The Lenovo Legion Y720 Tower (Y720T) is a Lenovo’s Y-series pre-built gaming rig. It packs an NVIDIA GTX 1070 graphics and Intel 7th generation Core i7-7700 all within the price of RM 7,899. Let’s give it a go and see kind of performance you’re getting after spluring out that hard-earned moolah.

Lenovo Legion Y720 Tower Specifications

  • Intel Core i7-7700
  • Intel H270 chipset
  • 2x 8GB DDR4 2400MHz
  • 256GB SSD + 2TB HDD
  • NVIDIA GTX 1070 8GB GDDR5
  • Windows 10 Home
  • 802.11AC, Bluetooth 4.0

Unboxing

What’s in the box:

  • Lenovo Legion Y720 Tower
  • Lenovo Keyboard & Mouse Combo
  • Power cable
  • User manual

Overview

Design & Build Quality

Lenovo Legion Y720 Tower

The design for the Lenovo Legion has been focusing mainly on the black and red theme with carbon fibre accents. Well, pseudo carbon fibre in this case.

There’s a 120mm front intake fan behind the front panel. While some may concern if the front panel would choke the cool air intake, but apparently with 1 intake fan configuration, the intake openings are proved to be more than enough.

Lenovo Legion Y720 Tower

The mid-tower case doesn’t come with any fancy transparent or tampered glass side panel. Just a piece of thick solid perforated steel panel.

Lenovo Legion Y720 Tower

There’s a handle at the top for easy transport of the rig.

Ports & Connectivity

Lenovo Legion Y720 Tower

You’ll find a great selection of ports at the front. From the left:

  • SD card reader
  • USB 3.0 port + Always On Charging
  • USB 3.0 port
  • 2x USB 2.0 port
  • Headphone jack
  • Microphone jack

One thing that bothers me is that Lenovo has decided to use the same red colour code for both USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports. I mean, usually, only USB 3.0 ports would receive special colour treatment, right? Nonetheless, I would prefer to see Lenovo dropping USB 2.0 and pick up USB Type-C 3.0 instead.

Lenovo Legion Y720 Tower

The back I/O is rather dull with just 6 USB Type-A ports. 4 being USB 3.0 while the rest are USB 2.0.

Internals

To get into the internal component of the Lenovo Legion Y720 Tower, there’s a neat mechanism that secures the side panel without using a screw. Unlock the slider and press the release switch at the top, the side panel should pop off without any effort.

Lenovo Legion Y720 Tower

Now we’re in the rig, at the first glance, it may seem hideous with the outdated silver colour scheme with those awful green PCBs. Once you lay your hands on the case, you will be amazed by its solid construction. Well, it’s something that we case lovers would really appreciate.

As mentioned, there’s one 120mm intake fan at the front and one 120mm exhaust fan at the back.

The optical drive cage and HDD cage has a tool-less design for easy upgrades.

Lenovo Legion Y720 Tower

The GPU support is top notch. It is well secured in place and that explains how Lenovo is shipping the desktop tower without worrying the transit would damage the GPU and PCIe slot.

Since this is a pre-built system, so don’t expect the most beautiful motherboard with all the bells and whistles. The CPU cooler got us a bit worried about the noise it may produce during loads but turns out it was fine after all. More on the noise and thermal performance right after this.

What surprises us is the add-on heatsink for the 256GB NVMe SSD. While it may not increase the performance of the SSD, but it will maintain the overall consistency in the read-write speed.

Lenovo Legion Y720 Tower

As for the power supply, what we are having here is an 80 Plus Bronze certified AcBel PSU rated at 450W. It is sufficient to power up the i7-7700 and GTX 1070, but definitely a big NO for GTX 1070 SLI. (In case you’re planning to do that in the future)

So, that means Lenovo is giving just about the right components without sparing extras.

Performance & Thermals

FPSTemperature
GameAverage FPSMinimum FPSCPU Max (°C)GPU Max (°C)
CS: GO230.69887482
GTA V151.8707080
Overwatch83.4646683

We hook up the Y720 Tower to our HKC G27 1080p 144Hz gaming monitor and run some games. With all settings maxed out, the rig is capable of pushing the games without facing any hiccups. As expected from the GTX 1070 on 1080p resolution.

Cooling performance is alright, just that we were hoping the GPU could’ve done better if it comes with a multi-fan custom cooling solution. Fan noise is alright during the gaming session, but we believe the fans are capable of spinning even faster and noisier especially the CPU’s industrial cooler fan.

Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 3134.857 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1174.418 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 8,T= 8) : 1035.370 MB/s [ 252775.9 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 8,T= 8) : 722.546 MB/s [ 176402.8 IOPS]
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 803.809 MB/s [ 196242.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 765.273 MB/s [ 186834.2 IOPS]
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 47.364 MB/s [ 11563.5 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 162.346 MB/s [ 39635.3 IOPS]

Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 214.738 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 201.046 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 8,T= 8) : 1.537 MB/s [ 375.2 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 8,T= 8) : 1.385 MB/s [ 338.1 IOPS]
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1.505 MB/s [ 367.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1.297 MB/s [ 316.7 IOPS]
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.616 MB/s [ 150.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 1.253 MB/s [ 305.9 IOPS]

Final Thoughts

Lenovo Legion Y720 Tower

The Lenovo Legion Y720 Tower has caught us by surprise with its uncompromising chassis build quality. Despite the front panel might seem to choke the cool air intake, nonetheless, the case internal cooling performance is pretty decent with just the pair of 120mm intake and 120mm exhaust.

Gaming performance is definitely living up to its standards with the i7-7700 CPU and NVIDIA GTX 1070 GPU for 1080p resolution monitors. Our only qualm is the choice of blower type GPU cooler or else there would be more room for overclocking.

Storage performance is without a doubt speedy as per NVMe’s standard and the 2TB HDD is good enough for a game library.

At the price of RM7,899 (inclusive of GST), that’s pretty hard to swallow because local custom rig builders are offering more value for every ringgit you spend. That is given if you live nearby a trustworthy custom rig builder, otherwise, pre-built systems would still be a good choice for non-tech-savvy consumers.

Pros:

  • Solid chassis with thick steel panels
  • Good looking design
  • Decent cooling
  • Great performance

Cons:

  • Blower style GPU cooler
  • Sub-par office-use keyboard and mouse combo (seriously? Legion?)
  • Price

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