Customer Ratings & Reviews

Lenovo Legion Y530 (81FV0001US) Setup/Testing/Conclusion The Lenovo Legion Y530 (81FV0001US). Packed with an Intel i7 8750H, 8GB DDR4 2666 memory, and an Nvidia 4GB GeForce GTX 1050 Ti. Let’s go ahead and dive right in and see how this budget Gaming Laptop performs. Right off the bat, the Intel i7 8750H is an excellent CPU. You’re looking at the successor to the widely popular Intel i7 7700HQ which is what was used a lot in previous gaming laptops. With the Intel i7 8750H, you’re going to be getting about a 10% increase in single core performance and about a 15 ~ 25% increase in multi-core performance. The Nvidia 4GB GeForce GTX 1050 Ti isn’t the fastest or considered a “high end” GPU, but it’s definitely considered as one of the best (if not the best) budget GPU. This specific version of the Lenovo Legion Y530 only comes with 8GB of memory and a traditional mechanical hard drive. So before I even ran any games, my expectations weren’t going to be through the roof. I mean we’re looking at a budget gaming rig here, not a top of the line gaming beast. So now that we got that out the way, let’s go ahead and see what this combo brings to the table. As expected, this specific Lenovo Legion Y530 performs decent. As mentioned previously, it’s not going to be the fastest out there; but it’s definitely not the slowest. So if you’re looking to play everything on ultra presets and expect incredible frames per second, I would probably invest in a pretty high end gaming rig. If you’re looking to play games on a combination of low ~ medium presets, you’ll be just fine with this Lenovo Legion Y530 model. I was able to run games like Counter-Strike Global Offensive (140 FPS), Battlefield 1 (60 FPS), Tom Clancy’s The Division (60 FPS), GTA V (55 FPS), and Diablo 3 (95 FPS) without any FPS drops. I did for a weird reason encounter micro stutters/skips while gaming though. With the Legion Y530, I didn’t have a problem taking it around. Because of it’s subtle and sleek design, it doesn’t scream “GAMING”; yet it doesn’t look like an ordinary laptop. I personally enjoy the black design and look of the laptop. Although the Y530 is made majority of plastic, it's still quite durable and still looks good. Lenovo changed the backlit keyboard from red to white which looks a lot better. The bezels around the screen (left, top, and right) are also quite thin compared to the last years model. Because of the thin bezel change, the webcam was moved to below the screen. So if you plan on using the webcam, be prepared to show off your nose and in addition to the other party seeing your knuckles a lot if you're typing. But, I’ll definitely make that trade any day; smaller bezels vs having the camera at the top. If you currently own the last year’s model, you’ll also notice that a lot of the ports have been placed in the back of the laptop. You’ll still have access to a USB 3.1 port on either side of the laptop. The reason for this is so that it offers better cooling. Overall, the thermals on the Y530 is pretty decent. When gaming, the CPU did get pretty hot (95c ~ 97c) while the GPU didn’t really heat up that much. The fans do get quite loud under load so make sure you have some headphones on. When it comes to the picture/screen quality, I wasn’t as impressed. I wished it was a bit brighter and the color reproduction was better. So if you were to use the Y530 in a more lit environment, you may have some difficulty viewing the screen. The 52.5Wh 3-cell lithium ion battery lasted about 4 hours with my usage which is typically expected with these type of setups. If you’re gaming on it constantly, the battery probably won’t last as long as 4 hours. So be prepared to bring your charger with you! Here are a couple breakdown of pros and cons that I would like to mention as my own opinion: Pros: Very sleek at subtle design No bloatware Decent all around performance Cons: Display (not as bright as others and colors are a bit spongy) Why GTX 1050 Ti? Would've liked to see at least a 1060. Lenovo also offers a 144Hz screen so it only makes sense to have a more powerful GPU… Wished battery lasted longer In conclusion, this Lenovo Legion Y530 has pretty decent all around performance. I didn’t experience any frame rate drops during gaming but did experience micro stutters. My settings on average were around low ~ medium (Nvidia Presets/Recommended). I would’ve liked to see Lenovo release all Legion Y530 with a GTX 1060 and a SSD by default (as this specific model comes with a traditional mechanical hard drive). I know they have other models but from what I could find; GTX 1050 Ti is all they have currently. Overall, I would give this specific model 3 out of 5 stars. Lenovo did do an excellent job by ditching the red and making the Legion Y530 very sleek (excellent redesign Lenovo!). Where it falls short on this specific model is with the traditional mechanical hard drive and the GTX 1050 Ti. Because of no SSD, the boot times and load times are pretty excruciating. I would say that if you’re on a really tight budget, this specific model may be for you. But if you’re able to dish out some more money for the version with an SSD, I would definitely recommend that. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Specs Windows 10 15.6” Full HD Display Intel Core i7 8750H (2.2GHz / 4.1GHz Turbo) 8GB DDR4 2666MHz Memory 1TB Hard Drive 7200 rpm Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB 52.5 Wh 3-Cell Lithium Ion Battery Built-in Harman/Kardon Speakers Built-in HD Webcam Headphone/Microphone Combo Jack USB 3.0 x2 USB 3.1 USB-C HDMI Output Mini Display Port Wireless + Gigabit Ethernet LAN Port Kensington Lock Slot Weighs 5.07 lbs. and Measures 1” Thin --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What's in the box? Lenovo Legion Y530-15ICH Lenovo 135W Power Adapter Various Manuals

The Legion Y530 is well engineered and feels like a solid product, but the selection of options for this specific unit does not have an optimal price/performance balance for gaming. If you intend to immediately add a SSD, then this laptop could be a decent option for entry-level gaming, as long as you don’t have expectations of getting into Virtual Reality setups. As-is with the lone HDD, however, I don’t recommend this for gaming. =====[ Hardware Package Selection ]===== The lone 1TB 7200 RPM HDD is not appropriate for a gaming system. Besides the obvious issues of slow boot-up times, slow application and game loading times, and slow asset loading times resulting in slow map loading, etc. while in game, having the operating system, all applications, and the game you’re playing all on the same HDD is a major IO system bottleneck. This means that during periods of any significant disk activity, IO saturation will lead to stuttering in-game, which can become very significant. Lenovo doesn’t provide SSD as an alternative to HDD in this model, but it does provide it as an additional option. SSD or HDD + SSD is common in competing gaming laptops at this price point, and it is my opinion that either configuration is an absolute must for gaming. For this reason alone, I would not recommend this particular unit unless you intend to immediately install an M.2 SSD. The GeForce GTX 1050 Ti was chosen over the base 1050, which is what you want for maximum performance. This is a decent entry level GPU, but unfortunately falls short of minimum requirements for most Virtual Reality systems by just one model. Competing laptops around this price point can be found with the GeForce GTX 1060 (base and Max-Q), providing a performance boost and VR-readiness. The Intel Core i7-8750H was chosen over the i5-8300H. While it’s nice to have, this is overkill for this system. I’m of the opinion that the money for this particular upgrade would have been better spent elsewhere on more likely candidates for performance bottlenecking, when considering the price/performance balance. While the 8GB of RAM is technically sufficient for most games the GPU is capable of handling, there’s not much headroom here for multi-tasking, let-alone near-future-proofing. This also doesn’t leave much buffer for the increasingly prevalent trend of resource/memory leaks being present in games, which means long gaming sessions in many games may not survive without the need for restarts. Once memory swapping kicks in, gaming performance takes a major nose-dive. There’s room for upgrade here, but upgrading to 16GB of RAM means replacing the current 8GB stick (because two un-matched sticks is generally not a good idea), which results in wasted money. =====[ Screen / Keyboard / Trackpad / Speakers / Camera ]===== The screen has a matte finish which provides protection against glare, but at the cost of sharpness, vividness, and brightness. The maximum brightness is sufficient for comfortable viewing in-doors, but doesn’t reach the maximum brightness of the displays I’ve seen in other laptops at this price range. The keyboard is surprisingly well designed for gaming, with great tactile feedback and key travel, low noise generation, full sized arrow keys, full number pad, consistent backlighting, and even dedicated print screen and video recording keys on the bottom row. Outside of gaming, however, the lack of dedicated page up/down, home, and end keys feels cumbersome when performing various tasks. Also, the keyboard tends to dip down noticeably with firm key presses. The trackpad, deviating from most modern laptops, has dedicated buttons that require greater than average force and travel to press down. The trackpad surface is smaller than average, but is very smooth to the touch and responsive. The speakers won’t be winning any awards, but they do have a solid mid-range. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any form of isolation or vibration dampening, resulting in heavy vibrations felt through the keyboard surface while playing music or gaming, when not using an alternative audio output. The bottom placement of the camera means the image is likely to consist more of your fingers than your face, at most comfortable screen angles. I would much rather have top placement even at the cost of a larger top bezel. Camera quality is unremarkable and doesn’t seem to support Windows Hello. The microphone picks up my voice well with plenty of volume. =====[ Performance ]===== In benchmarks, the hardware components rated above average, with the exception of the HDD. Actual game performance matched my expectations, including the occasional stuttering, most likely thanks to the HDD issue previously mentioned. Cooling and ventilation seems quite decent, at least for the GPU. Oddly, the hardware metric monitor and overlay software I use did not seem to pick up consistent/reasonable CPU temperatures, so I can’t comment on that. =====[ Engineering / Design ]===== The over-all engineering feels very solid, for a plastic build. The display hinge seems to have just the right amount of friction for easy opening while holding its angle steadily. The majority of the ports were intelligently placed out of the way in the back, while still offering a USB port on each side for convenience. The peripheral port selection is decent, but is noticeably lacking an SD card reader. Both interesting and odd, they implemented access to the BIOS/EFI/boot menu through a dedicated pinhole button rather than a keyboard key. The surface that shares a plane with the keyboard and trackpad is covered with a soft-touch material that feels nice, but unfortunately my experience with this type of material in other devices is that it eventually gums up and peels, which has me worried about how it’ll hold up in this laptop.

It's complicated to find the best value for an entry level gamer laptop. Specs are misleading or not fully specified but after many hours of research looking at HP Omen, Dell Gamers, Acer Predator and MSI found the Lenovo, in this entry level category to have the best value, least weight of this class. Like the ports being on the back instead of the sides. Only complaint is it is a little noisy when it starts working hard. Heat dissipation is good, no hot legs.

The Lenovo Legion is a very suitable gaming laptop, the case is pretty sturdy, however the lid containing the monitor is somewhat flimsy. It would have been more preferable to have an aluminum top or thicker plastic for protection, But I could see why it is this way (to reduce heat/weight and cost) The laptop is jam packed with great individual pieces: I7-8750, GTX1050 w/4gb on board, 8 gigs of Ram When I ran a couple of Benchmark tests on it I had the following results: Novabench: The overall score was 2212 with the CPU scoring an extremely high 1318 running at 3.9ghz. (turbo) 2.21ghz normally. The ram scored high also at 186 (8gb ddr4 with a speed of 15052 mb/s) Graphics score was in the 77th percentile with the (this Discrete setup is where for most uses the on board card picks up the tasks to keep heat down but when power is needed for games and graphics the intel hands the workload over to the Nvidia which performs above average) The disk scored a 30 which is right down the middle, with a 90mb/s write and 123mb/s read. UserBenchmarch: Overall score put this laptop in the 72nd percentile, Individually the CPU scored in the 96.4%. Or as they have their own rankings this was a Destroyer when compared to similar desktops, a yacht when compared to workstations. In the gaming area it ranked low but this is when they are compare to full on gaming PC not laptops. So in my Opinion this isn’t fair to compare the two. The on board card performed in the 88th %, The Seagate HD performed LOW at the 31st% this is a little disappointing, so I reran with…same results. The Samsung 8gb ram performed average (The Seagate Hard drives results knocked this from 5 to 4 stars, Seagates long term life span on their hardrives is still an unknown. You may opt for a warranty just in case) I then compared this unit to the baseline needs for the following games and how it faired: I loaded and played my copy of COD WW2, for the most part the game played pretty good on medium like settings. The video card performed really well but after playing a while I noticed some lag or stutter. This may be from the HD as per the previous benchmarks, the IO didn’t perform real well. So it did perform a little better once I lowered a few settings. Not a deal breaker but be aware you can’t run wide open on new games. So overall this unit is a pretty good gamer laptop with some solid specs, not the fastest by all means but is quite able to play most all games of today at low to medium settings. This is great for big time gamers who travel and can’t stand to miss a few days away from their favorite game. This unit makes it portable. Also worth mentioning, anyone who edits video or large file photographs would do well with the Lenovo as the processor is one of the best out there and when combined with the NVIDIA 1050 card work flow is fast. I would recommend this to family and friends.

I played Fortnite on a medium quality and it runs amazing, but when It comes to streaming and gaming the game will run slow. I would recommend this laptop if you only running this laptop for gaming and editing.

I chose this laptop because of the affordable price for an H series 8th gen i7 processor with a dedicated 4GB graphics card. After purchasing, swapped the 1TB HDD with a smaller SSD and added another 8GB of memory to increase this one to 16GB. For being a modern gaming laptop, it's disappointing to see that this laptop only supports a maximum of 16GB of RAM. It also doesn't seem to have Thunderbolt. Lastly, the touchpad and pad buttons didn't work with Debian 9 (stretch) and the 4.9.0-4-amd kernel that I tested. It's possible that a different Linux distribution may work. It's also possible that a future bios, firmware, or driver update may resolve this issue.

I absolutely loved this computer. It ran all my school projects great. I have only one complain... With in 1 year the screen has gone out. I was able to hook it up to a dual monitor set up which I love but I still wish I could use it as a laptop not as a desktop. It has also sadly become rather slow running but it's likely due to the amount of files ect I have on it. But I really wish I could give it 5 stars but I had to go out and buy a whole setup for it and now have to use it as a desktop instead of a laptop.

It's an amazing computer. Runs great. Wish I could change the lights on the keyboard.

I receive this item about a month ago and I love it. It has good performance for the most part but I would suggest that you get a SSD in it, because I find a hard time starting up my laptop. But the i7 processor is very good and fast. Once it starts up, it is as fast as I need it to be. I can do light video editing, music production and gaming. The GeForce 1050ti graphics card gives it a good performance over all and can get high quality gaming out of it. It looks great and is easy to carry around. The backlight keyboard is very helpful for working in the dark. Over all very great laptop. This version does not have a SD card slot.

The screen went totally black after about a month. I had to send it back to Lenovo. I was thrilled with the fast repair and service. No other issues since. Works great now!

Great design and bang for the buck. Works as expected and all the specs are decent. Not very sleek as modern laptops its more like a professional gaming laptop.

Very good size and super fast, graphics very good for a graphics software

I was looking for a laptop that could handle gaming and schoolwork and found this on a good deal, it suits all my needs and I am extremely happy with this.

Does everything I need? Some gaming, video editing, work. Works flawless! I do want to upgrade the ram, does anyone know which ram to purchase?

I’ve loved this laptop but unfortunately it has started having problems already. It did an update and said I have lost all my media. When it works it’s great but for how soon it’s started having problems I wouldn’t recommend this computer.

Like how fast it operates and the graphics are great

Fantastic graphics and fast laptop. Worth the cost.

As this is my first gaming laptop ever, I have to say this exceeded my expectations. I thought I would get mediocre graphics and that the computer would be slow since it's on the cheaper spectrum for gaming laptops, but I eat amazed to play most of my games with high quality graphics and the computer runs smoothly!

Got this as a gift for my nephew. It’s perfect for the games that he likes to play. It has a 1050ti with 8gb or RAM and 1TB of storage.

I know its a great computer, but the screen blacked out two months after I bought it. I needed to pay the repair as warranty was only in the US. Now, the PCIe is also broken, which does not allow me to play games fluently. I'm not sure if this happened due to Best Buy handling and care or a problem that came from Lenovo. Anyway, its a great computer even though I cannot use it in ita maximum performance.