Lenovo Legion Y25-30 review: A solid 1080p monitor jampacked with gaming features

There are all kinds of great monitors you can buy these days, but if you don't want things to get too extravagant, a 1080p resolution display will do the trick just fine for a decent price. Most 1080p monitors are pretty basic, though, but the Lenovo Legion Y25-30 monitor isn't.

For everyday gaming on a great desktop or even a great laptop, the Lenovo Legion Y25-30 is going to be great. With features like joystick controls for menu navigation, a 240Hz refresh rate, and even things like OverDrive, HDR, and Dark Boost, the Lenovo Legion Y25-30 monitor really impressed me in the month I had it in my setup. It does have some small quirks, though, like the massively wide base and the weirdly muffled speakers.

Lenovo Legion Y25-30: Price and availability

You can buy the Lenovo Legion Y25-30 today through three retailers. It's available at CDW for $337. However, it's also for sale at Amazon for $294, where stock appears to be limited, Lenovo also has a listing for the monitor, but it's not in stock at the time of writing this review.

You need to be careful as to which version of the Legion Y25-30 you buy, though, as there are two versions. There's one with Nvidia G-Sync, and a second version with AMD FreeSync; the version you choose might depend on your graphics card.

Design

Good enough to fit into any setup

The Lenovo Legion Y25-30 isn't a fancy-looking gaming monitor, but that's what also what made it so appealing to me The middle back of the monitor has a cool "hump" that ends almost near the edges of the display. It has a honey-comb-like grille and shiny Legion branding on the left side.

The front and the rest of the monitor are plain raven black-colored plastic, though, which helps make it more subtle and easy to fit into any setup. Bezels are thin along the top and two sides, but the monitor has a small bottom chin.

The Lenovo Legion Y25-30 isn't a fancy-looking gaming monitor, but that's what also makes it so great.

As for the stand, well, instead of coming forward towards your desk, it is quite wide. It stretches from the left to the right, and it has a spot for you to prop a phone down the middle in the front. This makes the stand take up more space than it should. The back of the stand on the monitor arm is just plain plastic without the honeycomb grille, which makes for a uniform look. There's also an open area on the bottom where you can route cables.

If setup is your concern, don't worry. I unboxed and got started with this monitor pretty easily by just sliding the monitor arm into the base, and then snapping the monitor into the back with no tools. I hated the setup process on this monitor's sibling, the Lenovo G27q, which involved using screws, so I'm happy to see this monitor is more user-friendly with setup.

The monitor has plenty of wiggle room, too. If you want, you can rotate the monitor fully vertically to view social media feeds and web pages. You also can swivel it, too between -45 and 45 degrees, and tilt it forward between -5 and 22 degrees. That's so nifty.

Ports

Connect all your devices

I have a lot of devices in my home, so I am happy to report that the connectivity on the Lenovo Legion Y25-30 is solid for all of my gadgets. The back of the monitor has two HDMI 2.0 ports and a DisplayPort. I used those HDMI ports with my Mac and my Chromebook. The DisplayPort is what I used with my Surface Laptop Studio. You also get some USB-A ports. And, on the side hump of the monitor on the back, additional USB-A ports and a headphone jack.

The connectivity is great, but a lot of gaming laptops and desktops now do have USB-C ports. I would have liked to have seen USB-C on board, but that's extremely rare for budget monitors.

Interface and buttons

I love the joystick controls

Even though this monitor is priced under $400, Lenovo was quite thoughtful of how the gamer might use and control this display. When I unboxed the monitor, I was delighted to see that it had joystick controls for navigating the OSD menus. You usually only see this on more expensive monitors.

Lenovo was quite thoughtful of how the gamer might use and control this display.

There are four buttons along the back. The main joystick control, two smaller buttons for game mode and inputs, and the power button. Move the joystick up and down, and you can control the brightness, and then the left and right controls the volume. The OSD is pretty clean, too, and is well organized, and I didn't need to fray too far to change the refresh rates on the monitor, or even change the image contrast settings and other game mode settings like the FPS settings.

A note on controlling the speaker volume, though. While you get two 3W speakers, the speakers are not the clearest. Whenever I was working, I had to crank the volume up on the speakers to nearly 90% to hear the voices of my colleagues clearly. When gaming and playing Broforce, the menu music sounded loud but was also a bit muffled. I ended up bringing in my dedicated desktop speakers to enjoy this monitor more and disabled the integrated speakers. It's nice to see integrated speakers on a low-budget monitor, though, so it means if you didn't want to spend extra on dedicated speakers, you don't have to.

Color accuracy and performance

Packed with features that make up for missing pixels

To take the Lenovo Legion Y25-30 for a spin, I played a pretty simple game, Broforce. This is a pixel-style game where you don't really need to worry about getting the most out of every single physical pixel on the screen. On the title screen of this game, the Blue in the Broforce logo was super bright, and the small blue specs emitting into the black background looked really sharp. Then, when I fired guns to bust open the dirt and other objects around me to hide from enemies, I really did like how vibrant the orange pixel-style explosions looked.

Even in a game like Counter-Strike 2, scenes looked beautifully bright, and I didn't notice any screen tears or dropped frames when jumping into public matches where fights can get very intense. The standard 240Hz refresh rate and 0.5ms response times really do their trick here. (You could overclock to 280Hz if you please, and even use HDR 400 in supported titles, but it's not something I did).

The Lenovo Legion Y25-30 is ideal for games where you don't need to worry about every pixel on the screen.

Beyond gaming, the Lenovo Legion Y25-30 was just all right for work. I'm used to working on a 27-inch 4K display, so a 1080p resolution and 24.5-inch monitor was a little too cramped for me. Still, the text on the screen was crisp, the web pages were clear and easy to read, and I didn't notice any images looking too washed out or dull. Even the green wallpaper I had on Windows looked great. As a second screen, this Lenovo monitor will indeed be useful for work, especially because it can hit about 400 nits of brightness.

On the technical side of things with color accuracy, the monitor put up respectful numbers that we usually look for in budget monitors. It's 98% SRGB, 75% Adobe RGB, 79% P3, and 70% NTSC as measured with my Spyder 5 colorimeter. Brightness was just close to 500 nits, and the contrast ratios were 1000:1.

Testing was done on regular settings, out of the box, Game mode was standard, OverDrive was set to Level 3, FreeSync On, and OverClock Off. Color temperatures were set to warm, brightness and 70%, and Contrast at 75% with a Dark boost to Level 4.

Should you buy the Lenovo Legion Y25-30?

You should buy the Lenovo Legion Y25-30 if:

• You want a budget 1080p monitor
• You want a monitor with a superfast refresh rate
• You want a monitor with lots of gaming features

You shouldn't buy the Lenovo Legion Y25-30 if:

• You need a monitor with a big screen
• You want a monitor that packs a lot of pixels and a high resolution

Priced just south of $400, the Lenovo Legion Y25-30 is a great monitor. While it's not packing a high resolution, it is packed with plenty of nifty features that make gaming fun. It's hard to complain about it for this low price, and you certainly will appreciate it if you want a quick second screen for work or a budget 1080p monitor for gaming.