The Lenovo Legion Y740S is the thinnest, lightest gaming laptop from Lenovo to date, measuring just 0.6 inches thick and weighing just under 4.2 pounds.

There’s just one catch — the 15.6 inch laptop doesn’t have discrete graphics. While the laptop’s integrated Intel graphics may be good enough for some games, you’ll need to plug in an external graphics dock if you want to take advantage of an NVIDIA or AMD graphics card.

Fortunately, Lenovo’s got one of those too — the new Lenovo Legion BoostStation is an aluminum eGPU dock that lets you use a desktop-class graphics card when gaming at home.

The Legion Y740S laptop and the Legion BoostStation should be available in May with starting prices of $1100 and $250, respectively.

Lenovo says the laptop supports up to a 15.6 inch, 4K IPS display with Dolby Vision and support for up to 600 nits of brightness and a 60 Hz refresh rate.

The Legion Y740S will be powered by a 10th-gen Intel Core H-series processor with support for up to a Core i9 chip. Intel hasn’t officially announced these processors yet, but they’re said to be coming soon.

The laptop has a 60 Wh battery and supports up to 32GB of DDR4 memory and 1TB of PCIe solid state storage. It has a 60 Wh battery, and the laptop will be powered by one of Intel’s not-yet-announced 10th-gen Core H-series processors.

The notebook also features a 180-degree hinge that allows you to set the screen to the most comfortable angle, and the laptop has “exclusive thermals” with a 5-point sensor array and 4 fans. It also features Dolby Atmos audio, and the laptop’s keyboard features an oil and abrasion-resistant coating.

You can connect the optional Lenovo Legion BoostStation graphics dock via a Thunderbolt 3 port (which means you could also use the BoostStation with non-Lenovo laptops).

The $250 starting price for the graphics dock gets you an empty case that allows you to add your graphics card of choice. But Lenovo will also offer versions bundled with NVIDIA GeForce RTX2060 or AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT GPUs.

While the laptop is designed to be portable, the BoostStation is a lot less so — it weighs 20 pounds. The graphics dock has an aluminum body with one transparent side panel. In addition to allowing you to connect an external GPU, the dock has a few USB ports, an HDMI port and Ethernet jack, allowing you to use it as a desktop docking station.

 

Lenovo isn’t the first company to release a so-called gaming laptop that lacks discrete graphics. The Razer Blade Stealth notebook I reviewed a few years ago was ostensibly a gaming laptop… but it was really just a thin and light notebook that you could use for gaming if you plugged in an optional graphics dock — something you could do to turn any supported laptop into a gaming PC.

But in late 2018 Razer added discrete graphics to its Blade Stealth line of 13 inch gaming laptops.

Meanwhile, Lenovo is taking its discrete GPU away… sort of. If you really wanted a Lenovo Legion gaming notebook with built-in graphics, you can still buy the current-gen Lenovo Legion Y740. It sells for $1360 and up and features a 9th-gen Intel Core H processor and NVIDIA graphics. But with a starting weight of 4.9 pounds, it’s a bit heavier than the new Legion Y740S. It’s also bulkier, measuring about 0.9 inhces thick.

Lenovo is also introducing a new “Studio Edition” version of the Legion Y40 featuring NVIDIA Studio Drivers for folks that want the performance of a gaming laptop, but who plan to use it for graphic design, video editing, or other content creation tasks.

press release

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One reply on “Lenovo Legion Y740S is a thin and light gaming laptop (external GPU required for serious gaming)”

  1. The interesting part is that Lenovo will use an H series processor, compared to Razer going with U series processors, should mean that gaming performance will be a bit better, and you can expect there to be some longevity before you’d have to upgrade. Wonder how battery life will be.

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