With the new Lenovo Legion Y740s (15-inch) revision also sporting Vapor Chamber cooling for the first time - a type of cooling that is as fun to say as it is impressive in terms of underlying tech. Which we won’t pretend to be able to fully comprehend. Joining the already impressive build quality and portability of the Legion range (the Y740s is the thinnest and lightest to date), the new addition comes in the form of an external GPU housing we’ve seen crop up in recent years.

As we learned from Lenovo at CES 2020, based on studies it has found that the majority of people game between the hours of 6-11pm, which happens in the home. So the versatility of an external GPU housings that also have enough ports to support peripherals and dedicated displays makes sense. In fact, the development of the external GPU housing occurred alongside the new crop of Legion laptops expected to drop in 2020. The company sees the two as complimentary.


Called the Lenovo BoostStation it will support the current crop of GPUs - going all the way up to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super and the AMD Radeon 5700 XT. Bringing true desktop-like performance to a gaming laptop. Going by its full title - Lenovo Legion BoostStation Graphics Booster - perhaps the most interesting differentiation here versus other external eGPU expansion boxes is that Lenovo plans to sell versions of them with graphics cards included. A concept it calls ‘bundles’. Okay, so everyone calls putting things that go together bundles but this a first for this type of product.

So far Lenovo BoostStation bundles include the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 6 GB and the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT - no word yet on pricing. The notable design touches don't stop there though as the BoostStation also features a single 3.5” and 2.5” storage slot, in addition to Thunderbolt 3 support, and a 500W power-supply, meaning that it will serve that singular function that we all think of when we imagine how an eGPU would be used. That is, portable productive laptop on-the-go and gaming powerhouse at home.


Being able to keep your games close, proximity-wise via a dedicated hard-drive, to the external graphics card is a smart move. Especially when you factor in that any connected device will gain access to said library and raw GPU horsepower. And by offering bundles this will no doubt become something that any modern gaming or high-performance laptop owner would look into - in addition to the, err, legion of Legion owners.

AusGamers travelled to CES 2020 as a guest of Lenovo.