Lenovo Legion Y540 vs Y545: Which One is Better For You?

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This article is an in-depth comparison between Lenovo Legion Y540 and the Y545. If you don’t wanna make a bad choice you should definietely read this article before you buy, because today we will compare the performance, thermals, quality, features, other configurations and basically everything that will help you decide which one is better for you.

LENOVO Y540	LENOVO Y545
BUY NOW	BUY NOW
PROS	PROS
Sturdy build, clean look. Top performance (incl. gaming). Decent audio quality.	Strong gaming value. Quiet. Bright screen.
CONS	CONS
Abysmally short battery life. Oddly placed keys. Rear ports are inconvenient.	Short battery life. Mixed productivity performance. Screen could be more colorful. Flat, shallow keyboard.

SPECIFICATIONS

DESIGN

Y540:

The laptop looks very clean and professional. It’s all black, the lid has nice circular grooves that emanate from the logo, the Legion branding on the side has a mirror-like texture and a small white light in the O letter.

On the back, it has extended exhaust section which doesn’t really make it bigger than other gaming laptops. Inside you can find a clean looking keyboard with the black deck that seems to be covered by soft and nice to the touch layer of rubber.

Y545:

The Y545 has more agressive shapes, but it still looks pretty clean for a gaming laptop. The big Y symbol only glows which looks great. Inside there’s nothing fancy as well. All we can see is the black deck and keyboard with touchpad. The back looks awesome, but the hinge in the center makes the screen a little bit more flexy.

BUILD QUALITY

The build quality is another thing to mention, and I think that Y545 is the winner here. It feels more premium as it is all made of metal. The chassis was perfectly stiff and solid. On the other hand, Y540 is made of thick plastic which is pretty solid, and thanks to rubber layer on the deck it actually feels really good and premium for a plastic laptop.

KEYBOARD & TOUCHPAD

Y540:

Y540 is equipped with a professional looking keyboard with characteristic for Lenovo U shaped keys. It has 1.7mm key travel, good spacing and the keys are slightly larger than in other gaming laptops that i’ve tested. It is great and very comfortable to type on, but if you’re a gamer you will not like. It comes with only white keyboard lighting.

The Y540’s touchpad uses Windows Precision drivers so it has good gestures and tracking. It looks almost the same, but the click sound audibly is louder than Y545.

Y545:

In my opinion the keyboard in Y545 is better for gamers and who have to type a lot. It has 1.35mm key travel, good spacing, it’s comfortable to type on and easy to get used to. It has the typical tactile feel. This laptop also comes with white backlighting. However, The light is strong and vivid.

It was more comfortable for me to use Y545 touchpad. It uses Precision drivers. As same as Lenovo it has 2 dedicated buttons for left and right click.

DISPLAY

Y540:

My Lenovo Legion Y540 had 1080p 144Hz IPS pannel as well. It was practically the same smooth as Y545. There’s no G-Sync too. If it comes to Y540 you have 3 display options of which 2 are 60Hz, one standard and the other with better color gamut and brightness. And 144Hz one that i’ve got here. It can reproduce 93% of sRGB color gamut, 74% of AdobeRGB and the brightness was on the dimmer side barely scoring 300 nits.

Y545:

My Y545 came with 15.6-inch 1080p, 60Hz anti-glare IPS pannel. There are also orher display options that you can choose including 1080p 60Hz, 1080p 144Hz. The color coverage of my 60Hz pannel was 95% of sRGB color gamut, 73% of AdobeRGB and the brightness of 271 nits. You can easily use this laptop for content creation, the games look great and smooth and the viewing angles are good.

The quality of both pannels was good. The camera was able to capture some backlight bleeding in both cases, but it was not visible to my eye during normal use even when the screen was black.

PERFORMANCE

The performance comparison is probably the most exciting part of this review. I had the Y540 with GTX 1660Ti and Y545 came with GTX 1650.

TESTED GAMES:

The Y545 was not that far behind which makes me think that it would perform the same good if it had the same GPU.

I pushed both laptops to the limits, so for testing purposes, I set the performance mode in both laptops for more CPU power and the fans are automatic, but the performance mode allows them to spin faster, and it also increases the CPU power limit to 50W during combined GPU and CPU load. So i tested it on performance mode which you can enable in the Lenovo Vantage app.

WEIGHT & DIMENSIONS

If it comes to dimensions and weight both laptops are practically the same (2.3KG) with the only difference that Y545 is slightly thicker.

PORT SELECTION

Basically both laptops have exactly the same I/O with no difference at all. Port selection in this price point is very good to see.

BATTERY

As for the battery life i managed to use the Y540 for up to 6 hours when browsing the web and doing light productivity work. When gaming battery died after 1.5 hour. The Y545 was far behind. It ran for up to 3.5 hours when light work and 1 hour when gaming.

WHICH LAPTOP YOU SHOULD BUY?

It seems to be everything that you need to know to wisely choose one of these laptops, but before we finish let me share my closing thoughts.

If it comes to the Y545, I think that it’s a very good and interesting laptop for those who are into content creation and average gaming.

On the other hand we have the Y540 which is a gaming laptop that seems to gear towards work more than gaming. It has a great and comfortable to type on keyboard, professional looking and clean design and it works quieter which is good if you wanna bring it to the class or business meeting and not distract others. However we can’t deny that Legion Y540 is a powerful gaming laptop that can run the most demanding games on ultra settings at respectable frame rates.

Expert Reviews For Y540:

By SlashGear
The Legion Y540 is a slim and lightweight, relatively speaking, gaming laptop that packs a sensible, mature, and ultimately still stylish design, narrow bezels, and several configuration options. Lenovo was careful to offer features and design elements that make sense for gamers.

By IndiaToday
Lenovo Legion Y540If you have made it through the entire piece, you must have already got a fair idea of what I am about to say. The Lenovo Legion Y540 (15) has impressed me in areas that matter the most for casual gamers or wannabe professional gamers….

By IndianExpress
Lenovo Legion Y540 is a gaming laptop that looks like a professional laptop. For the price it is being offered at, it is quite a capable gaming machine that can do everything you throw at it without any issues. It is a laptop that I loved everything…

By Beebom
At Rs. 1,19,990, the Lenovo Legion Y540 is a well priced gaming laptop. It brings in a 9th-gen Core i7 processor, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, and the RTX 2060 GPU, all of which translates to amazing performance. Competing laptops usually don’t offer the…

By Digit
It takes a few minutes of quiet reflection to realise just how far the Legion brand has come in the last couple of years. While the Lenovo Y510P didn’t even get the Legion badge, models starting from the Lenovo Legion Y520 started seeing it. The Legion…

Expert Reviews For Y545:

By CNET
Like its predecessor, the Y7000P, Lenovo’s Legion Y545 outperforms its price.

By PCMag
Lenovo’s new entry-level gaming notebook, the Legion Y545 provides smooth framerates on its 15.6-inch full HD screen in today’s games. It’s a good alternative to the Acer Predator Helios 300, although its chassis gets a little toasty.

By WindowsCentral
The Legion Y545 is an interesting alternative to the Y540, coming at you with a bulkier design and slightly cheaper price. It does suffer from some thermal issues, but for the most part, it’s going to deliver excellent performance.

By TomsHardware
With a simple, RGB-free design the Lenovo Legion Y545 is a good value. It makes some sacrifices to keep its price competitive, but its gaming performance is still on point.

By IGN
If I had to choose between the Helios 300 and the Legion Y545, I’d be hard-pressed to pick. They are both stellar machines for a stellar price. I might lean slightly towards the Helios 300 simply because of the distinct difference in battery life. Although, if you can find the Legion Y545 at the $949 price that it sometimes lists for, then it’s a steal and something you should jump on if your budget is around the $1,000 mark.

Jaskaran Singh

Jaskaran, a tech enthusiast from childhood, inspired by his father, began his tech journey by rooting Android phones. He now writes on various tech topics, aiming to simplify complex ideas for a broad audience. His writing is direct, concise, and flows effortlessly, making tech topics accessible and engaging.