Our verdict
The Lenovo Legion Y730 is a premium entry-level gaming laptop with solid performance, but its cumbersome webcam and short battery life provide some respite.
To the
Premium aesthetics
Live display
Solid overall performance
RGB backlight
Against
Expensive webcam under the display
Battery life is short even for a gaming notebook
Today's best Lenovo Legion Y730 deals
$1,699
at Amazon
A premium 15-inch workhorse on the road, an RGB gaming rig in the leaves. The 15-inch Lenovo Legion Y730 ($849 starting, $1040.82 on review) has an aesthetic making it the best of both worlds.It is
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
allows for entry-level gaming on medium and high settings at 1080p resolution, although you might find one
GTX 1060
Laptop for Less. The Legion Y730's display is bright and vibrant and performance is solid, but the price and poor battery life might put some people off.
draft
Just like his less powerful brother, the
Lenovo Legion Y530
, the Y730 comes across as quite mature for a gaming laptop. It has a sleek, gunmetal gray aluminum lid with a plastic Legion logo on the side. Unlike the Y530, the Y730 adds a Y-shaped . add a touch of color
RGB
Light in the "O" of the Legion logo. There's also some RGB lighting in the side and rear vents that you can control with Corsair's iCue app.
Lenovo Legion Y730 at Amazon for $1,699
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Lenovo has adopted Alienware's approach of placing most of the ports on a small hump that juts out from the back of the laptop. Here's a mini DisplayPort, HDMI, a pair
USB 3.1 Gen 2
Ports and an Ethernet jack. On the left side there is a Thunderbolt 3 port and a headphone jack, while on the right side there is only a single port, USB 3.1 Gen 1.
The Legion weighs 4.1 pounds with a footprint of 14.3 x 10.5 x 0.8 inches, putting it in the same size bracket as the 5.1 pounds
Acer Nitro 5
(15.4 x 10.5 x 1.1 inches), the 5.2 pounds
Dell G3 15
(15 x 10.2 x 0.9 inches) and the 5 lb
MSI GV62 8RE
(15.1 x 10.2 x 1.2 inches).
specifications
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15.6-inch FHD (1920 x 1080) IPS
CPU
Intel Core i7-8750H
graphic
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti (4GB)
Storage
16GB DDR4-2666
SSD
256GB PCIe
HDD
2 TB, 7,200 rpm
optical
✗
Networking
2x2 WiFi 802.11ac
video connections
HDMI, Mini DisplayPort
USB ports
2x USB 3.1 Gen 21x USB 3.1 Gen 11x Thunderbolt
Audio
Dolby Atmos with Sound Radar combo jack for headphones and microphone
camera
720p HD webcam
battery
57Wh, 3-cell
power adapter
135W
operating system
Windows 10 Home
Dimensions (WxDxH)
14.3 x 10.5 x 0.8 inches
Weight
5.2 pounds
Price (as configured)
$1,040.82
gaming and graphics
The Legion GTX 1050 Ti with 4GB of VRAM is powerful enough to play most games at 1080p, although not necessarily at the highest settings. I played
Middle-earth: Shadow of War
on high settings at 1080p, and it ran between 37 and 41 frames per second (fps) as I sneaked around a fortress and engaged in a crushing, drawn-out battle with Mogg the Painted.
on
hit man
(1920 x 1080, ultra settings) the Legion was able to keep up with the competition, playing the game at 45 fps, tying the G3 and outperforming the Nitro 5, both also running a 1050 Ti but behind MSI GV62s 51. falling behind fps (GTX 1060) and the mainstream gaming average.
the
Grand Theft Auto V
Benchmark results followed a similar pattern at 1920x1080 and very high settings. Legion and G3 again clocked in at 45 fps, just above the Nitro 5 but below the MSI and average.
But the 1050 Ti doesn't measure up to some of our more demanding benchmarks, such as
Rise of the Tomb Raider
(1920 x 1080, very high) in which it failed to hit a playable frame rate of 30 fps.
perfomance
With an Intel Core i7-8750H CPU, 16 GB DDR4 RAM, a 2 TB, 7,200 rpm HDD and 256 GB
PCIe SSD
, Legion is not only a powerful slot machine, but also a solid workhorse. With 25 open tabs in Chrome, including a streaming episode of
The Daily Show with Trevor Noah
at 1080p there wasn't even a hiccup.
On Geekbench 4's overall performance test, the Legion scored 17,541, beating all of its competitors (those use Core i5-8300H processors) but falling short of the mainstream average of 18,141.
The Legion took 18 seconds to copy 4.97GB of files, which translates to a speed of 282MB/s. While that's faster than the 195.7MB/s average, the G3 and MSI, Acer's Nitro does was faster with 318 MBit/s.
The Legion took 1 minute and 20 seconds to match 65,000 names and addresses in our Excel spreadsheet test, tying in with the Nitro 5. That's slower than the average of 51 seconds for both the Dell G3 and MSI.
In the Handbrake video editing test, the Legino took 10 minutes and 56 seconds to transcode a 4K video to 1080p. That beats the average (11:29) and every one of its competitors.
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The Legion's 15.6-inch 1080p display is bright and vibrant with great colors. When I saw the trailer for
Aquaman
, Black Manta's red eyes popped up against his black suit. And in an epic battle between fire and water creatures, the oranges and blues contrasted as both sides fired volleys at each other. As I played
Middle-earth: Shadow of War
, I could see fine details even in dark scenes, like pebbles on the floor in a cave and the various materials that make up Talion's cloak.
It covers 135 percent of the sRGB color space, which is higher than the mainstream gaming average (110 percent) and all of the competition.
The Legion measured an average display brightness of 302 nits, beating both the average (294 nits) and each of its competitors, all of which were below average.
keyboard and touchpad
The Legion's RGB-backlit keyboard offers 1.4 millimeters of key travel and requires 64 grams of force to press. The keys definitely felt a bit flat, and I was typing at 106 words per minute (just a word below my usual minimum) with one Error rate of four percent, double the usual two percent.
With the preinstalled Corsair iCue program, you can customize per-key RGB backlighting or choose from a range of presets with intricate patterns.
The 3.9 x 2-inch touchpad is a little small, but nothing to complain about. Its Windows precision drivers meant that every gesture I tried, even with three or four fingers, worked on the first try.
Audio
The Legino Y730's Dolby Atmos speakers are nice and loud; they easily filled our lab with sound. When I listened to The Goo Goo Dolls' "Iris," the strings, guitars, and drums all came through clearly, although the bass was lacking.
I tried playing around with the different sound profiles in the Dolby Atmos program, but I found that the dynamic profile, which is enabled by default, worked well. No other profile produced noticeably better sound.
expandability
I wish the Legion was a little easier to upgrade. Removing the cover requires removing 11 screws (six are very short and the other five are longer) and then removing them with a pry tool. The SSD and hard drive are instantly accessible when You want to upgrade the memory but the RAM is under a cover that you have to remove with a flat blade. Ours only used one DIMM slot while the other was free for upgrades.
battery life
As with most gaming laptops, the Legion isn't exactly an endurance machine. It ran for 2 hours and 47 minutes in our battery test. But even for a gaming laptop, that's pretty short. The mainstream gaming average is 4:03, the Nitro 5 ran for 4:03, and the Dell lasted 6:37.
heat
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While playing
middle-earth: shadow of war,
the bottom of the Legion reached 46.1 degrees Celsius (115 degrees Fahrenheit). The touchpad measured 25.9 degrees Celsius (78.6 degrees Fahrenheit), and the center of the keyboard measured 37.8 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit).
cam
That almost borderless screen has one victim, and that's a poorly placed 720p webcam. Actually, it's centered under the display. When I took a picture with it at my desk, I was clearly in the foreground, but my head was cut off and my fingers were right in front of the camera when I was placed on the keyboard. It captured some fine detail, like the placement of the hands on my watch, but the fluorescent lighting in our office faded the rest of the photo.
software and warranty
Luckily, as with its business and consumer laptops, Lenovo has kept the Legion Y730 mostly bloatware-free. Proprietary software includes only a Legion-branded version of the Lenovo Vantage utility, which provides CPU, GPU, RAM, and storage usage statistics, as well as a It also makes it easy to contact support and run hardware scans. The other great software is Magic Y, which lets you record macros on any key on the keyboard.
Otherwise, it's just the usual bloat that comes along
windows 10
, including two separate versions of
candy crush,
as well as
Drawboard PDF, Hidden City: Hidden Object Adventure
and
Royal Revolt 2: Tower Defense
.
Lenovo sells the Legion Y730 with a one-year warranty.
Construction
Our test unit with an Intel Core i7-8750H CPU, 16 GB DDR4 RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti with 4 GB VRAM, 2 TB, 7,200 rpm HDD and 256 GB PCIe SSD costs $1,040.82.
For a cool $849.99, the base model uses a Core i5-8300H CPU, 8GB of DDR4 RAM, 1TB, 7,200rpm HDD, and 16GB of Optane memory, and the same Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti.
A model identical to ours except with less storage (1TB 7200RPM 128GB PCIe SSD) is $934.99.
bottom line
The Lenovo Legion Y730 is a gaming laptop built with premium materials that could serve as both a gaming rig and a portable workhorse with RGB. Its display is vibrant, bright and offers strong performance. Just don't do anything with that badly placed webcam and keep the charger with you.
But you're paying quite a bit for the aesthetics. You can get a system with a GTX 1060 for less than the Legion and its GTX 1050 Ti. Like the
MSI GV62 8RE
is available for $949 with a GTX 1060 and a Core i5-8300H or for $1,149 with a Core i7-8750H and a GTX 1060
Dell G3
fifteen
with an equivalent configuration to the Legion base model is $100 cheaper.
However, if you want one of the best displays in this price range and build quality to match, it might be worth splurging.
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Today's best Lenovo Legion Y730 deals
$1,699
at Amazon
Andrew E Freedman
Andrew E. Freedman is the senior editor at Tom's Hardware, focusing on laptops, desktops, gaming and breaking news. He holds an MS in Journalism (Digital Media) from Columbia University Previous work has appeared in Kotaku, PCMag, Complex, Tom's Guide, and Laptop Mag, among others.
