Here’s Lenovo’s first eGPU enclosure and a ‘gaming laptop’ to go with it
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Lenovo is getting into the eGPU market with the Legion BoostStation, a new eGPU enclosure which can accommodate graphics cards up to 330mm in length. The company also has a new laptop it’s announcing today: the Legion Y740S, which starts at $1,099.99. The company’s press release calls it “our thinnest and lightest gaming laptop yet,” but that’s a claim you’re going to have to take with a hefty pinch of salt, not least because it lacks a dedicated graphics card, potentially making it a good partner for the BoostStation.
The pairing puts Lenovo in more or less direct competition with Razer, which already offers a pair of eGPU enclosures in its Razer Core X lineup that can be used alongside laptops like its compact Blade Stealth models. Lenovo’s eGPU enclosure comes with a small price advantage over Razer’s: the BoostStation starts at just $249.99, while Razer’s Core X starts at $300. In addition, Lenovo’s enclosure comes with a USB hub (including a pair of USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports and an Ethernet port), while Razer only offers a hub with its more expensive $400 Razer Core X Chroma. That said, Razer’s enclosures can accommodate graphics cards that are 330mm in length, which is slightly better than Lenevo’s 320mm maximum.
As well as selling the enclosure on its own, Lenovo says it also plans to bundle it with a variety of graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD, though there’s no mention yet of what these bundles could end up costing.
Away from its first eGPU enclosure, Lenovo’s Legion Y740S doesn’t sound like quite the gaming laptop that the company is billing it as. There’s the missing GPU for one thing, and the screen also tops out at 60Hz, when a lot of gaming laptops will offer a refresh rate of 120Hz or even higher these days. To Lenovo’s credit, it offers the laptop with up to a 10th gen Intel Core i9 H-series processor, but with that spec its modest 60 Wh battery might struggle to power it for long (Lenovo claims you’ll get up to eight hours from it). Oh, and while we’re at it, a 4.18-pound (1.9kg) laptop that’s 0.58 inches thick isn’t especially thin and light these days.
Elsewhere, the Legion Y740S has a fairly standard set of specs. For starters, you can get up to 32GB of RAM and up to 1TB of PCIe SSD storage. It also comes with a good selection of ports, including two USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports, an SD card reader, a headphone jack, and two Thunderbolt 3 ports, one of which you’ll have to use to connect its eGPU enclosure if you decide to go down that route. You get a choice of a 1080p or 4K display, both 15.6 inches in size, and both with 60Hz refresh rates.
Lenovo says both the Lenovo BoostStation enclosure and Legion Y740S laptop will be available starting in May.
