Lenovo Y50 gaming laptop review

The Lenovo Y50 is a bargain among gaming laptops—provided you can tolerate its subpar display, keyboard, and trackpad.

We’ve finally arrived at the long-foretold
future where gaming laptops can be slim
and light enough to fit comfortably on your
lap. Heck, even a non-gaming company like
Lenovo has managed the feat. Lenovo’s
2014 Y50 isn’t quite as slim as, say, the
0.7-inch thin Razer Blade, but at 0.9 inches
and 5.4 pounds, the Y50 is still incredibly
small for a powerful gaming laptop.

The Y50 delivers a strong price-to-
performance ratio. This $1200 laptop ships
with an Intel Core i7-4700HQ CPU clocked
at 2.4GHz, supplemented by an Nvidia
GeForce GTX 860M graphics card. That’s
pretty much the same core hardware as the
Razer Blade Pro for half the cost, making the
Y50 one of the best bang-for-buck mid-
priced gaming laptops.

The video card features Nvidia’s Battery
Boost technology, which dynamically adjusts
the GPU’s power draw to keep games at a
steady frame rate while putting the lightest
load possible on the computer’s battery.
And Nvidia’s ShadowPlay technology allows
you to record game footage without a
performance hit. You can read more about
Nvidia’s latest mobile GPU architecture in
this story .

The Y50 comes with 16GB of DDR3L/1600
RAM and a 1TB, 5400-rpm hybrid hard drive
with 8GB of solid-state memory. A hybrid
drive is better than a purely mechanical one
—especially one that spins its platters at
just 5400 rpm—but it’s still something of a
letdown considering that most gaming
laptops are moving exclusively to SSDs.
SSDs are expensive, though, so I’m sure that
was one of Lenovo’s key cost-cutting
moves.
Source:pcworld