The Legion Y530 fills in most of the spaces and does a good job of keeping the excitement levels high. It runs on an all-new, all-powerful, 6-core Intel’s 8th generation Core i7 8750H processor. Its brute strength is visible through its yield, a good overall score of 4,550 in PCMark 10 benchmarks tests. The scores are outstanding in all segments of the suite.
The heart of any gaming laptop is its GPU, and the Legion Y530 is equipped with NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1050 graphic card keeping the laptop pumped up. In most cases, the GPU does a decent job of handling popular gaming titles. To test the performance, we ran the Street Fighter IV benchmark in two different settings. With a display resolution of 1366x768, the Legion Y530 managed to get a great score of 30,212 because of its 307.22 average frames rate. We bumped up the display setting to test full HD performance, and still the Legion Y530 managed to surprise us with a score of 24,427 and a 264fps average. You could very well crank up the quality of slightly older titles to ultimate, and you won’t notice a major slowdown.
Playing graphic-demanding games like Fortnite is also a pleasure on the Legion Y530. We tried the auto-adaptive settings of the game, which initially selected medium graphics for the best performance. We decided to crank up the settings and found no major frame drops. The game works well with a steady frame rate of 60 fps at very high settings. You may notice some frame drops after selecting the Epic settings, but we still felt it was pretty playable.
The Legion Y530 comes with a 1 Terabyte of hard disk drive along with a 128 GB SSD. We ran the CrystalDiskMark test and the results were quite astonishing. The hard drive manages to get a respectable read speed of 134 MB/s and nearly the same write speed of 130.2MB/s. The SSD drive on the laptop in comparison just demolishes the test. It recorded a read speed of 555 MB/s and a write speed of 449.3 Mb/S. The SSD really helps software start-ups and system booting, although it’s a shame Lenovo didn’t bundle a more sizable 256GB SSD instead.
Speakers on the Legion Y530 are branded as Harman Kardon, and they are better sounding than other laptops in the segment. They do a decent job playing every day content, but don’t expect them to match the accuracy of gaming headphones. The Legion Y530 unfortunately does not excels in battery performance. Lenovo claims a battery life of more than 5 hours, we found it to not exceed 4 hours. If you plan to play games without your AC adaptor, expect a battery life closer to 1.5 hours.
Verdict
The Legion Y530 is a great gaming laptop for gamers looking for an upgrade from their entry-level laptops. The edge-to-edge display sports a quality which surely enhances your gaming experience. The laptop is equipped with all the hardware a gamer requires, while still maintaining its compact profile. It does a decent job of handling most popular gaming titles. With an price tag close to Rs.1,00,000, the Legion Y530 is a good option for gamers but it’s nowhere near the ultimate gaming machine. The fact that it lets users to upgrade RAM and storage makes it a solid future-proof choice. Also, if you ever feel the need for more GPU power, you can also connect an external GPU using the USB-C port to make this an even more intimidating rig.
