The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which is annually dedicated to the first days of January, is already behind us, but participation in CES provides manufacturing companies with the opportunity not only to demonstrate seasonal new products, but also to signal their plans for the entire next year. The brightest devices presented at the conference will not go on sale until the second or third quarter. So, Lenovo is preparing an ultra-thin Legion Y740s laptop for spring, but in reality a two-component gaming system that takes its finished form with a desktop box for the Legion BoostStation video card and a suitable monitor.
The very idea of ββββincreasing the performance of a laptop using external graphics connected by a Thunderbolt cable (and before that using proprietary interfaces based on PCI Express), although it looks promising, did not arise yesterday until it has earned great popularity among gamers. The Lenovo brand, which is still associated primarily with work products rather than gaming products, has found its own approach to solving this problem. Instead of just releasing another eGPU box and crossing your fingers at random, the company made the Legion BoostStation an almost full-fledged desktop, which only lacks a motherboard with a processor and RAM. The latter replaces the Legion Y740s laptop, and from it, in turn, they removed those components that you can do without on the road, but focused on the quality of the remaining ones.
The Legion Y740s is an extremely thin (14,9 mm) and light (1,8 kg) computer by 15,6-inch laptop standards, but Lenovo plans to equip it with high-performance Intel Comet Lake-H processors, up to eight-core models. Heat removal from the CPU is ensured by a developed cooling system, consisting of a thin evaporation chamber (1,6 mm) and four fans, not simple ones, but with blades made of liquid crystal polymer. A new, more stable blade material allowed Lenovo engineers to minimize the gap between the impeller and the fan walls. Cooling is benefited by a wide air intake grille and the fact that the Legion Y740s lacks a discrete graphics core.
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The laptop comes standard with 16 or 32 GB of RAM (which can probably be replaced with 64 GB) and a solid-state drive with a capacity of up to 1 TB. The built-in battery has a capacity of 60 Wh, which, again, is quite good for a laptop without discrete graphics. The younger version of the Legion Y740s is equipped with a screen with a resolution of 1920 Γ 1080 and a brightness of 300 cd/m2, but it can be upgraded to a 4K matrix with a brightness of 600 cd/m2 and full coverage of the Adobe RGB color range. The new product is made in a durable and lightweight aluminum case with a full-size keyboard. The set of external interfaces includes two USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports, two Thunderbolt 3 (which are also used for power), a card reader and a headphone jack.
As you can see, the Legion Y740s doesn't offer much in the way of wired connectivity, but that's what the Legion BoostStation desktop dock is for, among other things. The latter is a barebone in an aluminum chassis, inside of which any dual-slot video card (up to 300 mm long) can be placed, and the built-in 500-watt ATX power supply serves accelerators with a power consumption of up to 300 W and can supply up to 100 W via a Thunderbolt 3 cable for powering a laptop. In addition to a slot for a video card, BoostStation has a bay for a 2,5 or 3,5-inch hard drive, as well as an M.2 connector for an SSD (the manufacturer has not yet decided whether it will be one or two). Finally, the docking station carries all the external connectors that the Legion Y740s laptop lacks: HDMI video output, two USB 3.1 Gen 1, one USB 2.0 and wired gigabit Ethernet. There's even a built-in subwoofer planned to complement the Legion Y740s stereo system. As for prices, the basic Legion Y740s will appear on the market in March-April of this year for $1099, and the BoostStation without a built-in video card is priced at $249. In addition, Lenovo will sell the dock with a variety of pre-installed accelerators from the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti to the GTX 2080 SUPER. AMD fans will get the Radeon RX 5700 XT option.
In the photo with Legion Y740s and BoostStation, the system is connected to an external monitor. It is none other than the Legion Y25-25, one of the pioneering display devices based on an IPS panel with a 240Hz refresh rate. Monitors with 1ms GtG response times and such high refresh rates have until now relied on TN+Film panels with all the attendant disadvantages, including narrow viewing angles and mediocre color reproduction. Fast IPS panels created by AU Optronics made it possible to combine a 240 Hz refresh rate with high picture quality, and Lenovo was one of the first to use innovative technology in its products. The Legion Y25-25's 24,5-inch screen has a resolution of 1920 Γ 1080, a brightness of 400 cd/m2 and supports the FreeSync standard. It is also worth noting the extremely thin frames around the matrix and a convenient stand that allows for screen height adjustment, three-dimensional rotation, and even portrait mode. The device will go on sale no earlier than June, but at a very attractive price ($319) in light of its progressive characteristics.
Source: 3dnews.ru