Lenovo IdeaPad Y570: First Look

I'm Dan Ackerman and we are here taking a look at the Lenovo IdeaPad Y570. Now, we've looked at some other Lenovo's recently. Those have been from the lower-end Essentials line and they were actually pretty good. You've also got Lenovo ThinkPad line. Those are more business-oriented laptops. But, the IdeaPad line, those are consumer-based systems. It's not usually the first thing you think of from Lenovo but they actually do a really good job with it. The Y570, it's a 15-inch system and it's pretty recently price. It starts about $800 bucks. But, you can change the configuration a little bit and go up to about $1,200. But, for a baseline model that's built into a fairly nice looking box, we thought it has just ended up being a pretty good deal. It's got a Core i5, 2410 CPU. Again, the standard 4-gigs of RAM and 500 GB of hard drive. But, it has an Nvidia GeForce 555 graphics card that turn in some pretty decent gaming scores. So, if you want to do like gaming not too serious but more than you can do with basic integrated graphics, then this is a not very expensive step up into that discrete graphics category. There was one weird kind of thing about the graphics. A lot of laptops use an Optimus technology from Nvidia and that turns the GPU off and on automatically as needed. Here, there's a weird little metal switch right here and you'd almost miss it if you weren't looking for it and if-- if you flick it, then that turns the GPU off and on and [unk] on screen reminder if that's what you're doing over there. It's also got a fairly standard Lenovo keyboard. This keyboard is a little bit different from some of the other island-style Lenovo keyboards we've seen lately. In that, the keys are actually much higher up. There's deeper key travel which I actually found a little distracting and they're kind of clacky which was a little bit surprising. On the less expensive Lenovo Essential laptops, I obviously like the keyboard a little bit more. Because this is a little bit of a step up from the least expensive Core i5 in 15-icnh laptops at about $800 bucks, you do get a few cool extras thrown in. We've got these JBL speakers that are actually pretty decent for laptop. And, so with just one, you get two USB 3.0 ports and there are a couple of touch-sensitive media control buttons up here at the top which I always like to see. I'm Dan Ackerman and that is the Lenovo IdeaPad Y570.