Review of the gaming laptop Lenovo IdeaPad Y900-17ISK
Hello friends! Today we will talk about the Lenovo IdeaPad Y900 gaming laptop in the 17ISK modification - a real gaming classic. Why precisely about classics? Because the Y900 is a classic 17-inch laptop with a top-end processor, a video card, multiple drives, and even a mechanical gaming keyboard. Everything we love)
A powerful gaming laptop may not be thin, but there are exceptions to every rule and the Lenovo Y900 is one of them. We will modestly keep silent about the length and width now - nevertheless, we are talking about the game "semnashka" - but here about the harmony of the Y900 it is worth saying a few words. The thickness of the laptop was 36 mm, which compared to other gaming "semnashek" frankly, a little. Y900 competitors with similar technical characteristics and weights can no longer boast of such dimensions - they will be 10 to 15 mm more. As for weight, a miracle did not happen here, the gaming Y900 weighs about 4.38 kg - it will be difficult to carry around with you. What to do - for powerful gaming "semnashek" such a weight is considered quite acceptable.
The cover of the laptop is made of metal with a beautiful polished texture. In its center is the bright logo of the game series “Y900”, it stands out well against a black background.
The same logo is found on gaming accessories: headsets and mice.
When closed, the Lenovo Y900 is a bit like an expensive sports car. The similarity is enhanced by red inserts, similar to the taillights. They are located above the ventilation grates of the cooling system. Most likely, the idea of ​​engineers about this was.
')
To connect the peripherals of the Lenovo Y900 there are two USB 3.0 connectors (left) and the same USB 2.0 (right). And for the most modern and fast devices, the Y900 has a USB 3.1 Type C (Thunderbolt 3) connector, which is soldered on the left panel. DisplayPort and HDMI connectors are available for connecting external monitors, and if this is not enough, you can use USB 3.1 Type C, since the Thunderbolt 3 controller allows you to connect two external 4K monitors, or one display, but immediately to 5K.
For access to local networks, the Lenovo Y900 has a gigabit Ethernet connector (Killer e2400 controller) and a Killer Wireless-AC 1535 Wi-Fi module. By the way, two antennas are connected to the wireless module, which results in two channels for reception and the same for transmission data (technology MIMO 2x2: 2). This approach has a great effect on the signal strength of the wireless network and increases the data transfer rate.
Thanks to the wide, 17-inch diagonal of the screen, the Y900 had more than enough space to accommodate a keyboard with a number pad. And to the left of it are four keys for macros and a button for overclocking the processor. And due to the fact that the latter is just below the Esc key, it was possible to avoid accidental clicks.
Despite the fact that the Y900 refers to gaming models, it has a mechanical keyboard and is made in a recognizable style. Here we see the same keys that have been found in Lenovo’s well-known series for years now: IdeaPad and ThinkPad. Is that the game buttons WASD received bright, red caps. With the help of the Y900, you can comfortably play games and type texts. The key travel turned out to be deep for a laptop and was about 2.5 mm, and the moment of pressing itself was well felt. In general, we still have the same Lenovo keyboard - one of the most convenient and thoughtful laptop keyboards, with an excellent tactile response and durable keys.
By the way, the Fn key is in its usual place - in the lower left part of the keyboard, to the right of trl. If this arrangement does not suit someone, then in the BIOS you can swap these keys.
As befits a modern gaming laptop, the Y900 keyboard has a fully customizable backlight. Both Latin and Russian characters are highlighted. As for the WASD gaming keys, there are no Russian characters on them for the reason that the game caps that come with the laptop were installed on the buttons. However, they can also not be installed - Russian and Latin symbols are put on the “native” caps.
It is worth noting the work area. It is made of soft-touch, slightly rough Soft-Touch plastic, and the touchpad has a small border, with adjustable backlighting. The dimensions of the touch panel are 105 Ă— 70 mm, it is in a small recess, and the depth of its pressing is about 1 mm.
On the back of the IdeaPad Y900, there is nothing interesting, except for the holes in the cooling system and a separate grille covering the subwoofer. The latter is made in the form of a triangle and is located below.
Finally, it's worth talking about the IdeaPad Y900 screen. Lenovo decided to install a glossy 17.3-inch IPS-panel with anti-reflective coating and a resolution of 1920x1080 into the laptop. Of course, there could be a screen with a higher resolution, for example, the popular in the mobile segment “2K” or the usual 4K, but, as practice shows, playing on such panels is not easy. The fact is that most often the video card cannot stretch the resolution of the game (for example, 1920x1080 pixels) to screens with higher exotic resolutions, so the game will run at a resolution of 1920x1080, but on a 1: 1 scale, or in the native, maximum screen resolution, ignoring all other settings. It will be inconvenient in both cases. In the first, the picture will be too small, and in the second case, the mobile video card simply will not be able to cope with high resolution at maximum graphics settings, which will turn any game into a slide show. Therefore, the 17-inch screen with a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels can be called the optimal choice for a gaming laptop.
The heart of the Lenovo IdeaPad Y900 is a quad-core Intel Core i7-6820HK processor. Yes, this is not the new-fangled Kaby Lake, but let's be honest: in the current environment there is absolutely no point in chasing the processor performance. As shown by numerous reviews and tests, Kaby Lake is not much superior to Skylake in its performance, and the four-core i7-6820HK's power reserve is enough for even difficult tasks, like working with video.
The processor works with a clock frequency of 2.7 GHz, which can be increased to 3.6 GHz using Turbo Boost technology. By the way, this is one of the few Intel mobile processors that support overclocking. And thanks to the good cooling system of the IdeaPad Y900 and the auto overclocking key, you can quickly and easily add several hundred megahertz to the processor.
The amount of RAM is 16 GB, using modern DDR4 memory with a frequency of 2133 MHz. A total of four slots for RAM are available in the laptop. The first two, already occupied by the modules, are located under the keyboard, and the other two - in their usual place, behind the lower service panel. With increasing memory, there will be no problems.
The graphics card at the IdeaPad Y900 turned out to be one of the best. This is the flagship model of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M, supplemented with 8 GB of GDDR5 video memory. This combination should be enough for all modern games.
No less interesting was the disk subsystem, which the user can improve to your taste. In our modification of the IdeaPad Y900, we installed two fast M.2 drives of 128 GB each, and one hard disk of 1 TB. You can assemble a very fast RAID-0 array from two SSDs, and you can store movies, distributions or backup copies of the most important files on the hard drive.
We have already spoken about the network capabilities of the IdeaPad Y900. The Killer e2400 network adapter is responsible for the operation of the Gigabit Ethernet connector, and the Killer Wireless-AC 1535 is responsible for the wireless networks. 802.11 a / b / g / n / ac wireless standards are supported at 2.4 and 5 GHz. And to connect a variety of wireless peripherals, such as mice and headsets, Bluetooth version 4.1 is available.
But the laptop battery was not removable. On the one hand, it is a bit unusual. On the other hand, this design allowed us to win a few millimeters and make the laptop thinner. Such a reduction in size gaming laptop does not hurt.
Let's start with the processor. Intel Core i7-6820HK showed excellent results in benchmarks, which is not at all surprising. Nevertheless, in its crystal lurk four productive cores, able to work with frequency up to 3.6 GHz. So, in the benchmark Cinebench v. 11.5, he scored 7.69 points, and in the embedded CPU-Z test we received 6980 parrots in multi-core mode. With only one kernel loaded, performance logically sagged up to 1,516 parrots in CPU-Z. Finally, in the benchmark Geekbench v. 4.0.4 Lenovo IdeaPad Y900 notebook was able to score 13,726 points in multi-core mode and 4395 in single-core.
We now turn to graphics testing. As usual, such tests of the 3DMark synthetic benchmark began, and in order not to paint the number of measured parrots for each subtest, we present a comparative table with the results.
As for tests in real applications, in the equally popular benchmark Unigine Heaven 4.0 with a resolution of 1600x900 pixels and maximum graphics settings, we received 57 frames per second.
The solid-state drive IdeaPad Y900 showed excellent results. One could only dream about the speed of reading and writing at 2600 and 1361 MB / sec. Now these dreams have become reality. Windows on this laptop is loaded in seconds, and heavy applications like photo or video editors start even faster.
As for the speed of the hard disk, everything is trivial. Its results are similar to any other 2.5-inch drives and miracles are not to be expected here.
Now about the cooling system IdeaPad Y900. She was standard for all game models design. The heat pipes, which are cooled by two turbines, are connected to the radiators of the processor and the video card (as well as the hot components of the video adapter). In idle mode, the two turbines of the laptop worked almost inaudibly. The noise from the CO merged with the background noise and did not exceed its level. At maximum load, the IdeaPad Y900 started to make noise more, but the volume of the loaded turbines was no higher than normal conversation. In general, Lenovo engineers can be commended for a quiet and efficient cooling system, and the company's programmers should say thank you for the Nerve Sense application, where you can forcibly turn on the CO turbines at full capacity. This feature is useful both in summer and during serious gaming battles, when the speed of iron becomes much more important than the noise generated by the cooling system.
Also worth noting is the excellent sound of the Lenovo IdeaPad Y900. Thanks moderately large size notebook, inside it there was a place not only for the speakers, but also for a compact, mobile subwoofer. Sounds like the IdeaPad Y900 just great. For such a laptop you can not only play, but also watch movies or just listen to music. We didn’t have any complaints about the audio section, even at maximum volume (and it turned out to be very high) we didn’t hear any noise or wheezing from the speakers. Perhaps the sound of the Lenovo IdeaPad Y900 can be called one of the best among gaming models. This is not surprising, because JBL engineers also worked on its sound.
Lenovo IdeaPad Y900 can be praised for a long time and, just as importantly, deservedly so, as you can see. This laptop has an excellent screen with an optimal resolution for gaming “semnashki”, a very comfortable keyboard that is perfect for gaming or work and has a pleasant size. Perhaps the only spoon of tar in this sweet barrel of honey will be the price. The cost of the Lenovo IdeaPad Y900 starts at 135,000 rubles, but gaming laptops have always been expensive.
Appearance
A powerful gaming laptop may not be thin, but there are exceptions to every rule and the Lenovo Y900 is one of them. We will modestly keep silent about the length and width now - nevertheless, we are talking about the game "semnashka" - but here about the harmony of the Y900 it is worth saying a few words. The thickness of the laptop was 36 mm, which compared to other gaming "semnashek" frankly, a little. Y900 competitors with similar technical characteristics and weights can no longer boast of such dimensions - they will be 10 to 15 mm more. As for weight, a miracle did not happen here, the gaming Y900 weighs about 4.38 kg - it will be difficult to carry around with you. What to do - for powerful gaming "semnashek" such a weight is considered quite acceptable.
The cover of the laptop is made of metal with a beautiful polished texture. In its center is the bright logo of the game series “Y900”, it stands out well against a black background.
The same logo is found on gaming accessories: headsets and mice.
When closed, the Lenovo Y900 is a bit like an expensive sports car. The similarity is enhanced by red inserts, similar to the taillights. They are located above the ventilation grates of the cooling system. Most likely, the idea of ​​engineers about this was.
')
To connect the peripherals of the Lenovo Y900 there are two USB 3.0 connectors (left) and the same USB 2.0 (right). And for the most modern and fast devices, the Y900 has a USB 3.1 Type C (Thunderbolt 3) connector, which is soldered on the left panel. DisplayPort and HDMI connectors are available for connecting external monitors, and if this is not enough, you can use USB 3.1 Type C, since the Thunderbolt 3 controller allows you to connect two external 4K monitors, or one display, but immediately to 5K.
For access to local networks, the Lenovo Y900 has a gigabit Ethernet connector (Killer e2400 controller) and a Killer Wireless-AC 1535 Wi-Fi module. By the way, two antennas are connected to the wireless module, which results in two channels for reception and the same for transmission data (technology MIMO 2x2: 2). This approach has a great effect on the signal strength of the wireless network and increases the data transfer rate.
Thanks to the wide, 17-inch diagonal of the screen, the Y900 had more than enough space to accommodate a keyboard with a number pad. And to the left of it are four keys for macros and a button for overclocking the processor. And due to the fact that the latter is just below the Esc key, it was possible to avoid accidental clicks.
Despite the fact that the Y900 refers to gaming models, it has a mechanical keyboard and is made in a recognizable style. Here we see the same keys that have been found in Lenovo’s well-known series for years now: IdeaPad and ThinkPad. Is that the game buttons WASD received bright, red caps. With the help of the Y900, you can comfortably play games and type texts. The key travel turned out to be deep for a laptop and was about 2.5 mm, and the moment of pressing itself was well felt. In general, we still have the same Lenovo keyboard - one of the most convenient and thoughtful laptop keyboards, with an excellent tactile response and durable keys.
By the way, the Fn key is in its usual place - in the lower left part of the keyboard, to the right of trl. If this arrangement does not suit someone, then in the BIOS you can swap these keys.
As befits a modern gaming laptop, the Y900 keyboard has a fully customizable backlight. Both Latin and Russian characters are highlighted. As for the WASD gaming keys, there are no Russian characters on them for the reason that the game caps that come with the laptop were installed on the buttons. However, they can also not be installed - Russian and Latin symbols are put on the “native” caps.
It is worth noting the work area. It is made of soft-touch, slightly rough Soft-Touch plastic, and the touchpad has a small border, with adjustable backlighting. The dimensions of the touch panel are 105 Ă— 70 mm, it is in a small recess, and the depth of its pressing is about 1 mm.
On the back of the IdeaPad Y900, there is nothing interesting, except for the holes in the cooling system and a separate grille covering the subwoofer. The latter is made in the form of a triangle and is located below.
Finally, it's worth talking about the IdeaPad Y900 screen. Lenovo decided to install a glossy 17.3-inch IPS-panel with anti-reflective coating and a resolution of 1920x1080 into the laptop. Of course, there could be a screen with a higher resolution, for example, the popular in the mobile segment “2K” or the usual 4K, but, as practice shows, playing on such panels is not easy. The fact is that most often the video card cannot stretch the resolution of the game (for example, 1920x1080 pixels) to screens with higher exotic resolutions, so the game will run at a resolution of 1920x1080, but on a 1: 1 scale, or in the native, maximum screen resolution, ignoring all other settings. It will be inconvenient in both cases. In the first, the picture will be too small, and in the second case, the mobile video card simply will not be able to cope with high resolution at maximum graphics settings, which will turn any game into a slide show. Therefore, the 17-inch screen with a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels can be called the optimal choice for a gaming laptop.
Specifications
| Screen | 17.3 inches, 1920 Ă— 1080, IPS, with a matte finish |
| CPU | Intel Core i7-6820HK From 2.7 GHz to 3.6 GHz in Turbo Boost mode 4 cores 8 threads, 8 MB L3 cache, TDP 45 W Skylake architecture, 14 nm, LGA 1151 |
| RAM | 2x 8 GB DDR4-2133 |
| Video card | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M; 8 GB GDDR5; |
| Chipset | Intel CM236 |
| Drives | 256 GB SSD 1,000 GB hard drive |
| Card reader | Yes, SD / SDHC / SDXC |
| Network adapter | 1x 1000 Mbps, Killer e2400 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller |
| Wi-Fi | Killer Wireless-AC 1535; Wi-Fi 802.11 a / b / g / n / ac, 2.4 and 5 GHz MU-MIMO |
| Bluetooth | 4.1 |
| Connectors | 2x USB 2.0 2x USB 3.0 1x USB 3.0 Type C (Thunderbolt 3.0) 1x DisplayPort 1x HDMI 1x Ethernet network connector 2x 3.5 mm audio jacks 1x Charging Connector |
| Battery | 90 W * h (8100 mA * h), built-in |
| operating system | Microsoft Windows 10 Home Single Language, 64 Bit |
| Dimensions | 425 Ă— 315 Ă— 36 mm |
| Weight | 4.38 kg |
| Warranty | 2 years |
| Estimated price | from 135,000 rubles |
The heart of the Lenovo IdeaPad Y900 is a quad-core Intel Core i7-6820HK processor. Yes, this is not the new-fangled Kaby Lake, but let's be honest: in the current environment there is absolutely no point in chasing the processor performance. As shown by numerous reviews and tests, Kaby Lake is not much superior to Skylake in its performance, and the four-core i7-6820HK's power reserve is enough for even difficult tasks, like working with video.
The processor works with a clock frequency of 2.7 GHz, which can be increased to 3.6 GHz using Turbo Boost technology. By the way, this is one of the few Intel mobile processors that support overclocking. And thanks to the good cooling system of the IdeaPad Y900 and the auto overclocking key, you can quickly and easily add several hundred megahertz to the processor.
The amount of RAM is 16 GB, using modern DDR4 memory with a frequency of 2133 MHz. A total of four slots for RAM are available in the laptop. The first two, already occupied by the modules, are located under the keyboard, and the other two - in their usual place, behind the lower service panel. With increasing memory, there will be no problems.
The graphics card at the IdeaPad Y900 turned out to be one of the best. This is the flagship model of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M, supplemented with 8 GB of GDDR5 video memory. This combination should be enough for all modern games.
No less interesting was the disk subsystem, which the user can improve to your taste. In our modification of the IdeaPad Y900, we installed two fast M.2 drives of 128 GB each, and one hard disk of 1 TB. You can assemble a very fast RAID-0 array from two SSDs, and you can store movies, distributions or backup copies of the most important files on the hard drive.
We have already spoken about the network capabilities of the IdeaPad Y900. The Killer e2400 network adapter is responsible for the operation of the Gigabit Ethernet connector, and the Killer Wireless-AC 1535 is responsible for the wireless networks. 802.11 a / b / g / n / ac wireless standards are supported at 2.4 and 5 GHz. And to connect a variety of wireless peripherals, such as mice and headsets, Bluetooth version 4.1 is available.
But the laptop battery was not removable. On the one hand, it is a bit unusual. On the other hand, this design allowed us to win a few millimeters and make the laptop thinner. Such a reduction in size gaming laptop does not hurt.
Testing
Let's start with the processor. Intel Core i7-6820HK showed excellent results in benchmarks, which is not at all surprising. Nevertheless, in its crystal lurk four productive cores, able to work with frequency up to 3.6 GHz. So, in the benchmark Cinebench v. 11.5, he scored 7.69 points, and in the embedded CPU-Z test we received 6980 parrots in multi-core mode. With only one kernel loaded, performance logically sagged up to 1,516 parrots in CPU-Z. Finally, in the benchmark Geekbench v. 4.0.4 Lenovo IdeaPad Y900 notebook was able to score 13,726 points in multi-core mode and 4395 in single-core.
We now turn to graphics testing. As usual, such tests of the 3DMark synthetic benchmark began, and in order not to paint the number of measured parrots for each subtest, we present a comparative table with the results.
| 3DMark Presets | Results, points |
| Time spy | 1,812 |
| Sky diver | 14,797 |
| Fire strike | 4,305 |
| Fire strike extreme | 2,247 |
| Fire strike ultra | 1,252 |
As for tests in real applications, in the equally popular benchmark Unigine Heaven 4.0 with a resolution of 1600x900 pixels and maximum graphics settings, we received 57 frames per second.
The solid-state drive IdeaPad Y900 showed excellent results. One could only dream about the speed of reading and writing at 2600 and 1361 MB / sec. Now these dreams have become reality. Windows on this laptop is loaded in seconds, and heavy applications like photo or video editors start even faster.
As for the speed of the hard disk, everything is trivial. Its results are similar to any other 2.5-inch drives and miracles are not to be expected here.
Now about the cooling system IdeaPad Y900. She was standard for all game models design. The heat pipes, which are cooled by two turbines, are connected to the radiators of the processor and the video card (as well as the hot components of the video adapter). In idle mode, the two turbines of the laptop worked almost inaudibly. The noise from the CO merged with the background noise and did not exceed its level. At maximum load, the IdeaPad Y900 started to make noise more, but the volume of the loaded turbines was no higher than normal conversation. In general, Lenovo engineers can be commended for a quiet and efficient cooling system, and the company's programmers should say thank you for the Nerve Sense application, where you can forcibly turn on the CO turbines at full capacity. This feature is useful both in summer and during serious gaming battles, when the speed of iron becomes much more important than the noise generated by the cooling system.
Also worth noting is the excellent sound of the Lenovo IdeaPad Y900. Thanks moderately large size notebook, inside it there was a place not only for the speakers, but also for a compact, mobile subwoofer. Sounds like the IdeaPad Y900 just great. For such a laptop you can not only play, but also watch movies or just listen to music. We didn’t have any complaints about the audio section, even at maximum volume (and it turned out to be very high) we didn’t hear any noise or wheezing from the speakers. Perhaps the sound of the Lenovo IdeaPad Y900 can be called one of the best among gaming models. This is not surprising, because JBL engineers also worked on its sound.
Conclusion
Lenovo IdeaPad Y900 can be praised for a long time and, just as importantly, deservedly so, as you can see. This laptop has an excellent screen with an optimal resolution for gaming “semnashki”, a very comfortable keyboard that is perfect for gaming or work and has a pleasant size. Perhaps the only spoon of tar in this sweet barrel of honey will be the price. The cost of the Lenovo IdeaPad Y900 starts at 135,000 rubles, but gaming laptops have always been expensive.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/403317/
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