Below is a review written by Mason Baxter – his first review of a product, as well as his first article! He is a 14 year old student (at time of writing, now 15) in South Australia, interested in different technologies, games and sports.
Introduction
I had the chance to test Lenovo’s Y40-80 gaming laptop for a few days. This is my first gaming laptop experience, so I was really excited to see how it worked with it’s dedicated graphics card. Here’s what I thought about it.
Overhead photo comparing to size of a Surface Pro 3
Design
I loved the look of this gaming laptop at first sight. The carbon fibre look finish on the outer of this laptop not only feels great but it is appealing to the eye. This design makes the Lenovo badge stand out and give it a nice touch. When I opened the lid I saw very nice a clean look on the interior. The palm rest was made of a smooth material that was very comfortable when I typed.
Ports
For such a small and compact gaming notebook, the Y40 has lots of ports. On the left side there are a pair of USB 3.0 ports, an expandable gigabit Ethernet port, a full-sized HDMI port and a power port. On the right side there is a one USB 2.0 port, a 4 in 1 card reader, a S/PDIF jack, microphone/ headphone jack and a kensington lock. Having the full-size HDMI and Ethernet port were a welcome addition, so you don’t need additional adapter cables to connect the network or an external display, all other ports are well placed.
Left hand side – Power, Full size Ethernet and HDMI ports, 2 x USB 3.0
Right hand side – 4 in 1 card reader, an S/PDIF jack, microphone/ headphone jack, USB 2.0 port and Kensington lock
Keyboard and touch pad
I am currently using HP Pavilion X2 for school and I thought the keyboard was ok until I used the Y40. The keyboard on the Y40 was very comfortable and easy to type on. After about an hour of gaming I did notice that the keyboard was getting warm in the centre region, but it didn’t get too hot. My only disappointment was that the keyboard wasn’t backlit, as it is in the Y50 (which is another Lenovo gaming laptop with higher specs).
The touch pad was great to use and quite responsive, I also found it easy to use with the windows gestures for scrolling and pinch to zoom.
Display
The Y40 only has a 1080P resolution compared with the 4K resolution on the Y50. While it would be good to have the higher resolution at least all of the games rendered perfectly at 1080p. I believe that even though there is a webcam in the top of the screen, the bezel could have been thinner to maximize the screen size.
Battery
This battery lasts on average 5 – 6 hours if you are using it for everyday activities such as browsing the web, checking for emails or finding out the latest news. But if you are looking to use this laptop for gaming you are only going to get 1 – 2 hours of it, so make sure you have a charger at handy if you’re looking to game.
Graphics / gaming
This gaming laptop is fitted with AMD Radeon R9 M275 GPU with 2GB of ram and it also comes with an onboard Intel(R) HD Graphics 5500. After realising this laptop had two GPU’s I wanted to test which was more powerful. Using 3Dmark, I gathered the results shown in the table below:
Intel(R) HD Graphics 5500/ AMD Radeon R9 M275
As you can see from the results, the AMD Radeon outperformed the onboard GPU on all of the tests, which would make sense as it has 2GB of dedicated RAM. When I played games like CSGO (Counter Strike Global Offence) or Garry’s mod I could run those games using the highest settings. I didn’t notice any lag at all and the game play was very smooth. I played the same games with the AMD Radeon disabled and there was a noticeable reduction in the quality of the gaming experience.
Whilst having a SSD hard drive would have been great, the SATA 2.5″, Hybrid drive: (1TB 5400 rpm + integrated 8GB NAND flash) provided a great storage capacity and good speed when gaming.
Final results
In conclusion if you are looking to for an entry level gaming laptop that is compact and well-priced, then this laptop is the one for you. The Y40 has a fantastic keyboard, long lasting battery for everyday tasks and has a solid gaming performance. However I wish that the keyboard was backlight and that the bezel was smaller to maximize the screen size. But overall I would recommend this to people looking for a nice gaming laptop at an affordable price.
Open view – 14”FHD screen, 1.0-megapixel, 720p HD camera, fixed focus, with dual array microphone
Thanks Mason for the review!
The Y series of gaming laptops from Lenovo are available here.