The PC gaming market has been pretty strong market over the last couple of years, and recent developments have pushed the boundaries again. With the impending launches of virtual reality headsets, we’ve seen even notebook manufacturers getting prepared to drive these new devices, but it takes a lot of compute to do it. Manufacturers going after sales of gaming notebooks are going to be able to eke out better margins too, so it’s an area many of them focus on. But the typical gaming notebook is going to be quite expensive. A powerful mobile GPU, nice display, and good processor, are all going to add to the bill of materials. For those that want to get into the market for a gaming notebook, sometimes you don’t want to break the bank.

When you try to define what makes up a gaming notebook, it’s not always cut and dry. You are certainly going to expect a discrete graphics card in the mix, along with enough processing power and storage to keep some of the latest games, which are now often times 50 GB or more. Proper gaming notebooks are going to have sufficient cooling to keep everything working at peak capacity for extended sessions of high use.

Lenovo markets their gaming lineup under the Y branding, and they offer both notebooks and desktops targeted towards this market. To round out the collection, they also offer gaming keyboards, 7.1 headphones, and even a backpack to haul the equipment around in. Today we are going to take a look at the IdeaPad Y700 gaming notebook, which was launched with Skylake processors at IFA 2015. Lenovo offers a very impressive entry level price on the Y700, with it starting at just $899 for the 15.6-inch model. This is not the only Y700 they have on offer, and Ian was able to test out a pre-production model with AMD’s Carrizo APU and R9 M380 graphics. The model Lenovo sent for review though is the Intel Core i7-6700HQ version with NVIDA GTX 960M graphics and touch display. The touch version starts at $1099 with 8 GB of memory, and the model we have is the $1149 version with 16 GB of memory.

Lenovo Ideapad Y700 As Tested: Core i7-6700HQ, 16GB RAM, 128GB+1TB, 1920x1080 Touch
	Non Touch 15	Touch 15
CPU	Intel Core i5-6300HQ (45W) 2.3-3.2 GHz Quad-Core 6MB Cache Intel Core i7-6700HQ (45W) 2.6-3.5 GHz Quad-Core with Hyperthreading 6MB Cache	Intel Core i7-6700HQ (45W) 2.6-3.5 GHz Quad-Core with Hyperthreading 6MB Cache
GPU	Integrated: Intel HD 530 Discrete: NVIDIA GTX 960M (640 CUDA Cores, 2 or 4 GB GDDR5 depending on model) Optimus Enabled
Memory	8GB or 16GB DDR4 RAM (SODIMMs)
Display	15.6" IPS 1920x1080 resolution non-touch with matte finish	15.6" IPS 1920x1080 resolution touch with gloss finish Optional: 3840x2160 IPS panel
Storage	HDD: 500GB or 1TB HDD Optional SSD: 128 GB or 512 GB SATA SSD
Networking	Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 3165 802.11ac 1x1:1 Optional: Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 8260 802.11ac 2x2:2 Gigabit Ethernet (Realtek)
I/O	USB 3.0 x 2 USB 2.0 always on x 1 SD Card reader HDMI 1.4 Headset Jack Ethernet
Dimensions	(mm) : 387 x 277 x 25.95 (inches) : 15.23 x 10.90 x 1.02
Weight	2.6 kg / 5.7 lbs
Camera	Windows Hello (Front) optional 720p standard	720p
Price	$899+	$1099+ (As tested: $1149)

There is quite a bit of value here with the internals. The Core i7-6700HQ is a 45-Watt quad-core processor with hyperthreading, 16 GB of DDR4 memory should be plenty for any gaming scenario, and you even get a SSD for the boot drive. The PM871 Samsung drive is a SATA SSD based on TLC V-NAND, so write performance likely won’t be great, but regardless it’s going to be a lot nicer than using the 1 TB hard disk drive for the OS drive. The 15.-6-inch display is an IPS panel as well, and it’s great to even see low cost gaming notebooks ditching the TN option.

We also get our first sighting of the latest Intel wireless card, which is the Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 8260. The baseline option appears to be just the Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 3265 which is a single stream solution, so the 8260 with 2x2:2 is the way to go. We’ll see later in the review how it fares.

Component wise, Lenovo has crafted a strong looking laptop for this price range. The GTX 960M is a decent pairing for 1080p gaming, and with options of either an i5 or i7 quad-core chip, there should be enough CPU power to keep everything running at maximum.

Design

Gaming laptops can sometimes have a very gaudy appearance, with numerous LEDs and lights everywhere. Lenovo has built in a bit of style, without going over the top on extras. The black aluminum body has a nice cross-hatch pattern machined into it, and when closed the only hints of the purpose of the Y700 are the red speaker grilles. Once opened, the Y700 features a display almost feels separate from the rest of the body, with angled edges where it meets the speakers, and it’s a nice effect. The large bezels around the display make it look like Lenovo could have almost fit a 17-inch display inside though.

The Y700, although on the low end of the price spectrum for gaming laptops, doesn’t suffer from the lack of build quality in what would normally be a low end laptop. The hinge is nice and sturdy, and the display doesn’t suffer from very much flex at all. I love the look of the LED power button, with its dot matrix styling, and the badging on the laptop is subtle.

There are two main speakers on the back of the laptop, as well as a subwoofer underneath. JBL provides the audio solution for the Y700, and it’s always a benefit to have the speakers actually facing you compared to so many laptops that stick them on the bottom.

To me, one of the most important parts of any laptop is the keyboard. The Y700 is mixed at best. It does offer a number pad on the right, however Lenovo has done what so many companies do, and squished it into the rest of the keyboard. The arrow keys are parked in between and covers half of what would normally be the zero key on the number pad. There is plenty of space on the sides of the keyboard to stretch this out a bit and have a proper number pad, and I’m not sure why companies feel they need to offer the number pad but then compromise it. The Y700 has a six row keyboard, but the top row is a lacking in assigned functions, and they are spread out all over the keyboard. Volume controls are Fn + left or right, for instance. Lenovo has also found space for Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn, but then also included them as Fn functions on the number pad, which is a bit strange.

The key travel not great, especially for a laptop of this thickness. We tend to give up key travel to reach the insanely thin level of Ultrabooks, but I see no reason to have such shallow travel on the Y700. The keys are also very mushy. The one thing I do like about the keyboard is the backlighting. The red is very nicely done, and it has two levels. The WASD keys show a bit more of the red through them since the translucent part of the key comes up around the sides and top.

The trackpad is quite good though. It’s centered under the space bar, rather than centered in the laptop, which is good. It’s large enough to get the job done, and its plenty smooth. I had no issues with any of the one or two finger gestures, so Synaptics has delivered here. It features up to four finger support, with a four finger tap opening Action Center by default.

For connectivity, there are two USB 3.0 ports on the right side of the laptop, along with an HDMI 1.4b port and Ethernet. On the left side, there is a single USB 2.0 port which is always powered, along with the power connector, SDXC card slot, and headset jack. There’s nothing forward leaning here like USB 3.1 or USB-C, but the Y700 should offer enough connectivity for today. The inclusion of Ethernet is very much appreciated.

On the bottom, we can see the intake vents at the front which feed the main exhaust vent at the rear, as well as the round subwoofer vent. The bottom of the laptop is also aluminum, with the same cross-hatch patter. That’s a nice feature for the price, since some laptops opt for plastic on the bottom where you aren’t going to be looking at it much.

Overall the design of the Y700 is something I’m pretty happy with. I wish it had a better keyboard, and I realise I’m likely pickier than most with the quality of the keyboard. I know Lenovo is a pretty large company, and the ThinkPad lineup is separate, but it would be great if the Y700 had something somewhat closer to the quality of one of those keyboards. Still, the styling is subtle but nice, and the red accents offer a nice splash of color to go with the red backlighting. The build quality is strong, with no noticeable gaps or bending.

System Performance

Lenovo offers both the 45W Core i5-6300HQ and the similar 45W Core i7-6700HQ as CPU options on the Y700. The i5 is a quad-core part with no hyperthreading and 6MB of L3 cache, operating at 2.3-3.2 GHz, while the i7 gains hyperthreading and sees its clockspeed boosted to 2.6-3.5 GHz. The impact of the clockspeed increase is relatively straightforward, but even with current quad-cores hyperthreading sees a fair bit of use, so that should keep the performance of the two CPUs comfortably separated. Our review unit features the Core i7 model, and this is the first quad-core Skylake mobile part to grace my desk. As such, I’m pretty curious to see how it compares to outgoing gaming laptops with Broadwell or Haswell.

The Y700 has been put through our standard test suite for notebooks. A selection of comparable devices has been added to the graphs to get a feeling for where the Y700 stands as far as performance, but for those wishing to compare it to any other device we’ve tested, please refer to our Notebook Bench. The Razer Blade 14 is a 14-inch gaming notebook with Core i7-4720HQ and GTX 970M. The cost is quite a bit more, but it’s a small gaming notebook so it’s worth looking at. The Surface Book has a GT 940M GPU so it will fit in on the low end. For a mid-range device, the MSI GS60 3K has a Core i7-4710HQ and GTX 870M card. The Dell XPS 15 9530 is the previous generation XPS 15, with Core i7-4702HQ and GT 750M graphics. The MSI GT80 Titan may seem like an unfair comparison, but it’s the only Broadwell quad-core laptop we had a chance to test so it needs to be here.

PCMark

PCMark is a test which uses all of the components, and everything factors in from GPU speed to the display resolution. The various tests across the different benchmarks within PCMark try to focus on applications which would be applicable to the segment. I had some issues with PCMark 8 when I first got the notebook, and it would bluescreen on any of the tests. Luckily a new graphics driver from Intel allowed some of the tests to be completed, however Creative is still not working, which is something I’ve observed on other Optimus notebooks as well. The Y700 can’t really compete with the high end gaming notebooks here, nor is it expected to.

Cinebench

Cinebench from MAXON does a 3D rendering, and it is all about CPU speed. More cores and more frequency is the name of the game here. In the single threaded results, the i7-6700HQ in the Y700 doesn’t quite match up to some of the previous generation chips which is a bit surprising. Skylake is not a huge jump in performance, but it generally does outperform Haswell and Broadwell.

x264

Much like Cinebench, x264 is purely a CPU test. The video conversion software loves more cores and high frequencies. Much like Cinebench, the Skylake chip doesn’t really jump ahead of Broadwell or Haswell here.

Web Benchmarks

With the launch of Windows 10, we’ve moved our web testing over to use Edge rather than Chrome, since Edge is built in and its performance has come a long way since Internet Explorer.

Although on Cinebench and x264, the Skylake part was neck and neck with the older chips, on the web testing under Edge it does very well. Some of this is due to Intel’s Speed Shift which lets the CPU ramp up to maximum turbo in much less time. This is a new feature of Skylake and requires the latest version of Windows 10 to be installed.

Edge still falls behind to Chrome on some of the tests (namely WebXPRT 2013), but it’s done well to catch up.

All in all, the CPU performance is about what you would expect of a quad-core notebook, but I was hoping for a bit more from the latest Skylake processor.

Storage Performance

The 128 GB TLC SSD found inside the Lenovo Y700 is going to be much better than any spinning disk for bootup and random access, but being a TLC drive, and especially a lower capacity model, performance is likely not going to be as high other models.

We generally use PCMark 8 as a storage test, but it has always had a tendency to lump all SSDs pretty closely together. This isn’t far from real life experiences, because for the real application traces in PCMark, you may not notice a huge difference. However, FutureMark has adjusted the PCMark 8 storage test to better reflect the impact of NVMe drives. This is a good thing in the long run, but it does mean that the test scores can no longer be compared.

 

CrystalDiskMark shows the deficits of the TLC drive with low capacity. Write speeds are not fantastic. Read speeds show the limits of the SATA interface. Still, compared to the hard disk drive (results on the D: drive in the above image) any SSD is going to be a pretty big improvement. Once again, Lenovo was aiming for a price point so the TLC SATA drive is understandable.

GPU Performance

The Y700 is marketed as a gaming notebook, so this section may be the most important for potential buyers. The GTX 960M found inside the Lenovo Y700 is a Maxwell part, but it’s not exactly new. This is a GM107 part - so we're looking at first-generation Maxwell - and is actually the same GPU as the Maxwell version of GTX 860M (it came in two versions), but the GTX 960M has higher frequencies than its predecessor. This is definitely a mid-level card, with NVIDIA offering several cards below, and more powerful (and featured-filled) cards above this including the GTX 965M, and then the much more powerful GTX 970M and 980M.

The GTX 960M has been around since March of last year, but just due to the devices that we’ve had in for review in the last year, the GTX 960M has not graced our desks. This is a 640 CUDA core part, and it can support either two or four gigabytes of GDDR5 RAM accessed through a 128-bit bus.

As with our System tests, the Lenovo Y700 will be compared to a cross sampling of devices, but for those that want to compare it to any other system we’ve tested, please user our Notebook Bench.

First we’ll start with our synthetic tests and then move into gaming results.

3DMark

The GTX 960M paired with Core i7-6700HQ is very respectable in 3DMark, easily doubling the GT 940M performance in the Surface Book, and coming in pretty close to the GTX 870M. The bigger GPUs still offer a lot more performance.

GFXBench

GFXBench has been updated to version 4.0 on Windows now, but it does retain a couple of the older tests. Manhattan and T-Rex are both pretty light tests by any measure of a device with a discrete GPU, and the GTX 960M aces these with no issues. There’s a big gap to the top tier NVIDIA mobile cards.

Dota 2

Valve’s Multiplayer Online Battle Arena game Dota 2 got a new engine under the hood. The new version is a lot heavier on CPU than the previous one, but it’s still a game that can be played well on low end hardware. For those that want to turn up all of the effects, the Y700 handles this game very nicely. Our enthusiast settings offered over 90 frames per second on average, and even with Dota 2 set to “Ultra” it still provides 84.7 frames per second. The Y700 would be a great entry level gaming laptop for this very popular game.

Tomb Raider

The latest version of Tomb Raider is now out, and Rise of the Tomb Raider looks to set the bar even higher than the original, but the first game in this series reboot can still be punishing with all options, including TressFX, enabled. The Y700 can handle this version pretty well, but the top settings can certainly make the system struggle. I’m hoping to add Rise of the Tomb Raider to our laptop suite going forward, but we need a couple more systems to test it on first.

Bioshock Infinite

This is another game that is getting to be a bit long in the tooth, but it can still be a challenge to run on modern laptops with the settings cranked up. The Y700 is only just over 40 frames per second on Enthusiast settings, but as you can see if you turn the settings down a bit, the frame rate jumps up a lot.

Dragon Age Inquisition

Bioware’s massive RPG can also be very punishing with settings cranked up in the game. This is the first game where the frame rate drops to unplayable on Enthusiast. Even the Mainstream settings are a struggle for this game, which has some pretty insane draw distances, and even with the 4GB GTX 960M option, it pushes this card to its limits.

Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor

The well received action-adventure game from Warner Brothers and Monolith Productions uses the LithTech game engine, and with everything set to maximum at 1080p, the GTX 960M barely keeps an average over 30 frames per second, so once again this test is a bit too demanding for this laptop. Some tweaking of the settings with GeForce Experience would be required.

GRID Autosport

The EGO 3.0 engine which powers this latest version of the Codemasters racing series has quite a bit of dynamic range with the settings, but even on our maximum settings the frame rate average is playable. The GTX 960M is certainly at its limits already, but it still does enough to be useful, delivering over 50fps at 1080p Ultra with 4x MSAA.

GPU Conclusion

The GTX 960M is a decent graphics card for a lower cost gaming laptop. It can generally play most games at 1080p with settings dialed down perhaps a bit. If you have the UHD version of the Y700, it certainly won’t be enough power to game very well at its native resolution of 3840x2160. The base 1920x1080 model is served pretty well though with this combination.

There is still a big gap to the GTX 970M though, but we have to put the Y700 into the context of where it stands price wise. The GTX 960M is the sweet spot for performance and price.

Display

Lenovo offers two displays in the Y700, but luckily both are IPS panels. Several low cost gaming laptops are still shipping with TN panels as the base offering, and that’s very unfortunate in 2016, so it’s great to see Lenovo offering IPS on all of the models. The display panel in the Y700 review unit is an LGD04A7, which is the 1920x1080 offering. This is a 6-bit panel, so it's still a lower-end IPS offering, and utilizes a full RGB stripe.

Since this laptop has Optimus, there is no option of G-SYNC on this panel, since G-SYNC is only possible if Optimus is not available. This is something I hope NVIDIA can solve, because the laptops that are more often going to benefit from G-SYNC are the same laptops with the less powerful GPUs like this model. Due to the way that Optimus works though, it may be very difficult to get this to function.

To test display accuracy, we use SpectraCal’s CalMAN 5 suite with a custom workflow. Contrast and brightness levels are measured with an X-Rite i1Display Pro colorimeter, and color accuracy is measured with an X-Rite i1Pro2 spectrophotometer. As a refresher, color accuracy is measured as a Delta-E, which is the “distance” between the correct color and the color portrayed on the display. Values under 1.0 are considered imperceptible, with values under 3.0 as what we would consider acceptable.

Brightness and Contrast

The Lenovo Y700 has a display that is not very bright. 260 nits is enough for indoor use, but if you were to use it outdoors it would be a struggle. It also has only an average contrast ratio for an IPS panel. There have been some nice advances in LCD contrast in the last little bit, but they seem to be relegated to higher end devices like the Surface Book for the time being.

Grayscale

Here we start to see some issues with the Y700 display. At a targeted 200 nits, the Y700’s display has a pretty large drop off in both red and blue levels, causing the white levels to shift into the green spectrum. Amazingly the white shows as close to the target temperature of 6504K despite the color issues, highlighting the issues of using a single number to try to portray something with color.

Gamut

Normally I don’t bother with Gamut graphs, but on the Y700 its worth taking a look at. On this test we can see the glaringly obvious issue of the backlight used in the Y700. This is a narrow-band LED backlight, and it can’t produce anywhere near the entire sRGB gamut. The blue levels are well under what is necessary to cover the entire range, and red and green are also well under. This doesn’t bode well for the rest of the tests.

Saturation

With the saturation sweep you can more easily see the compressed nature of the narrow-band backlight. All of the colors are well under what they should be for any given point in the color space, with 100% blue topping out on the green side of about 75% of the range. This hurts magenta quite a bit, as does the red which tops out around 78% or so.

Gretag Macbeth

Our most comprehensive color test is the Gretag Macbeth test, which targets many more colors, including a lot of flesh tones. Although the overall average is about a dE of 6, there are large gaps in the results where its not even close.

Color Checker

To put the above numbers into a context that’s easier to understand at a glance, we use the Color Checker tests. The bottom of the color swatch is the correct color, and the top half shows what the display produced. Just as a reminder, the color checker results are a relative comparison, because any inaccuracies in your own display will skew the results.

On the grayscale swatches, you can clearly see the green coming out of the whites from quite early on. The color swatches make it very obvious in the shortcomings especially for blue. 100% blue on this display is far too light, and it’s very easy to see by eye.

Calibrated Results

We can use CalMAN to run a calibration of the display, but bear in mind that calibration on a display without an adjustable 3D Look Up Table (LUT) is not going to be able to do anything with the actual colors. Grayscale can be fixed, and sometimes this can pull some of the colors back a bit too, but sometimes it also hurts the color accuracy.

 

Once calibrated, the grayscale is much better behaved, but 100% white is not fixable because the display runs out of gamut. But as expected, the saturation and gamut results are basically unchanged. GMB does come down a bit due to the more accurate gray levels.

Overall this is a pretty disappointing display. It’s great that it is an IPS panel, so you don’t suffer from the terrible viewing angles of TN, but the backlight in the Y700 just can’t cut it. I wasn’t surprised that the display wasn’t calibrated at the factory when they are targeting this price point, but it would be great if it could come a bit closer to hitting more of the already small sRGB color space.

Battery Life

When you think of a gaming laptop, battery life is generally not something that springs to mind. But with Optimus to limit GPU power consumption and a larger chassis to accommodate a big enough battery, it can be acceptable. With that said, the Lenovo Y700 only has a 60 Wh battery, which is unfortunately only barely larger than the average Ultrabook. Otherwise the more hardcore gaming laptops can struggle to get only a few hours, but then other devices like the Razer Blade achieve pretty reasonable runtimes.

To test battery life, we run the devices through two tests, both with the display set to 200 nits to keep the test as comparable as possible. The light test is just web browsing, and with Windows 10 we’ve moved from Internet Explorer to Edge for this test, since it’s the default browser. The heavy test increases the numbers of pages loaded, adds in a movie playback, and a 1 MB/s file download to keep the network card active.

Light Results

The light results kind of took me by surprise. Most gaming laptops struggle to get even six hours of battery life, but the Y700 does very well at around 7.5 hours. The combination of Skylake’s power enhancements along with a new network card have certainly helped. Another big help is likely the display. The same narrow-band backlight which caused so much grief on the display testing, likely uses less power since its not covering the entire sRGB color space. This is a much better result than I would have expected with the 60 Wh battery though.

Heavy Results

Here things come back down to earth a bit. Clearly Skylake is much better at idle power, and the backlight has a bigger impact on the light test too. On the heavy test, the results are much more in the range of what I was expecting. But still an almost four-hour runtime on the heavy test is a good result for a gaming notebook.

Normalized

For the normalized results, we divide the runtime by the battery capacity to get an overall platform efficiency result. Once again the Y700 does very well here. Without being able to measure individual components, the backlight is likely a major factor here, but the newest CPU and wireless card from Intel are also both in play too. This is a good result for a gaming notebook, and the overall run times are now moving devices like the Y700 into the realm of being useful unplugged from power. The overall battery life and efficiency is nothing like the latest Ultrabooks, but its still a big step forward.

Charge Time

The other half of the battery life equation is how long it takes to charge the device. Lenovo ships the Y700 with a 135-Watt power adapter, which is significantly larger than you’d get on a smaller notebook.

With a charge time of just 120 minutes, the Y700 is one of the quickest notebooks to go from 0-100% charge. That’s not unexpected, with such a large power adapter and a relatively small battery. But regardless combined with the decent battery life offered by this notebook, it should be fairly good for travel.

Wireless

We’ve seen most devices coming with 802.11ac these days, and generally in a 2x2:2 configuration, which means it can transmit and receive on two antennas at the same time on two spatial streams. On 802.11ac, this gives a maximum connection speed of 866.7 Mbps, although functional speeds will be lower due to overhead and interference. The good cards can generally sustain over 500 Mbps with a good connection to the access point.

The Lenovo Y700 comes with a new wireless card inside, which is the Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 8260. This upgraded adapter utilizes the M.2 form factor and is the latest iteration of Intel’s lineup of wireless adapters. Intel cards have tended to be reliable, but not the fastest card out there, at least on the models that we’ve tested. Most of them max out at around 400 Mbps on our wireless test, which is a SMB file copy.

The new card is a big improvement over the outgoing 7260 and 7265 models. In fact, I’ve seen file transfers even higher than what I achieved on my test, including up to around 650 Mbps file copies. This is a fantastic result for a 2x2:2 card, and is fast approaching the physical limits of two streams.

As for day to day use with the new card, it’s more anecdotal but connections have been fast and solid in my time with the Y700. Unfortunately wireless is almost a black art once you start to add walls, wiring, and outside interference into the equation, so your mileage may vary, but with Intel’s track record it would seem that they’ve sorted the one issue they had, which was throughput, while maintaining their solid wireless connections.

Audio

JBL supplies the audio for the Y700. There are two speakers on the top near the hinge, and any time you can have forward facing speakers, it is only going to improve response and stereo separation of the channels. Many notebooks have downward firing speakers, and while often times they are adequate, that is a compromise for sure. The Y700 does have one downward firing speaker though. It includes a subwoofer on the bottom of the chassis to assist with the lower frequencies.

With the caveat that this is a notebook computer, and not a home stereo system, the end result of the 3-Watt sound system is fairly impressive. Listening to music on the Y700 is a pleasant experience, and there is plenty of volume. I measured 86 dB(A) from the Y700 with the SPL meter 1” over the trackpad. That’s about 5 dB over the average notebook. Sound pressure level isn’t everything of course, and the frequency response was good. The subwoofer definitely helps, but in the end this notebook, like all others, is going to suffer from a loss of response on the low end of the scale, since the small size of the speakers and limited power available makes it difficult to produce the low frequencies. It’s better than most, but headphones are going to always sound better.

Speaking of headphones, with the launch of the Y700 gaming laptop, Lenovo also launched a new set of gaming headphones aptly named the Lenovo Y Gaming Surround Sound Headset. If you like your accessories to match your system, the Y set features a similar theme and accent colors, and the USB connection allows 7.1 virtual surround sound out of the two 40 mm neodymium magnet drivers, and there is a detachable noise cancelling microphone as well. It also features a 3.5 mm connector for use on any other device that doesn’t support USB headphones. The price is pretty reasonable too at $70 USD.

Thermals

Heat is the enemy of any gaming laptop. With high powered CPUs and GPUs, being able to extract the heat generated is the key to maintaining performance over a long gaming session. We’ve certainly seen devices that have struggled with this in the past, meaning frame rates drop over the session, and that’s not what you want when you buy a gaming notebook.

The Y700 features a 45-Watt CPU and a GPU that will be in the 60-Watt and over range (NVIDIA doesn’t release official TDP values) so the Y700 needs to be able to dissipate 80-100 Watts of heat. That’s a heck of a lot more than a 15-Watt Ultrabook, but still fairly manageable compared to something with a GTX 980M inside.

To measure the impact of gaming on the Y700, I ran the Tomb Raider benchmark for around an hour straight and measured the CPU and GPU temperatures and other data points.

The results are excellent. The Y700 had no issues keeping up with the demand of the CPU and GPU, and GPU temperatures never even got over 65°C. The laptop itself was barely warm after this too, so Lenovo has packed in plenty of cooling to ensure that the system can maintain peak performance for as long as necessary.

Noise

The downside of a good cooling system is generally noise. Fans used to move the hot air out of the chassis are going to be audible, and the faster they need to spin the louder they get. Like most quad-core laptops, there is pretty much no escaping the fans running all the time. Lenovo does have the fans set to turn off completely, but in my time with the notebook that was a rare event indeed.

At idle, the fan noise was about 39.5 dB(A) in my lab with a noise floor of around 30 dB. It is certainly audible, but not excessively so. There are some slight changes in fan speed, but for the most part it sticks pretty close to this sound output. After gaming for an hour, the fan noise had only increased to 44.8 dB, which is an excellent result. Some very high powered laptops can easily go to 50 dB, and I’ve seen a couple that are over 60 dB with the fans set to maximum. The Y700 is one of the few gaming notebooks that I could actually game on without headphones. Yes, the GPU is not as powerful, so there are tradeoffs being made, but regardless this is a great result.

Final Words

With an in-depth look at the Lenovo Ideapad Y700, its time to look at the complete picture again. If you are in the market for a gaming laptop, and have around $1000 to spend, should the Y700 be on your list to look at?

Let’s start with the design. Lenovo has built the Y700 out of a nice aluminum chassis, which adds a bit of premium feel right off the bat. The styling is smart but subtle, with just a couple of red accents to make the look pop a bit. It’s a design that I like, and the size and weight of the chassis makes the Y700 something that wouldn’t be too difficult to travel with. Lenovo offers a backpack as well, for those that want something that fits the same aesthetic.

With the base model coming with a Core i5-6300HQ quad-core processor, and an optional Core i7-6700HQ model, there’s quite a bit of performance on tap for day to day activities. Both of these processors are going to be plenty to keep the GPU fed for any gaming sessions. The base model comes with 8 GB of memory, but you can also get 16 GB of DDR4 as well, which is plenty for a notebook in this range, and because the Y700 uses DDR4 SODIMMs, you can always upgrade that on your own.

The GTX 960M inside the Y700 has proven itself to be fairly capable for gaming at 1920x1080, and its able to handle many of our gaming benchmarks with reasonable framerates even at maximum settings. For the newest and most demanding games, you will have to turn some of the settings down, but luckily NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience software can easily handle all of this for most well known games on the market. If you’re looking for more gaming performance, you’d have to step up to a more expensive card, and then you quickly get out of this price bracket.

The display, at least the 1920x1080 touch model in the review unit, certainly leaves a lot to be desired. It’s hard to say how the 3840x2160 offering would do, but on a notebook like this I would likely stick with the lower resolution model anyway, as the GTX 960M is certainly going to struggle with gaming at UHD resolutions. The backlight is the main issue with this display, and the narrow-band LED lighting makes it impossible for the Y700 to even come close to the sRGB color space. Blues, in particular, are very far from the deep blue you can get on a quality panel. Calibrated displays still seem to be something of an niche item, but the Y700 is pretty far from excellent out of the box. Gaming laptops from MSI, for instance, have a sRGB mode which is surprisingly accurate, so Lenovo could take a lesson from them for future models. Lenovo also offers a non-touch offering which will be a matte finish for those that prefer that.

The battery life was surprisingly good on the Y700. When it was first announced, I didn’t expect very much from a quad-core system with a discrete GPU when it only had a 60 Wh battery, so I was pleasantly surprised to see how this notebook did on our battery life tests. The light test is very light, and likely an unrealistic goal for anyone actively using the notebook, but even the heavy test showed a decent result.

Lenovo also offers a great wireless option, although the base model only comes with a 1x1:1 802.11ac card, the optional 2x2:2 Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 8260 is a great performer, and would be worth the increase in price. Intel cards have been dependable but below average in speed compared to Broadcom and other Wi-Fi chips, but with the latest model they seem to have kept their dependability while increasing their throughput.

The one area that was a big disappointment for me was the keyboard. I’ve used Lenovo products with great keyboards many times in the past, but on the Y700 apparently that was sacrificed to hit their price point. The keys are mushy, and the layout is not as good as other devices. It does include a number pad, but it is compressed into the rest of the keyboard when there is plenty of space on the laptop deck to stretch it out a bit. I’ve never been a fan of the 0 key being cut off like it is here, because when I want to use the number pad for data entry, I want it to be standard. It’s likely something you could get used to over time, but I use many keyboards so any time they stray from the norm, it can be an issue. The red backlighting is great, but not much else good can be said here.

All-in-all we need to look at the whole package. People who are in the market for a gaming notebook are going to struggle to find a device with this much performance for much less money. There are a couple of other devices on the market which are close, but the shortcomings of the Y700 are likely things that people in this market would be able to put up with. None of the shortcomings affect the actual experience of gaming on this system, and that’s likely what matters most. For a starting price around $900, there is a lot of value here with a strong CPU and GPU combination, and a cooling system that can easily handle everything thrown at it without becoming overbearing. If you are looking for a gaming laptop and don’t have a lot of money to spend, the Y700 needs to be on your list of notebooks to check out.