Lenovo’s Y gaming series has been around for awhile now, standing as a mainstream option for those looking for an affordable notebook for more casual and mid-level gamers. However, get ready for a new Lenovo gaming experience as the well known PC manufacturer has now thrown out its own rulebook.
The Lenovo IdeaPad Y900 is really the first first high-end gaming laptop from the company, with all previous efforts being a good deal cheaper and aimed more at those with tighter budgets. With this gaming behemoth Lenovo holds nothing back, offering top-notch specs with a hefty price to match.
In this in-depth review we aim to dive deep as we get a closer look at the new Lenovo IdeaPad Y900-17isk.
Buy Lenovo Y900 now!
Design
It isn’t enough for a gaming machine to offer high-performance specs. Of arguably equal importance is the design itself. After all, unlike business-oriented laptops and desktops, gaming rigs are about more than just “getting the job done”. You guessed it; they are for showing off.
While this might not be quite as important as it was during the golden age of lan parties (yes, I’m old, and yes Icewind Dale LAN parties were part of my youth..), the gaming rig a player chooses to use says a lot about who they are as a gamer. Thankfully, the Lenovo Ideapad Y900 speaks pretty loud and clearly.
From the very first moment I laid my eyes on the Ideapad Y900 I fell in love. This is the kind of machine that turns heads. First, at a whopping 9.8 pounds and with a size of 16.7 x 12.4 x 1.4-inches, it takes up a lot of room literally and is hard to miss. Beyond that, the design itself simply commands attention thanks to its sexy, bold look that pairs a brushed aluminum outer lid with glossy black accent ridges and a large red-lighted Y in the center.
Even the bottom-side of the laptop – traditionally the most boring place to look on a laptop – has a set of rear vents create a nice triangular pattern, with black aluminum and a red undercarriage to help them further stand out.
On the right side of the laptop, you’ll find the 6-in-1 card reader, a microphone jack, headphone jack, a security lock slot, and two USB 2.0 ports. Over on the left, you’ll find HDMI, a displayport, the gigabit ethernet jack, a single USB-C port (with Thunderbolt 3 support), two USB 3.0 ports, and a proprietary charging port.
Opening up the single hinged lid, you’re greeted by an equally attractive interior. Added both to the aesthetics and comfort of use is a rubberized palm rest. Towards the front you’ll find more of Lenovo’s red and metal venting, which also provides the housing for the front-facing speakers, which we’ll talk about a bit more later in the review.
While the size of the Ideapad Y900 won’t be for everyone, there’s no arguing that this is a sexy looking machine. It’s also worth noting that if you’re coming from a device that uses two-hinges, like so many laptops these days, there is some so solid and alluring about a single latch. It strongly and firmly holds up the display, but at the same time, when closed, isn’t wobbly and is even a bit hard for my three-year old to get to in those moments where I leave my laptop’s side for a moment. As a parent who has lamented the loss of more than one key over the years (which as it turns out only takes about three seconds to happen), this is a big plus.
Display
Okay, so in 2016, 1080p isn’t exactly an impressive resolution — instead it’s simply considered the ‘standard’ for entry and pretty much the lowest resolution you’ll find on anything except for those ultra-budget laptops and Chromebooks. Of course, there’s more to a quality screen then just the pixel count. So how does the 17.3-inch 1080p panel on the Y900 compare to other similar-sized 1080p displays? It’s a bit of a mixed bag, honestly.
When it comes to brightness, I love this display. The Y900 is capable of producing around 330 nits and a contrast ratio of 1000:1, better than the 295 nit average found in most other 1080p gaming displays. Combined with the display’s anti-glare technology, I found that it was much easier to see (and work) from this laptop outdoors than my personal machine. Though direct sunlight can still obviously pose a problem.
The display’s color space is also around 57 percent of the AdobeRGB and 86 percent of the sRGB standards. Further, gamers should take note that Nvidia’s G-Sync technology is present in this display, which syncs up the laptop’s display rate with the graphics card, eliminating tears and leaving images nice and smooth.
Of course, not everything about this display is perfect by an means. Namely, while playing several games such as Fallout 4 and Grim Dawn, I started to notice that colors seemed just a wee bit off. The same can be said when watching my favorite shows on Netflix and Hulu. Granted, the shades are just slightly off and still look pretty good overall, but it’s something worth mentioning.
It should be mentioned that if you’re looking for a touchscreen, the Y900 is not offered in such a configuration. Not a deal breaker, but again something to be aware of.
Keyboard and touchpad
The Lenovo IdeaPad Y900 isn’t the only laptop out there with a mechanical keyboard, but Lenovo’s take on this type of configuration is certainly a bit unique. Instead of opting for Cherry switches, Lenovo uses its own proprietary system that admittedly takes some getting used to.
These keys have a decent click, but offer up very light tactile feedback with a soft auditory click. Early on, I found that this setup slowed down my typing a bit, but interestingly enough, once I adjusted my speed became just as good as on my own Cherry MX Blue keyboard that I use on my desktop machine. There’s also an array of customizable colors present, which we’ll talk about in greater detail a bit later in the review.
Turning to the touchpad, you’ll find a smooth and highly responsive surface that supports multi-touch gestures of up to four fingers, and overall works as you’d expect. I have to admit I’m an avid mouse user on my laptops and so I didn’t use the touchpad extensively, but when I did — I found I had no problems with it.
Bottom-line, the keys do take some getting used to, but once you’re accumulated, this a pretty solid keyboard. As for the touchpad, it’s certainly nothing special, but it is as functional as you’d expect from an expensive gaming laptop.
Performance
The Lenovo IdeaPad Y900 offers a 2.7-GHz Intel Core i7-6820HK processor with 16GB RAM. On paper, this is quite the powerhouse, but what about in actual use? After nearly a month of using this massive gaming laptop as my primary machine, I can confidentially say I’m more than impressed by its day-to-day performance.
As a Managing Editor for the Android Authority family of sites, I tend to have literally dozens of tabs open in Chrome at once. Usually I am running Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop, and more. Without closing anything out very often. Despite this, I found that the Y900 was up to the challenge and stutters and slowdowns were an extreme rarity.
Need even more performance? Lenovo’s gaming beast offers a “Turbo” button found on the keyboard. Sliding it on cranks things up to an eleven, overclocking the CPU to 3.8GHz across all the cores. Turning on this feature requires you to be plugged into an outlet as it uses a little more power. For the most part, I kept Turbo on all the time when using it plugged in as there aren’t any noticeable disadvantages — aside from perhaps hearing the fans a slight bit more as the machine works to keep things nice and cool.
While the difference isn’t that noticeable, it did positively influence the benchmark scores when Turbo was turned on, so it’s certainly not just a placebo effect.
Model
PC Mark 8
(Home Accelerated)
PC Mark 8
(Creative Accelerated)
PC Mark 8
(Work Accelerated)
3DMark
(Fire Strike Extreme Graphics)
ATTTO
(512K read / write Mb/s) - Primary SD
ATTTO
(512K read / write Mb/s) - Secondary HDD
GeekBench 3
(Single / Multi-core)
Lenovo Ideapad
Y900
2.7GHz Intel Core i7-6820HK, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 1TB HDD
4952
6609
5533
9888
850 /1228
43.49 / 61.05
3315 / 13,905
Dell XPS 13
2.5GHz Intel Core i7-6500U, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD
3056
4024
3915
3689
1537/304
N/A
3301/ 6932
As you can see from the chart above, all the benchmark scores are pretty solid with performance that is relatively on par with other high-end gaming laptops that run similar specifications. And just for fun, I added in the stats from the Dell XPS our team reviewed earlier this year, just so people can see how a higher-end ultrabook compares to a gaming beast. Spoiler: The Y900 wins, to no surprise.
For clarification, we ran the Y900’s benchmarks with Turbo on, as again, this is probably the default way to run this machine unless fan noise is a major concern for some reason (and it’s not even much louder). We did test things out with overclocking (turbo) off, as well as with the machine unplugged. The end result is that scores are highest with Turbo on, drop a couple hundred points with it off, and drop a couple hundred more if you are running on battery. That last point is especially interesting, as it means that the Y900 actively throttles things when unplugged likely to preserve battery life, that said, gaming and other tasks were still relatively smooth in all different scenarios I found myself in (plugged in, turbo, unplugged, etc).
So the specs and performance are pretty solid, but the Y900 isn’t without weaknesses. Unfortunately one area where the Lenovo IdeaPad Y900 falls behind its most recent gaming notebook peers is in graphics, especially on paper.
The latest generation of Nvidia graphics cards have arrived, and the new Pascal series offers some big improvements over the previous gen such as much greater efficiency. Unfortunately for Lenovo, the Y900 doesn’t take advantage of this new technology, instead sticking with an older Nvidia GTX 980M. This is a pretty big omission considering the graphic performance is easily one of the most important aspects on a gaming notebook.
It’s not that the GTX 980M is a bad chip, it’s just that the new generation offer up even better performance and are perfect for VR headsets like the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift too. Still, the actual performance is pretty good, and therefore you can run the vast majority of current games (at time of this writing) in High to Ultra settings with reasonable frame rate performance.
In my own playthroughs, I found that Metro: Last Light delivered around 66.5fps in Ultra, Fallout 4 delivered 57fps, and Witcher 3 came out at 53fps. It was pretty much a similar story for all the recent games that I tested. There were a few instances were setting it down to something like high or medium made for a smoother experience, but the games were certainly playable at even higher settings.
It’s worth noting that during the framerate tests the IdeaPad Y900 was constantly set to “Turbo Mode” and was plugged into a power source. Obviously the results will be less optimal if Turbo is off, or if you’re running unplugged – as throttling will be present in this case. For what it’s worth, on an airplane (which is a feat with such a large machine), I got bored and started playing Fallout 4 for about 30 minutes. I didn’t adjust the settings at all from what I’d set them in the framerate testing phase and found the game still performed great. I sure the FPS wasn’t as good, but it was still very playable.
Display
17.3 inch IPS panel (1920x1080, 127 PPI)
Processor
Intel Core i7-6820HK 2.7 GHz
Graphics
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M, 8GB V-RAM
RAM
16GB DDR4, PC4-17000
Internal Storage
256GB SSD, 1TB 7200 RPM HDD
Operating system
Windows 10 Home Edition with Lenovo extras
Webcam
720p integrated webcam
Connectivity options
4 USB 3.0/ 3.1 Gen1 ports, 1 USB 3.1 Gen2 port, 1 USB-C with Thunderbolt, HDMI, DisplayPort, 3.5mm headphone jack, 3.5mm microphone jack, SD card reader,Gigabit Ethernet port, Wireless n/a/ac 1535 (b/g/n/ac), Bluetooth 4.0, Proprietary charging port
Battery
90 Wh Lithium-Ion
Speakers
Stereo + subwoofer, Dolby audio
Extras
Mechanical chiclet keyboard with lighting, Turbo button for overclocking mode
Dimensions & weight
36 x 427 x 318, 9.7 pounds
Battery
With a 17.3-inch display and high-performance specs, the Ideapad Y900 is not a battery sipper by any stretch of the imagination. That said, I felt that the results weren’t bad either, averaging around three to four hours on average.
During measured battery life tests, I found that continuously surfing the web over Wi-Fi produced a battery life of four hours and six minutes. In another test where I used minimum brightness and turned on Power Saver, I was able to do basic work tasks like browsing and word processing, cranking out five hours and fifteen minutes.
Obviously doing more strenuous tasks like gaming are going to drain the battery faster but, as previously noted, when unplugged, the Y900 uses active throttling of the GPU and CPU to ensure battery life is better than you might imagine. At the same time, the throttling is minor enough that you won’t really notice the difference when it comes to general performance.
Heat & Noise
With great power comes.. Great heat production. It’s not surprising to learn that a high-end gaming laptop has the potential to heat up, but we were actually pleasantly surprised to report that the Y900’s fans are super efficient and so heat never became a real issue for us. Even when using this monster in your lap.
Of course, good heat management comes with a trade off: fan noise. This laptop’s fans can be heard very clearly in a quiet room, or even in one with only a little noise. In a noisier environment or when listening to music? Most of the time, you won’t be able to hear it.
That said, occasionally it will crank up the fans automatically and when that happens, things do get pretty loud. Not a deal breaker, but if working a quiet environment, you are likely to stick out when the fans crank up to make up for that heavy gaming, editing, or whatever else is taxing the machine. In a coffee shop? It might get noticed but it probably isn’t bad enough to bug anyone.
Sound quality
The Lenovo IdeaPad Y900 integrates JBL speakers that offer some pretty solid sound quality, though I’d be lying if I said they were the best sound system I’ve ever encountered. While the speakers are pretty loud, they tend to offer a slight bit of distortion on higher volumes. Thankfully, Dolby’s Audio enhancement app gives you a bit more granular control over the situation and so it’s possible to fine tune things a bit further to your own liking.
Overall these are good speakers, about on par with a good pair of Bluetooth speakers — but certainly nowhere at the same level as a high-end audio setup. Than again, it’s hard to expect much more than that from a laptop.
Webcam quality
It’s pretty easy to clip on a high quality webcam if you really need to use your laptop for video conferencing, but it’s certainly more convenient to use the built-in option. So how does it far? Honestly, it’s okay. Video noise is pretty noticeable, colors are a little darker than they should be.
For talking with friends and family, it’s more than good enough. If you’re using it for business settings it might be less amazing, but this is a gaming machine first and foremost, and so it’s not surprising that the webcam wasn’t a top priority for Lenovo.
Upgradeability
The Lenovo IdeaPad Y900 is plenty powerful out of the box, but what if you eventually are itching to deliver some under the hood changes? Thankfully this is more than possible here, though it’s not super easy.
A Phillips screwdriver and some careful, patient movements are very much par for the course here. But once you get things open, you’ll have access to 2 of 4 SODIMM slots, 3x drive bays, the battery, and the cooling system. The other 2 SODIMM slots are underneath the motherboard and therefore not really accessible. The GPU and CPU, are of course, not upgradeable at all.
Included Extras
The Lenovo IdeaPad Y900 comes with more than just a laptop and a charging. Some of the additional accessories include a micro-USB cable, additional WASD keycaps, a key puller, an external DVD burner, and of course standard documentation and warranty info. One thing that isn’t included, however, is a cleaning cloth. This isn’t a major deal, but it’s worth noting that this is a little touch found with many of competing high-end gaming laptops on the market.
Software
At the heart of the Lenovo IdeaPad Y900 is Windows 10 Home Edition, alongside some Lenovo “extras” including 3rd-party apps like Flipboard, Twitter, Candy Crush Soda Saga, CyberLink PowertoGo 8, and a few others. Thankfully removing 3rd party apps is a pretty simple affair in Windows.
While it’s technically possible to axe many of the Lenovo programs as well, they are built to help you better customize your experience with the Y900. The most central of these apps is the Lenovo Nerve Center. From here you can toggle on Turbo Boost, set Network Priority, turn Sound Enhancement on and off, and even access OnePlay – a $6.99 subscription gaming service that offers access to a library of over 2000 games.
However, the most useful of the apps in the Nerve Center is Light Shift.
See, with this app you can customize the LED lighting found within the keyboard. While Lenovo has several default settings baked in, there are actually seven different sections on the keyboard and you can have choose one of the eighteen available colors for each of them. There’s also several lightening effects baked in. While there are some gaming keyboards that allow customization of the lighting in every single key — this is still a pretty color setup and has gotten a lot of attention from those who have seen this laptop during the time I spent reviewing it.
Conclusion/ Pricing
As my time with the Y900 comes to an end I can’t help feel a bit bummed that I’m going to have to send back my review unit now. I’ve had a ton of fun with this laptop and have fallen in love with it. But should you buy it? That’s not an easy question to answer.
With a beautiful design, blazing fast performance, and a nice, customizable keyboard — there’s plenty of reasons to consider the Y900. Unfortunately, the $2,426 price tag gives you reason to pause as well. Although this kind of money isn’t a ton for a high-end gaming notebook, in a world where Nvidia Pascal GPUs are now readily available, it just feels like the Y900 was released a hair later than it needed to be.
Still, if you can get past the significant downsides that come with its GPU, such as a lack of optimization for VR, it’s still a pretty compelling product. At the end of the day though, you might be better waiting for Lenovo to offer the Y900 at a discounted price — or for the company to (hopefully) offer a variant that upgrades the GPU.
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