Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 review: A unique gaming laptop at a great price

The current version of the Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 is a laptop that's hard not to like. A chunky, 15-inch Windows 8 machine with some real gaming muscle, sharp design, and a funky red-on-black backlit keyboard, it perfectly embodies the aesthetic Lenovo seems to be reaching for in the consumer-targeted IdeaPad line. It's not as staid as the much more traditional ThinkPad line, but instead takes basic black plastic and brushed metal and adds a sophisticated edge.

8.1

Lenovo IdeaPad Y500

The Good

The <b>Lenovo IdeaPad Y500</b> offers high-end components, including gamer-level graphics, a swappable accessory bay, and the coolest-looking backlit keyboard I've seen in a long while.

The Bad

If only the Y500 had a touch screen, which is practically required for the Windows 8 UI, it might be one of my favorite laptops of the year.

The Bottom Line

For those looking for something more than a feature-light ultrabook, the gamer-friendly Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 is close to brilliant, and several configurations are currently available at a deep discount -- but I can't believe it doesn't have a touch screen.

The Y500 is represented here by an impressive high-end SLI configuration, which Lenovo says runs $1,299, but this dual-GPU configuration is only available from retailers such as NewEgg. However, Lenovo is offering deep discounts on some single-GPU configurations on its website as of this writing, with a couple under $900. Despite the attractive prices and components, there are still issues. The Nvidia GeForce 650M GPU found here is great for a mainstream laptop, but the lack of a touch screen means the system is not well-suited for all the nongaming hours you're going to spend in the Windows 8 UI. The keyboard is excellent (and the red backlight gives it a nice edge), but the touch pad has an imprecise, floating feel, exacerbated by the lack of a secondary touch input on the screen.

Adding some extra kick is the system's modular Ultrabay concept. Years ago, you would see this occasionally on midsize and larger laptops, but today it's very rare. Where the optical drive would normally go, in right side of the system chassis, is instead a bay that can handle different optional components.

The Ultrabay accessory included in our review unit is a second GeForce GT650M graphics card -- a rarity indeed for a gaming laptop -- but you can also use the bay for an extra hard drive, an additional cooling fan, or an optical drive.

All that makes the Y500 powerful, flexible, and stylish. It's also well-made, looks sharp, and is quite reasonably priced (and a positive bargain, if the current sale prices hold). If it only had a touch screen for a frustration-free Windows 8 experience, this might be my favorite laptop of 2013 to date. As it is, the non-touch screen would be a deal-killer for me if I were reaching into my pocket to buy a new laptop.

Design and features
It's easy to tell at first glance that this is no ultrabook. Unlike the majority of laptops we've reviewed over the past year or so, the Y500 is not trying to be a slim MacBook Air clone. Instead this is a 15-inch portable powerhouse, with a full-voltage Intel Core i7 CPU and not one, but two graphics cards. Even with all that, it's still hardly thicker than the average midsize laptop of a few years ago, proving that it's not just ultrabooks that have slimmed down.

The basic-black design is a matter of taste -- some people would not be caught dead with a goth-looking black laptop. But black gadgets, white gadgets, chrome gadgets, and so forth all seem to have their day in the sun and then go back out of style.

In this case, the back of the lid has a brushed-metal finish, with a flat black wrist rest and black keys. That's unusual, because there's typically some contrast between the key faces and keyboard tray in a laptop. The contrast in this case, however, comes from the keyboard's backlighting.

The outer edge of each raised, island-style key glows deep red, helping the individual keys stand out against the dark background. It's a bit in-your-face, but I have to admit I thought it looked pretty sharp -- although the fact that it's just so different from other backlit keyboards may have put a bit of a thumb on the scale for me.

The keyboard itself is similar to what we've seen on other recent IdeaPad laptops, and even some ThinkPad models. The keys, thanks to copious keyboard research and testing from Lenovo, are well-spaced, deep enough to give a satisfying click, and make the most out of the space offered, with large Shift, Return, and other important keys.

The same cannot be said for the large, clickpad-style touch pad. It lacks separate left and right mouse buttons, as many current laptops do, but the two click zones are hard to hit consistently and the entire pad feels like it's floating on top of the wrist rest -- use too light a touch and your finger slips just enough to miss whatever you're clicking on before the click actually registers.

Compounding this problem is that, because the Y500 lacks a touch screen, that touch pad is going to be your main interface with the Windows 8 UI, unless you plug in an external mouse.

While the finicky touch pad and lack of a touch screen are annoying, I must applaud the Ultrabay concept. Years ago, one would very occasionally run into a laptop with swappable accessories, but I'm glad to see the idea is still around, at least in this system. The bay came with a second Nvidia GPU in our configuration, but sold-separately alternatives include an additional fan, a second hard drive, and an optical drive, which each cost between $29 and $189.

The devices are not exactly hot-swappable, so don't expect to install a game via the DVD drive, then just pull the drive out and replace it with the second GPU. Instead, you have to flip the laptop over, remove the battery, and then release a couple of latches to pull out the component that's currently in the bay. Still, it's a feature that makes your laptop more flexible, and I could see swapping in the fan, for example, to get longer battery life and better cooling while on the road.

The 15.6-inch display has a native resolution of 1,920x1,080 pixels, which is what you'd expect in a high-end midsize laptop today. The most recent Y-series Lenovo we looked at, the 2012 IdeaPad Y480, was a 14-inch model with only a 1,366x768 screen. At the time, we rightly pointed out that for a $1,000-plus midsize laptop, that was unacceptable. The better resolution on this model is much more in line with expectations.

As mentioned previously, that otherwise-excellent screen isn't a touch screen, which would greatly increase its appeal. Some would no doubt say that you don't need touch for Windows 8, or that with a few tweaks, you can stay in the traditional desktop view most of the time. But Windows 8 is built around that tile-based UI, and for a good out-of-the-box experience, trying to activate the Windows 8 Charms bar by swiping off the right side of the touch pad just doesn't cut it.

Connections, performance, and battery life
You get decent flexibility with the Y500, including dual video outputs, an always-on powered USB port for charging accessories, even with the system turned off, and that potentially handy Ultrabay for customizing the system for gaming, travel, or storage.

Several preconfigured models are available, with Ultrabay accessories potentially adding to the cost of each. As of this writing, Lenovo is offering what it calls "doorbuster" deals on a couple of the models, and the closest configuration to our review unit is $869, down from a list price of $1,349, which is a pretty solid deal, with one Nvidia GPU, a 1080p screen, a DVD drive for the Ultrabay, and a 1TB hard drive with 16GB solid-state drive (SSD) cache. It may be gone by the time you read this, but that's an insane price for as long as it lasts.

Thanks to the high-end 2.4GHz Intel Core i7-3630QM quad-core CPU, the Y500 performed superbly on our benchmark tests, matching up with even the highest-end desktop replacement laptops. You're definitely trading away some portability and battery life by not using an ultralow-voltage CPU, but if this laptop is going to stay plugged in on a desk most of the time, it's almost definitely worth it.

Gaming performance was also excellent, and our dual-GPU configuration (including the removable Ultrabay GPU) was correctly set up for SLI performance out of the box. In the very challenging Metro 2033 test at 1,920x1,080, the Y500 ran at 15.0 frames per second, which is a respectable score. In the more mainstream Just Cause 2, on medium/high settings, it ran at 53.5 frames per second. You can feel confidant running any current or upcoming game (such as BioShock Infinite) on this system at the highest settings and a lower resolution, or the highest resolution and medium-to-high settings.

As one might expect, battery life is not this system's strong suit. Still, at exactly 3 hours on our video-playback battery drain test, it hits a number we would have found perfectly acceptable from a 15-inch midsize laptop a few years ago. Note that this battery test doesn't really push the GPUs, so gaming with the power cord unplugged will no doubt lead to much shorter battery life.

Conclusion
With a high-res screen, decent design, some serious graphics for a nonspecialized gaming laptop, and a flexible accessory bay, the IdeaPad Y500 has a lot of the features you may be looking for.

Coupled with the current (and likely temporary) price breaks on different configurations, it's well worth considering for anyone not locked in to the idea of a superslim ultrabook. Look over the current prices and configurations carefully, as prices seem to change regularly, and most models come with an optical drive for the Ultrabay, instead of the second GPU.

Add a touch screen for all the non-gaming hours you'd spend on it, and this would be my favorite laptop of 2013 to date. As it is, it's still a strong contender, but one with a hard-to-overlook omission.

Find out more about how we test Windows laptops.

System configurations:

Lenovo IdeaPad Y500
Windows 8 (64-bit); 2.4GHz Intel Core i7-3630QM; 16GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz; (x2) 2GB Nvidia Geforce GT650M; HDD#1 SanDisk 16GB SSD/ HDD#2 1TB Seagate 5,400rpm

Origin EON17-SLX
Windows 8 (64-bit); 3GHz Intel Core i7-3940XM; 16GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz; (x2) 2GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 680M; HDD #1: 240GB Intel 520 SSD / HDD #2: 1TB Western Digital 5,400rpm (RAID 0)

Dell XPS 15
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) with SP1; 2.1GHz Intel Core i7-3612QM; 8GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,333MHz; 1GB Nvidia GeForce GT 640M LE / 64MB (Dedicated) Intel HD 4000; 750GB Toshiba 5,400rpm

Apple MacBook Pro 15-inch with Retina Display (June 2012)
OS X 10.7.4 Lion; 2.3GHz Intel Core i7-3610QM; 8GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz; 1GB Nvidia GeForce GT 650M + 512MB Intel HD 4000; 256GB Apple SSD