IdeaPad Y570: a powerful laptop at a reasonable price

In the blog of Lenovo on Habré, we pay the most attention to the ThinkPad series, which is quite logical - judging by the reviews, most of you like just these models, created for work and creativity, strong and strict in appearance. But today we have an overview of the model IdeaPad Y570, a bright representative of the "user" series of Lenovo laptops, quite different from IBM's inherited business models. To ignore such a laptop is difficult: at a cost of 30 thousand rubles, it provides you with one of the most powerful graphics cards, modern Intel Core processor, and an incredibly fast disk system. A hybrid of a capacious hard drive and fast SSD became the regular one in the "five hundred and seventieth": most notebook modifications are equipped with it. In this review I will talk about how good the load is in 15 seconds, what changes have occurred in the new Y-series model, and also about why this particular model should be chosen as a home entertainment center.


Appearance


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Talk about the design of the IdeaPad Y570 should start with the fact that this model has much less gloss. I know that this criterion is very important for many users. In the updated gaming notebook series, the glossy display and frame around it remained. Everything else does not shine and does not collect fingerprints. Moreover, the keyboard panel is made of metal at all, which adds to the construction of the laptop strength.



The display lid is covered with a “dotted” texture, on which slight scratches are invisible.



The proprietary orange edging remained in place, but the keyboard panel, previously completely glossy, now looks completely different.



Changed and keyboard with touchpad. A digital block of keys appeared, though tightly “ground in” to the main keyboard, the touchpad increased in size. It is very pleasant to work with him, although some training is required, especially to the mouse buttons separated by a large distance from each other. When typing, the touchpad is temporarily locked to avoid accidental clicks. But from the touch panel that allows you to quickly launch the desired application, in the new modification they decided to refuse.

The laptop is equipped with a universal set of connectors. There are 4 USB ports, two on each side, two of which support the USB 3.0 speed standard, another one is combined with the eSata port. To connect an external display, you can use an analog D-Sub interface or a digital HDMI. Finally, there are separate headphone and microphone jacks, an Ethernet port and an SDHC card reader.

It should be noted and powerful audio system developed in conjunction with JBL. It provides a very powerful sound for a laptop, and perfectly shows itself in cases where it is not possible to connect external speakers to the device.

Performance

Notebooks Y-series are attractive by the fact that their modifications usually differ only in the processor model, hard disk capacity and the number of RAM rails installed. The video card in all versions is the same, in this case - the powerful accelerator GeForce GT 555M with a gigabyte of its own memory. This allows you to purchase a cheaper model, for example, with a Core i3 processor, but in terms of graphics you will get an equally powerful machine.

Game lovers will like the display resolution: 1366x768 pixels. For some, such a resolution on a 15-inch matrix will seem too small, but in 3D applications it allows for greater performance compared to, for example, FullHD displays. I tested the notebook version with an Intel Core i5-2410M processor (2.3 GHz), with a price tag of about 35,000 rubles. It is noteworthy that the model with a 4-core Intel Core i7 and otherwise identical configuration costs only 3000 rubles more.



The GeekBench test results were higher than the ThinkPad X220 with a more powerful Intel Core i5-2520M processor. This was due to faster memory, working in this laptop in dual channel mode (2x2 GB).

The laptop is equipped with switchable graphics, thereby providing both high performance and decent battery life. For switching there is a special lever on the front edge: this is probably the most convenient solution, since you do not need to go into the video settings to determine the optimal mode of operation. In the already old 3DMark test, when working with integrated Intel graphics, the following result is obtained:



When switching to NVIDIA graphics card, we get a two-fold increase:



But the result in a more modern 3DMark Vantage:



The results of notebook video card tests in real games can be viewed in media reviews, for example, on IXBT.com or Retera.ru .

Under prolonged load in the FurMark test, the temperature of the graphics processor rises no higher than 85-87 degrees. The fan in the company with a fairly massive radiator copes quite well with this load, but it is quite noticeably noisy. By the way, Lenovo’s proprietary software for this laptop has a special utility for managing the cooling system, which allows you to set a “quiet” mode of operation, or vice versa, to force the cooler on at maximum speed. The latter is presented as a means for cleaning dust, which in general may not be superfluous.

Hybrid disk system

But this feature of the IdeaPad Y570 in independent tests is practically not covered, but in vain. Trying to find a reasonable balance between performance and price, Lenovo engineers decided to use two drives at once in this laptop: a 32-gigabyte SSD installed in the mSata slot and a large and fairly slow 750-gigabyte hard drive with a rotation speed of 5400 revolutions per minute. In the system, they are combined into one section: this technology is called RapidDrive, and in Windows it is controlled by a special driver.



The result of this approach is visible when you first turn on the laptop: the system boots in 10-15 seconds, and the laptop comes out of sleep mode instantly. Programs also run quickly, as when using a conventional SSD drive. In the HDTune test, in the initial area of ​​the logical partition, an average linear read speed of about 140 megabytes per second is achieved.

IdeaPad Y570 owners have a lot of questions about a clean reinstall of Windows using RapidDrive. On the technical support site there is a special instruction for such cases. In short, the system must be installed on the SSD, and then install the RapidDrive driver. The “big” hard disk should not be marked up: the program will automatically create a virtual partition with a total volume of about 730 “fair” gigabytes.

Autonomous work

The laptop is equipped with a 6-cell battery, which in early models of the Y-series provided a couple of hours of battery life. With the advent of hybrid graphics, everything changed, and in the standard test for video playback, I got a very impressive 4 hours and 28 minutes of battery life. Although the size and weight of the model make the Y570 more of a home device, if necessary it can be used and away from the outlet for quite a long time. During the test, the screen brightness was set to 70% of the maximum, the WiFi module was turned on, the sound was output to the headphones, and Intel graphics were used.

Summary

The main distinguishing features of the Y570, I would call the RapidDrive hybrid system and a powerful graphics card. It is these two features that make the laptop quite enjoyable in work: you just enjoy the instant response of the programs and the ability of the model to effectively cope with any task, including games and video encoding. A universal set of connectors allows you to make a home entertainment center from a laptop: you can connect a large TV and a fast external drive to it, although it is also equipped with an impressive three-quarters terabyte data storage. And all this - at a cost of 40 000 rubles for the most powerful configuration and from 30 - for the base, which is not so much inferior in performance. When buying a laptop, I recommend choosing the model with a hybrid SSD + HDD system. With a small difference in cost, it provides a real increase in productivity in everyday tasks.