Lenovo Y70 Touch: A fully loaded 17-inch gaming laptop (hands-on)

Lenovo bows a new slim gaming laptop with a jumbo 17-inch touchscreen.

Dan Ackerman Editorial Director / Computers and Gaming

Dan Ackerman leads CNET's coverage of computers and gaming hardware. A New York native and former radio DJ, he's also a regular TV talking head and the author of "The Tetris Effect" (Hachette/PublicAffairs), a non-fiction gaming and business history book that has earned rave reviews from the New York Times, Fortune, LA Review of Books, and many other publications. "Upends the standard Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs/Mark Zuckerberg technology-creation myth... the story shines." -- The New York Times

Expertise I've been testing and reviewing computer and gaming hardware for over 20 years, covering every console launch since the Dreamcast and every MacBook...ever. Credentials

Author of the award-winning, NY Times-reviewed nonfiction book The Tetris Effect; Longtime consumer technology expert for CBS Mornings

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Dan Ackerman

Sept. 2, 2014 9:01 p.m. PT

2 min read

Lenovo's cult favorite gaming PC collection is getting a new entry in the form of the 17.3-inch Y70 Touch.

Like the 15-inch Y50 version , which has been one of the PCs most asked-about by readers in 2014, the Y70 version includes laptop features rarely seen together in a single system. Those include a slim 17-inch body, current-gen Nvidia discrete graphics, JBL speakers with a built-in subwoofer for better audio, and a high-resolution touchscreen.

Like the Y50, this version has a brushed black metal shell embossed in a crosshatch pattern, with a subtle chrome Lenovo logo on the back panel. Red accents include wedge-shaped speaker grilles and a red backlit keyboard.

The specs top out at a current-gen quad-core Core i7 CPU, Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M GPU, and up to 1TB of hybrid drive storage, or a 512GB SSD. The display is a full-HD 1,920x1,080 panel, with no plans for a 4K version yet, despite it being an option on the smaller Y50 model.

We loved the Y50 as a portable gaming laptop that could work as a full-featured everyday laptop, too. The larger 17-inch version, which will weigh about 7.5 pounds (3.4kg), is similarly well-suited for both gaming and productivity tasks, but it's a bit disappointing that a 17-inch gaming laptop can't go all the way up to the top-of-the-line GeForce 870 and 880 GPUs.

The Lenovo Y70 Touch will be available beginning in October, starting at $1,300. Pricing and worldwide availability has not yet been announced, but converted pricing would be about £790, or AU$1,400.