Looking for power on the go, but on a budget? Then you’re just who Lenovo has in mind with its Y520, part of its new Legion gaming laptop brand.
I got a chance to check out the Y520 at a launch event in Dubai earlier this month, and went away impressed. But I wanted to see what this sleek little machine had to offer on my own terms, and so got my hands on one for a week. I’m even more impressed now.
Looks
This sort of thing is always going to be a matter of taste, but I think the Y520 is a pretty good looking piece of kit. Gaming laptops can often look very unwieldy, or overdo the lights and accents in an attempt to yell “gaming!” to anyone within eyeshot [intentional :)].
Specs
The Y520 line comes with up to a seventh gen Core i7 processor, a GTX 1050 Ti, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, and a variety of SSD and hard drive options. The screen is a 15.6” 1920 x 1080 anti-glare IPS panel. You also get your usual connectivity options as standard, with Bluetooth, up to 2x2 WiFi 802.11 ac, ethernet, one USB 3.1, two USB 3.0, one USB 2.0 and one HDMI ports. Sound-wise we have two 2W Harman Certified Speakers with Dolby Audio Premium. In its lightest configuration the Y520 weighs only 2.4kg.
Performance
If you’re not willing or capable to shell out the fortune it takes to run the newest games at ultra settings in a mobile form factor, but still want to play the latest and greatest with great performance and high graphics settings, you won’t be disappointed by the Y520.
Games like Forza Horizon 3, for example, look incredible, and is sure to make friends and family do a double-take when they discover it’s not live footage they’re seeing.
But the Y520 also did well with unoptimised software, such as the famously heavy resource hog PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (keep an eye on Game Masters for more on this title soon). I could run this Steam Early Access title with quite smoothly with most graphical settings pushed towards the higher end.
I tried a few 3Mark benchmarks using the latest nVidia drivers and without fiddling with any settings, and got 16,613 for Sky Diver (that’s 53% better than all results, according to 3DMarks stats — not bad for a “budget” machine), 5,608 in Fire Strike, and 1,860 in Time Spy.
It goes without saying that the power on offer here is more than adequate to do some heavy browsing, office work and multimedia consumption, if you can drag yourself away from the games for long enough.
Price
The Y520 series starts at Dh3,099 (Dh11,380)
Conclusion
I have no hesitations in recommending the Lenovo Legion Y520 to anyone looking for a good, affordable gaming machine that is just as comfortable at a LAN party as it is in the classroom or office. It hits the perfect sweet spot in the price/performance curve, meaning you’ll have more than enough cash left over for what’s really important: the games.
WHAT’S NEW
Try it: PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds
If you’re looking for a new shooter, you really should give the inelegantly titled PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds a try. Only available on PC via Steam Early Access at the moment, but with console versions in the pipeline, it’s set to be one of the big hits of the near future. It’s a massively multiplayer online game that drops 100 players at a time out of a plane and onto an island with one simple goal: be the last survivor.
The abandoned structures on the island are conveniently filled with a variety of items that increase your chances of survival, including a variety of guns, deadly kitchen utensils and dilapidated vehicles. The latter come in very useful to get to a randomly select part of the map that will eventually becomes the only safe space left to fight it out as a deadly blue wall of energy slowly makes the rest of the map uninhabitable.
It’s a survival battle royal that’s as intense as it gets!
Second home for the Switch
Want another dock for your Nintendo Switch to use with a second TV, or to make it easier to take the whole console with you without having to fiddle with your home set-up? Then you’ll be happy to know that spare Switch docks are now on sale. No news on local pricing yet, but they’re going for $89 in the US.
Injustice 2 gets $5,000 tournament series in Middle East
Power League Gaming and Red Entertainment, in partnership with Warner Bros Interactive, are starting a Middle East eSports program for the excellent new Injustice 2. The tournament series will bring together players from the UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwai, Oman, Qatar, Jordan and Lebanon to battle it out for a $5,000 prize pool. Time to learn those combos!
