Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 - An Affordable AND Powerful Gaming Notebook?
Lenovo's IdeaPad Y500 is a 15.6-inch multimedia/desktop replacement notebook with an interchangeable drive bay that lets you switch out your optical drive for a second NVIDIA GTX 650M module for a boost in gaming performance. We find out if it can hold its own against some dedicated gaming machines or if it's just a gimmick.
Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 - An Affordable AND Powerful Gaming Notebook?
Notebooks with optical drives that can be swapped out and replaced with something more useful - like a secondary HDD or SSD - aren't exactly novel, but so far, they've also been somewhat limited in practicality. Generally a feature only seen in business notebooks, most offer a dummy faceplate for reducing overall weight, or at best, a back-up battery or secondary HDD for more storage. The most versatile option right now is probably Fujitsu's LH772 business notebook, which lets you swap out its optical drive for a back-up battery unit, a second HDD or, amazingly, a mini-projector but, unless you regularly want to screen presentations out of your notebook, you're probably not going to get a lot of mileage out of that.
Lenovo is taking a more pragmatic approach with its latest notebook, the IdeaPad Y500, by being the first consumer multimedia notebook to offer a swappable optical drive that can be replaced with a second GPU module, in this case, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650M, providing better gaming performance through a 2-way SLI configuration. This means the notebook already has a primary GeForce GTX 650M module and adding the secondary GPU of the same configuration activates both of them in SLI configuration. If you want more traditional options, a 750GB HDD is also available (sold separately for S$179), as is a fan module for better cooling and reduced weight (sold separately for S$59).
The optical drive on Lenovo's IdeaPad Y500 can be swapped out for a second NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650M module.
Lenovo also makes a swappable Blu-ray drive for the Y500, however, it is not currently available in this region. Online, the Blu-ray drive appears to be sold for between US$99 - $149.
Our review unit is armed with a quad-core Ivy Bridge Intel Core i7-3630QM (2.4 GHz) CPU, a 15.6-inch full HD 1920 x 1080 pixels resolution display, Windows 8 OS and 1TB HDD. It's also extremely affordable (especially compared to some of the S$3000-4000+ gaming notebooks out there) at just S$1999 (which includes the swappable GPU module bundled in). So is the Y500 the king of bang-for-your-buck, or just a big bust? Let's find out.
Design
Lenovo is normally quite understated in its notebook design and the Y500 is no exception, sporting a stealthy, all-black finish that Lenovo has dubbed 'Dusk Black'. The build is mostly plastic, with a panel of brushed, black aluminum covering the lid and another on the interior for a nice, sleek look. Overall build quality feels fairly solid, and we didn't notice any finish or fit issues.
The Y500 isn't terribly exciting, but it does look rather smart.
There's a mild taper from back-to-front, but it's not very noticeable so essentially, the notebook is a rectangular block. You won't find any exotic grilles, glowing vents or other such gamer-chic here, but the look, while not particularly innovative or exciting, is clean and has no chance at offending anyone's aesthetic sensibilities (which can't be said for some of the gaming monstrosities out there).
The Y500 is tapered from back-to-front, but it's not very drastic.
On the inside, things are marginally more exciting, helped by an injection of color from the backlit keyboard which shines a very bright red, and can also be seen on the speaker vents.
The Y500's interior is a bit more exciting thanks to its red keyboard backlighting.
The interior and wrist rest utilize the same black, brushed aluminum as the lid providing a nice, consistent look.
The screen is surrounded by a super glossy, black bezel which is matched by an equally glossy keyboard well. Normally we're not too keen on glossy, black plastic, but it seems to work for the Y500, as it provides a contrasting texture to the brushed aluminum.
The screen bezel and keyboard well are both glossy black plastic.
Sticking to the clean design philosophy, there are no media controls or other buttons on the interior, just a simple power button that sits flush to the surface.
Keyboard
The Y500 has a full-sized chiclet-style keyboard with a numberpad, although, due to its 15.6-inch form factor, it's a little bit cramped with a shortened right Shift and repositioned right Control key to make room for the arrow keys. The keys themselves have good height that allow generous amount of travel, but unfortunately feel quite soft and mushy, and we also noticed a bit of wiggle evident on each key.
The keyboard is full-sized, but a bit cramped.
Backlighting deserves a special mention as Lenovo have opted for a very nice surround lighting style, with the edges of each key illuminated, rather than just a light shining through the symbol printed on top. Lighting can be set to two brightness levels, or turned off altogether, via Fn + spacebar. The higher brightness level is one of the brightest backlights we've seen on a keyboard, notebook or otherwise.
The Y500's surround backlighting is nice and bright so you won't have any problems typing in the dark.
Trackpad
The Y500's clickpad-style trackpad was a bit disappointing. For starters, it really should be backlit, which would have complemented the keyboard nicely, but for some reason, Lenovo decided not to do this. To further compound the problem, while the trackpad surface is quite large, it feels very similar to the wrist rest surrounding it which can cause some confusion if you're trying to feel your way around in the dark.
Additionally, both left and right click were quite mushy and, at least on our review unit, the left click also traveled noticeably further inward than the right click, which made it feel very cheap. On the plus side, we didn't encounter any problems with tracking, and multi-touch swipe and zoom gestures worked well on Windows 8's Modern UI.
While the Y500's clickpad is large, the buttons are mushy and feel cheap.
Multimedia Aspects
Display
The Y500 is fitted with a glossy 15.6-inch, 1920 x 1080 full HD screen. While it is running a Windows 8 OS, unfortunately, it's not a touch screen. The display is bright with good color reproduction, high contrast and decent viewing angles, although it is quite reflective, which can be annoying while gaming or watching a movie.
The Y500 display is sharp and bright, but the glossy screen results in some unwanted reflections.
There is also some noticeable backlight bleed around the edges of the screen when viewing dark scenes.
There's a fair bit of backlight bleed noticeable towards the edges of the Y500's display.
While most gaming notebooks use a 17.3-inch display, we didn't have any problems with the Y500's 15.6-inch screen and, thanks to its full HD resolution, there was sufficient screen real estate for displaying in-game information.
Audio
Like many Lenovo notebooks, audio is provided by JBL. Overall sound quality is passable, but not particularly impressive, getting by mostly on ample amounts of volume and a reasonable level of bass thanks to a small built-in subwoofer.
Audio by JBL has lots of volume. It's not anything spectacular, but it's decent as far as quality is concerned.
Flip the Y500 over and you'll find its small built-in subwoofer. It's probably not much more than a separate speaker taking care of the low frequency, but it helps a bit.
Swapping Out The Optical Drive
Swapping out the optical drive on the Y500 is fairly easy but requires you to turn off the machine and remove the battery. Beneath the battery, a lock mechanism and a catch on the base of the notebook let you pull out the optical drive and insert the GPU module.
A lock in the battery compartment and a pull catch below it let you remove the optical drive.
An asymmetric design on all of the swappable drives ensures that you don't try to force them in the wrong way.
Incidentally, even if you leave the lock in the battery compartment in the 'unlocked' position, the drive will still stay locked in place until you first remove the battery.
For SLI gaming you'll also need to switch to a larger power brick (also bundled in with the Y500 package) as the original brick doesn't have enough juice to power the second GPU module. Obviously, this also means that SLI gaming on battery is impossible. We expect most users will simply use the larger power brick all the time, as the size and weight difference between the two is not significantly different.
The Y500 comes supplied with two power bricks. The larger one is required for SLI gaming.
Ports and Connectivity
The Y500 has a fairly comprehensive array of ports:
On the right of the machine you'll find one powered USB 2.0 port, plus the microphone and headphone ports.This USB port is probably intended for your mouse.
On the left of the machine, you'll find a VGA port, RJ-45 Ethernet port, HDMI port and two USB 3.0 ports.
The front left of the machine has a 6-in-1 card reader, as well as some LED activity lights.
Performance & Benchmarking
In its default state, with a single NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650M, the Y500 is comparable to many multimedia notebooks out there, such as HP's Pavilion DV6. It also has very similar specs to the Razer Blade, with the Blade having a slightly better GPU. In its SLI setup however, we were interested to see how much of a performance boost it would get and how it would fare against some serious gaming machines. As such, we're putting it up against Dell's Alienware M17X R4 (GTX 675M) and MSI's GT70 0NE (GTX 680M), winner of our Tech Awards 2013 Editor's Choice Best Gaming Notebook.
[hwzcompare]
[products=384550,296827,384781,384753,384757]
[width=175]
[caption=Test Notebooks Compared]
[showprices=0]
[/hwzcompare]
PCMark 7 Results
PCMark 7 tests a machine's overall capabilities. The SLI setup didn't seem to make a difference in this benchmark, with both results almost identical. The Y500's biggest downfall was its System Storage score, where it was let down by its mediocre 5400 RPM HDD.
3DMark 11 Results
3DMark 11 is a synthetic benchmark designed to test a notebook's GPU performance at various aspects of DirectX 11 such as tessellation and DirectCompute. With the single GPU configuration, the Lenovo Y500 scored very similarly to HP's Pavilion DV6, and slightly behind the Razer Blade. However, when we tested the SLI setup, it almost doubled its score, matching and actually slightly surpassing Dell's monster Alienware M17X R4 machine!
Far Cry 2
We saw a similar result in Far Cry 2 with the Y500 SLI config easily outscoring the Razer Blade and matching the Alienware M17X R4.
Note: Unfortunately, we did not have the HP Pavilion DV6 available for any of the gaming benchmark tests.
Dirt 3
Dirt 3 showed the same result, with the Y500 SLI almost doubling the performance output of the single GPU default configuration, and matching the performance of the Alienware M17X R4.
Crysis 2
The very intensive Crysis 2 benchmark consists of a grueling test of tessellation, Parallax Occlusion Mapping, water rendering, and particle motion blur and shadowing. Despite this, the Y500 SLI config still managed to perform well, continuing to outscore the Razer Blade, with output equal to the Alienware M17X R4.
Battery Life
The Y500 gets its juice from a 6-cell 72Wh battery. Compared to the rest of our machines, only it and the HP Pavilion DV6 utilize a 15.6-inch screen size. The Y500 is also the only machine in our setup running on Windows 8, which some evidence from our past testing suggests is less power consuming than Windows 7.
While the SLI config doesn't work properly when running on battery, we thought it would be interesting to see if it made any difference to overall battery life.
The Y500's 6-cell 72Wh battery.
With the optical drive installed, the Y500 managed to last a very impressive 3 hours and 28 minutes, far surpassing the rest of our machines. Surprisingly, even when not in use, the second GPU module made a huge difference in battery life, knocking 50 minutes off of the Y500's total battery life.
Power consumption was excellent with the optical drive installed, and still better than most of our 17-inch gaming notebooks even with the SLI configuration.
Portability Index
Our Portability Index factors in battery life, weight and volume so you can see which notebook is the most worthwhile to carry around. Predictably, the smaller Y500 was much more portable better than all of our 17-inch gaming notebooks and was generally on par with other 15.6-inch multimedia machines like the HP DV6 or Samsung RF511.
Conclusion
The Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 is the notebook that many people have been waiting a long time for - an affordable multimedia notebook that can transform into a seriously capable gaming machine.
The power of a Dell Alienware M17X R4, with more portability than a Razer Blade, for less than S$2000? Where do we sign up?
Up until now, multimedia notebooks have only been able to handle light gaming, and if you wanted to run anything at full HD resolution and high settings, your only options were expensive 17-inch, heavyweight monsters. Lenovo's idea to put a swappable second GPU into an affordable multimedia notebook is so good, we wonder why no-one thought of it sooner. Of course, anything is possible without a price cap, but at the price point of the Y500, we can only say kudos to Lenovo for making a gaming notebook that everyone can afford become a reality.
While it has a few faults (bad trackpad, somewhat mushy keyboard, some backlight bleeding from the screen), we're willing to overlook them in favor of the big picture. Essentially, you're getting a machine with the potential performance level of Dell's Alienware M17X R4 (which weighs a hefty 5.3kg and will set you back S$4400), with better battery life and more portability than Razer's Blade (which sells itself on its portable gaming capabilities), all at a price unheard of for a gaming machine. For what it does at its price range of S$1999, the Lenovo Y500 isn't just the king of bang-for-your-buck, it's an absolute steal!
Just take note that if you intend to work at length without tethered to the wall socket, be sure to remove the secondary GPU module to preserve battery life. This is probably the only inconvenience you'll have to take note to manage your needs for gaming performance as opposed to extended battery life for productivity.
After all's said and done, for all its mentioned attributes, we're bestowing the Lenovo Y500 our Best Value and Innovation award.
Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.