Lenovo
External appearance
A powerful gaming laptop can not be thin, but in each rule there are exceptions and Lenovo Y900 is one of them. We are now modestly silent about the length and width – nevertheless, we are talking about a gaming “seed” – but the slenderness of the Y900 is worth saying a few words. The thickness of the laptop was 36 mm, which is quite a bit different from the other gaming “seeds”. Competitors Y900 with similar technical characteristics and weight of such sizes can not boast anymore – they will be more by 10 – 15 mm. As for the weight, then the miracle did not happen, the Y900 weighs about 4.38 kg – it will be difficult to carry with itself. What to do – for a powerful gaming “seed” this weight is considered quite acceptable.
The lid of the laptop is made of metal with a beautiful polished texture. In its center there is a bright logo of the game series “Y900”, it stands out well against a black background.
The same logo is also found on gaming accessories: headsets and mouses.
In a closed state, the Lenovo Y900 is somewhat like an expensive sports car. Similarity is enhanced by red inserts, similar to the rear lights. They are located above the ventilation grilles of the cooling system. Most likely, the idea of engineers was something like this.
For connection of peripherals, Lenovo Y900 has two USB 3.0 connectors (on the left) and the same USB 2.0 (on the right). And for the most modern and fastest devices, the Y900 has a USB 3.1 Type C connector (Thunderbolt 3), disconnected on the left panel. For connection of external monitors, DisplayPort and HDMI connectors are available, and if this is not enough, you can use USB 3.1 Type C, thanks to the Thunderbolt 3 controller you can connect two external monitors with a resolution of 4K, or one display, but at once 5K.
For access to local networks, Lenovo Y900 has a gigabit Ethernet connector (Killer e2400 controller) and a Wi-Fi Killer Wireless-AC 1535 module. By the way, two antennas are connected to the wireless module, which as a result gives two channels for reception and the same for transmission Data (technology MIMO 2×2: 2). This approach has an excellent 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 room to accommodate a keyboard with a digital unit. And to the left of it are four keys for macros and a button for overclocking the processor.
Despite the fact that the Y900 belongs to the game models, the keyboard has a mechanical keyboard and is made in a recognizable style. Here we see the same keys that are not the first year found in the well-known Lenovo series: IdeaPad and ThinkPad. Unless the game buttons WASD got bright, red caps. With the help of Y900 you can comfortably play games and type texts. The key stroke was deep for the laptop and was about 2.5 mm, and the moment of pressing was well felt. In general, before us is the same Lenovo keyboard – one of the most convenient and thought-out keyboards for laptops, with an excellent tactile response and long-lasting keys.
By the way, the Fn key is in its usual place – in the lower left part of the keyboard, to the right of Ctrl. If this arrangement does not suit someone, then in the BIOS, you can swap these keys.
As it should be a modern gaming laptop, the Y900 keyboard received a fully customizable backlight. Both Latin and Russian symbols are highlighted. As for the WASD game keys, there are no Russian characters on them for the reason that the buttons were equipped with “game” caps that come with the laptop. However, they can and do not install – on the “native” caps are marked with Russian and Latin characters.
It is worth mentioning and the working area. It is made of a nice touch, a little rough plastic Soft-Touch, and the touchpad received a small border, with a customizable backlight. The dimensions of the touch panel are 105 × 70 mm, it is in a small depression, and the depth of its pressing is about 1 mm.
There is nothing interesting on the back of the IdeaPad Y900, except for the holes of the cooling system and the separate grating covering the subwoofer. The latter is in the form of a triangle and is located below.
Finally, it’s worth to tell about the IdeaPad Y900 screen. In Lenovo, they decided to install a glossy 17.3-inch IPS-panel in the notebook with an anti-reflective coating and a resolution of 1920×1080. Of course, here could be a screen with a higher resolution, for example, popular in the mobile segment “2K” or the usual 4K, but, as practice shows, it is not easy to play on such panels. The fact is that most often the video card can not stretch the resolution of the game (for example 1920×1080 pixels) onto screens with higher exotic resolutions, so the game will be launched at a resolution of 1920×1080, but on a scale of 1: 1, or at the native, maximum screen resolution, ignoring All other settings. It will be inconvenient in both cases. In the first picture will be too shallow, and in the second case, the mobile video card simply can not cope with high resolution with the maximum graphics parameters that will turn any game into a slideshow. Therefore, a 17-inch screen with a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels can be called the optimal choice for a gaming notebook.
Technical characteristics
Here you can confirm the accuracy of the information specified in the description.
Approximate price
Approximate price
| Screen | 17.3 inches, 1920 × 1080, IPS, with a matte finish | |
| The processor | Intel Core i7-6820HK From 2.7 GHz to 3.6 GHz in Turbo Boost mode 4 cores 8 threads, 8 MBytes cache L3, TDP 45 W Architecture Skylake, 14 nm, LGA 1151 | |
| Operative memory | 2x 8 GB DDR4-2133 | |
| Video card | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M; 8 GB GDDR5; | |
| Chipset | Intel CM236 | |
| The accumulators | 256 GB SSD Hard Drive 1,000 GB | |
| The card reader | Yes, SD / SDHC / SDXC | |
| The network adapter | 1x 1000 Mbps, Killer e2400 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller | |
| Wi-Fi | Killer Wireless-AC1535; 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 Audio connectors 3,5 mm 1x Charging connector | |
| The battery | 90 W * h (8100 mAh), built-in | |
| Operating system | Microsoft Windows 10 Home Single Language, 64 Bit | |
| Dimensions | 425 × 315 × 36 mm | |
| Weight | 4.38 kg | |
| Warranty | 2 years | from 135,000 rubles |
The heart of the Lenovo IdeaPad Y900 was the quad-core Intel Core i7-6820HK. Yes, this is not the newfangled Kaby Lake, but let’s be honest: in the current environment, there is absolutely no point in chasing the performance of the processor. As shown by numerous reviews and tests, the performance of Kaby Lake is not much superior to Skylake, and the power reserve of the quad-core i7-6820HK is enough for even heavy tasks, like working with video.
The processor operates at a clock speed 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 mobile Intel processors supporting overclocking. And thanks to the good cooling system IdeaPad Y900 and the auto-dispersal key, you can quickly and easily add a few hundred additional megahertz to the processor.
The amount of RAM was 16 GB, using modern DDR4 memory with a frequency of 2133 MHz. In total, the laptop has four slots for RAM. The first two, already occupied by the modules, are located under the keyboard, and the other two are at their usual place, behind the lower service panel. With the increase in the amount of memory there will be no problems.
The video card of the IdeaPad Y900 was one of the best. This is the flagship model of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M, supplemented with 8 GB of video memory GDDR5. This combination should be enough for all modern games.
No less interesting was the disk subsystem, which the user can improve on his taste. In our version of IdeaPad Y900 were installed two fast drives M.2 with a capacity of 128 GB each, and one hard disk with a capacity of 1 TB. Of the two SSDs, you can build a very fast RAID-0 array, and on the hard drive you can store movies, distributions or backups of the most important files.
We already talked about the networking possibilities of the IdeaPad Y900. For the operation of a gigabit Ethernet connector, the Killer e2400 network adapter is responsible, and the Killer Wireless-AC 1535 for wireless networks. The 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’s a bit unusual. And on the other hand, this design allowed 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 surprising. Yet, in its crystal four productive cores are concealed, able to work with a frequency of up to 3.6 GHz. So, in the benchmark Cinebench v. 11.5 he scored 7.69 points, and in the built-in CPU-Z test we got 6980 parrots in a multi-core mode. When only one kernel was loaded, the performance logically sank to 1516 parrots in CPU-Z. Finally, in the benchmark Geekbench v. 4.0.4 laptop Lenovo IdeaPad Y900 was able to score 13 726 points in multi-core mode and 4395 in single-core.
Now let’s move on to testing the graphics. As usual, such tests of the synthetic benchmark 3DMark have started, and in order not to describe the number of parrots measured in each subtest, we will give a comparison table with the results.
| Presets 3DMark | 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 no less popular benchmark Unigine Heaven 4.0 at a resolution of 1600×900 pixels and maximum graphics settings, we got 57 frames per second.
The IdeaPad Y900 solid state drive showed excellent results. The speed of reading and writing in 2600 and 1361 MB / sec earlier could only be dreamed. Now such dreams have become a reality. Windows on this laptop is loaded in a matter of seconds, and heavy applications, like photo or video editors start even faster.
As for the speed of the hard drive, then everything is trivial. Its results are similar to any other 2.5-inch drives and here it is not necessary to wait for miracles.
Now about the IdeaPad Y900 cooling system. She had a standard design for all gaming models. Thermal tubes that are cooled by two turbines are connected to the radiators of the processor and video card (as well as of the hot components of the video adapter). In idle mode, the two turbines of the notebook 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 more noise, but the level of the loaded turbines turned out to be no higher than usual conversation. In general, you can praise Lenovo engineers for a quiet and efficient cooling system, and the company’s programmers should say thank you for the Nerve Sense application, in which you can forcefully include the CO turbines at full capacity. This function is useful both in summer and during serious game battles, when the performance of iron becomes much more important than the noise cooling system created.
Also worth noting is the excellent sound of Lenovo IdeaPad Y900. Thanks to moderately large dimensions of the laptop, inside it there was a place not only for the speakers, but also for a compact, mobile subwoofer. The IdeaPad Y900 sounds great. For such a noutube you can not only play, but also watch movies or just listen to music. To the audio track, there were no complaints, even at maximum volume (and it turned out to be very high), we did not hear any noise or rattles from the speakers. Perhaps, the sound of Lenovo IdeaPad Y900 can be called one of the best among gaming models. This is not surprising, because over its sound engineers JBL also worked. Conclusion
To praise the Lenovo IdeaPad Y900 can be long and, equally important, quite deserved, as you could see. This laptop received an excellent screen with the optimal resolution for the gaming “seed”, a very comfortable keyboard, which is perfect for games or work and nice dimensions. Perhaps, the only spoon of tar in this sweet barrel of honey will be the price. The cost of Lenovo IdeaPad Y900 starts from 135,000 rubles, but gaming laptops have always been expensive.
