14 DAY TRIAL // We were expecting Lenovo to make quite a few announcements at IFA 2014 and the company was already on it. Last week we saw the Lenovo IdeaPad Y70 gaming notebook leak with specs and first images, and now the device has been officially announced.
The world’s largest PC manufacturer already launched the IdeaPad Y40 and Y50 gaming notebooks at CES 2014 some months ago, and now Lenovo is looking to offer an alternative for those who can’t live without a spacious display watching over them.
Being a 17-inch machine, you shouldn't expect this to be an extremely super sleek device. The laptop breaks the scale at 7.5 lbs / 3.4 kg which sounds quite a lot if you forget we’re talking about a large-screened, powerful notebook.
Even so, the device will not be easily carried around, so if you’re a gamer looking for portability you’d best look somewhere else. Anyway, if heavy weight is not a concern for you, you are probably interested in finding out more about the specs of the device.
The new Y70 basically copies the design of the existing Y50 ,so you’ll find the same brushed-metal chassis and red backlight keyboard, reminiscent of similar products coming from MSI and others.
If you had high hopes you’d be getting a nice screen here, we hate to blow your hopes up. Sure, Lenovo doesn’t throw in the average 1366 x 768 pixel resolution, as things are bumped up to 1,920 x 1,080 pixels, but this is still quite unimpressive compared to the current industry standard (3,200 x 1,800 or 2,560 x 1,440). However, a positive point is that the screen is a touch display.
Under the hood hides a quad-core Haswell Core i7-4710HQ processor clocked at 2.7GHz fitted with up to 16GB of RAM.
In the GPU department, customers can go as far as choosing an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 860M 4G VRAM graphics card. Moving on to storage, one can outfit the lappy with a hard drive of up to 1TB or a solid state drive going as far as 256GB.
As for ports, you can be sure to find everything your heart desires onboard, including a pair of USB 3.0s, one USB 2.0, HDMI, Ethernet, a memory-card reader, headphone/mic jacks and a lock slot. Lenovo also throws in JBL speakers that work in concert with Dolby Advanced Audio, so your listening experience should be quite an enchanting one.
Keep in mind that since this is a gaming book, it is equipped with a battery that can’t sustain more than four-five hours of use.
Lenovo said it would be offering the Y70 Touch starting this October for $1,299 / €989.
