I sometimes avoid reviewing certain products when I know the internet has a
massive raging hard on for them. If I like it, then I'm not telling anyone
anything they don't already know. And if I don't like it, then I get to deal with
a bunch of vitriol just for having a contrary opinion. Not worth it. I don't
need a few video views that badly. That's actually why I've never reviewed
the Audio Technica ATTHM50s. I have a pair. They're good for the money, but
they don't blow me away or anything. So, that along with not having a contact for
review samples is actually the reason that I hadn't planned on reviewing the
Lenovo Y50 up until now. I thought everyone knew about it and loved it
already until I tweeted that I was looking into it and someone said,
"Lenovo does cases." What? And I was like, "No." So, I resolved to double my
efforts to get one. And here it is. So, let's get this show on the road.
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classifies the Y50 as a gaming essentials model. And honestly, I would
agree with that if it wasn't so darn good at everything else. But let's back
up for a second. We'll start with a physical tour. The top has a striking
brushed finish that manages to be clean and professional while hinting at the
horsepower underneath. And the bottom looks the same, adorned only by a
subwoofer for the shockingly good JBL designed audio system, as well as a
large air intake. The front has the usual indicator LEDs for power and
whatnot. The right side has a Kensington lock, a USB 2 port, an SD reader, a
headset jack, and a spit of audio output. Then the left side has two USB 3
ports, an HDMI output that I wish was DisplayPort, a gigabit Ethernet port,
and a reversible power jack. Back to how to categorize this notebook, though.
It's not just for gamers. It's more of a sensible option for pretty much anyone
who doesn't mind the size kind of thing, if if that was a category. Even though
it is a bit on the big side with sizable bezels around the screen, I feel like it
compensates by weighing only 5.3 lbs and being a mere 0.9 in thick. Both very
reasonable values for a 15.6 6 in notebook. And it also helps me forgive
the size to see Lenovo use that space to equip this bad boy with one of the best
keyboards that I've ever used on a gaming notebook. It's got a striking red
backlight and matte wrist rest. Commits no cardinal sins like short shifts or
backspace keys. Includes a full number pad for productivity. Has correctly laid
out arrow keys. And most importantly, the tactile feedback is excellent. My
two complaints are that it lacks mute and media control keys. even with a
function modifier. And the tops of the key caps are a little bit slippery out
of the box. But that didn't prevent me from being at full speed within 2
minutes of using it. Although, given how many business notebooks Lenovo makes, I
guess it shouldn't surprise me that much that they know a thing or two about how to make a keyboard. It's just a shame
that this didn't carry over to the touchpad. To be clear, there are some
really good things about it. It almost never misinterprets multi-touch and
Windows 8 gestures, a big problem with my XPS that forced me to disable them
all. The positioning is perfect, allowing me to easily type without
touching it. And whenever I intentionally brush my palms on it to
test it, it did a great job of palm rejection. Tracking and the Surface
finish are all right. But even with all those positives in mind, I wasn't a huge
fan of using the mouse pad two-handed with clicks often registering as
downward movements. And the overall fit and finish left a fair bit to be desired
for me with some noticeable rattling when using Tap to Click. and the
clickpad functionality on the rest of the pad being extremely inconsistent
with the middle requiring a little bit of force and the edges
much more. I guess it makes sense that there would have to be at least a few
compromises like this on a notebook that costs anywhere from around $1,000 to
around $1,500 and delivers these kinds of specs, though. The $1,300 model on
Amazon has a Core i7 2.4 4 GHz quad core, 16 gigs of RAM, a GTX 860M with 2
gigs of RAM, a 256 gig SSD, and last but not least, a 4K IPS display. I mean,
think about that. For less than the cost of buying a 4K IPS monitor, you can buy
an entire notebook with one attached to it. The world is a funny place. Speaking
of the 4K display, what a great value. My unit even has a touchcreen, although
a quick search on Newegg didn't reveal an option available like that, so your
mileage may vary. But back to how it looks, it's beautiful. No, it's not
perfect. Mine has some noticeable backlight bleed, especially along the
left edge. But man, that kind of pixel density is amazing, even with my nose 10
cm from the screen. Correctly scaled text looks astoundingly crisp. Viewing
angles are easily suitable for sitting and watching 4K videos with a group of
friends with no one getting a crappy view or lousy colors and doing my usual
drag Windows around and see how noticeable motion blur is. quick and
dirty test didn't reveal anything unexpected given that we know it won't
have the same speed and responsiveness of a TN panel. Now, I've seen a lot of
people online being very harshly critical of Lenovo's use of a 48 Hz
display here instead of a 60 Hz one, but to be honest, it doesn't bother me that
much. 30 Hz is unbearable, but I've used 50 Hz by accident on my computer before.
And while things do feel a little bit off, and I I'll notice, and I'll change
it back eventually, it never really bothers me in 2D work. And frankly, in
games, your IPS panel, slow response time, and GTX 860M are going to likely
be bigger performance bottlenecks than the maximum refresh rate of your screen
being 48 hertz, especially if you're gaming at 4K. Which leads us nicely into
the overall gaming experience, which
isn't as seamless as I think it needs to be. While more casual games like Dirt 3
were actually playable at 4K on high settings with minimum frame rates around
30 FPS, hardcore titles are not going to
run at that resolution, which wouldn't be a problem except that due to the way
Intel's driver handles scaling on this display when you're running at native
resolution, DirectX11 games, the ones that I tried anyway, will run at the
resolution you set, like 1080p, in the middle of the screen with black bars
around them. There are a couple of workarounds, but the first is to force
the lower fidelity DirectX9 render path, which can involve weird config file or
registry edits. So, not everyone will want to do that. And the second involves
changing the desktop resolution, which will likely require you to change the
text scaling, which by default is set to the maximum and will push a bunch of UI
elements off screen. So then in order to do that, you have to log out of Windows
and log back in every time you want to
run a DirectX11 game at 1080p.
I hope a driver can fix this, but given that the NVIDIA control panel doesn't
control display scaling in dual graphics mode, and the most recent Intel graphics
drivers validated for this model are over 3 months old, I don't know if I
would hold my breath for that fix. But
and there are some other issues too, like the GPU power limit throttling that
occurs sometimes when gaming at high settings on battery, causing large frame
rate fluctuations, even when I set the NVIDIA control panel to prefer maximum
performance for the GPU. It's not all bad or anything, though. The battery
lasts for over an hour of straight gaming and about 4 hours doing other
things, an acceptable result. And the system runs really cool with neither the
CPU nor the GPU reaching over 70° even
after an hour straight gaming and only the top of the keyboard between the E
and Y keys developing a bit of a toasty hot spot. Something that really didn't
affect me much. The problem is I just don't think these things are enough to
turn my conclusion into a super positive one. The Y50, at least the 4K model,
just isn't easy for me to recommend as a gaming notebook. Honestly, it's issues.
most of which are relating to the cutting edge screen are not Lenovo's
fault. It's hardware or driver limitations that are beyond their
control. But for the customer spending his or her own real money on the product
that says Lenovo on it, I don't know how much that matters. With that said, while
gaming on the Y50 had problems, other than the frustrating touchpad, it was a
pleasure to use in every other way. So, I still have no problem recommending it
as a powerful CUDA capable productivity and multimedia notebook. It delivers
astounding specs, great build quality, a fantastic keyboard, a rich content
enjoyment experience, basic gaming functionality, and to my eyes, beautiful
stealthy looks, and it does it all at a price that real people can afford. So, I
have to give kudos to Lenovo for all of that. But as a gamer, I feel like option
one is settling for the 1080p model with the much less beautiful screen. And
option two is waiting for either a driver fix for this one or a next
generation product to iron out the wrinkles, which is IMO not a terrible
choice because once they fix that stuff, this baby is going to be really hard to
beat. Speaking of hard to beat, audible.com's massive selection of over
150,000 audio books. Embarrassingly enough, I still haven't gotten around to
reading The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, someone whose work I admire very
much. So, when it came time to pick this month's audio book, and I had Sihow open
in another tab, I was like, "Oh, snap. Hank Green is hosting that. I still
haven't read his brother's latest critically acclaimed book. Got to pick that up." And that's basically how the
monthly audiobook membership works. You sign up to get your first book for free,
and then every month after that, you get one included with your membership and discounts on additional audiobooks.
Check it out now at audible.com/lininus.
Guys, thank you for watching. Like if you liked, dislike if you disliked. Leave a comment letting me know what you
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will appreciate very much and love you long time for. Thank you. That's not
very politically correct. Has this show ever been politically correct?
I think we're done here.
Heat.