Lenovo Y50 Owners and Information Thread

YMMV. Noticed the price a few days ago and tried something similar (contacted some reps, they can't override anything), but it didn't work out for me either. Shop Discover offers 5% back on Microsoft Store purchases (need to use their link), so I saved an additional $70 regardless. You can say it came to $1280 pretax. Driving down to the Microsoft store and arguing about $20 wouldn't be worth it in my opinion.

 

Well I have had my Y50 (touch base model from Klick online) for a few days now and I love it! don't get me wrong it does have its flaws, but lets be honest every laptop has it's flaws. I am very impressed with the keyboard, the touch and feel of it is amazing. I haven't had the problem of missing keys while I type ( as some users on the forum have reported). It does get warm under the space bar under regular use (internet, videos , music, etc), not a big deal but it does seems odd.

Only game I got to play so far was Star Craft 2 and got from a range of 105 FPS to 45 FPS on Ultra settings. During game play the laptop did not get too hot at all, I was very impressed with the cooling system. The laptop in general didn't get too hot and it was really quite, even during a full load ( well at if you call playing start craft a full load lol). I know some one on here reported earlier that he was having problems with starcraft but I played for a good 5 hours straight and everything worked flawlessly.

now we get to battery life, well this is the biggest draw back for me. I have not gotten past 3 hours and 20 minutes on green mode in the energy manager. I am kinda bummed I was hoping to at least get the 4 hours, but I really cant complain with this performance, looks, excellent cooling, BAD speakers, and beautiful design.

The screen is not as bad as people say. yes I can tell the difference from my two 24 inch screens that I have for my desktop and the blacks do not look very good, but the screen is good enough for me, I really like the glassy look everything is very clear and easy to read ( a problem they are having with some of the y40's). I am not trying run movies or run all my video games through here, that might be why it does not bother me. everyone has their opinion, if this is your only PC and you are very picky about screen's, I would be aware for sure. Just remember I am on the Touch Y50 so I know its a different screen then some of the other people have.

If you have any questions or want some pics of something in specific just let me know! I will try to help out as much as I can.

Just to end on this note Money is not an issue for me, but I am always about the deal ( just because money is not an issue dosent mean I throw it away, I like to get quality stuff for the best price possible). I was contemplating very heavily over the GS60 stealth and the Y 50. For the money this is the best deal hands down! I dont care what people say, but in my opinion if you want to spend 1700 dollars plus on a laptop just for gaming why dont you just built a tower that will over perform the laptop any day of the week for that kinda money. But again that's just my opinion (so dont take it personal guys).

 

Forgot to update this thread with my return reasoning.

I returned it due to the keyboard being terrible. On a gaming machine having a keyboard that would depress keys from slight variations of pressure or hitting the edge of the key and not having it get registered defeated the purpose of even having it for gaming if input was unreliable.

I did an AMA on reddit for people who had questions. [AMA] I Bought a Lenovo Y50 & Returned it : laptopama

 

Got some sorta bad news for 4k owners. I disabled the drivers and forced the default driver to run at "65Hz" I took some pictures and confirmed there are some skipped frames so it's not really 65 Hz. I tried it at 1080p and native resolution and got the same results. This doesn't really mean a whole lot, it just means that it's not really running at 65Hz and is probably still at 48Hz. It's probably just keeping the settings that were in effect before disabling the drivers. I'm thinking the only way to try higher than 48 Hz is to manipulate the drivers now. Pictures of my results are attached.

 

The reps on the phone can't really do much. However, in store, the staff can override/adjust prices.

 

That sucks... :cry:

 

Can anyone confirm if the Y50 can run OSX ML, Maverick?

Hackintosh it and tell if possible, it can be a steal at this price if it does.

 

Apparently log me in hamachi is a possible problem for win 8.1 bsod. I uninstalled it and hoping another dpc_watchdog_violation will not occur.

 

Wired just posted a review

It was a i7 FHD touch, scored it a 4/10.

 

Sorry we will have to agree to disagree on that - velocity is determined by both fans and open air space. A fan moves a fixed volume of air - so if the space the air has to go through is smaller, then the air velocity has to be faster in order to move the same volume through a lesser space. This is easily proven by if you open a window in your house a very small amount, you will feel the air coming in much faster than if you open the window more. In a laptop, if you want the majority of air to move over and dissipate heat on a certain component(s), you use the vent placement to direct the air to the appropriate place. Again we will use the house example - if you have a fan in a room in a house, and you want to cool a certain room faster - you would open two opposite windows in that room to provide air flow and faster cooling to that room. That room would cool down the quickest, and the rest of the house would cool down at a slow pace. If you were to open every window in your house instead of just the windows in that room, the whole house gets cooler evenly, but slower. If you are targeting a room, it would cool down much faster with the windows only open in that room, versus waiting for the whole house to cool down.

 

I see your point. In short, turbulent flow cools more poorly than laminar flow. Adding major headloss drops such as vents in the flowpath, major turns or flow perimeter changes will contribute to turbulent flow. I just assume that the engineers that design these things think about his stuff but who knows. But I don't think heibk201 was talking about vents in the flowpath, more like vents on the bottom cover. I haven't opened it up yet, but from the picture, it looks like the intake and exhaust are pretty much a closed system. So there's not much room for the other internals to breathe after being heated up from the ambient losses through the copper pipes. That heat buildup will affect how well the system cools over time. The only problem with a vent is you would probably need two of them on opposite sides, like you said. My guess is the engineers decided that the performance gained wasn't worth the dust risk.

 

Well that reviewer is an idiot.

 

I apologize for the double post. Will changing the LCD screen of the Y50 4k models to aftermarket models solve the 48 Hz refresh rate cap?

 

someone has done it before, but you can't use the 860m because there's no driver for it, which sort defeats the purpose

in a closed environment yes that would be the case, but inside the chassis is not fully enclosed there are other openings such as the bottom vents and all those ports. since you have those anyways, it's not really possible to get the ideal kind of air streaming.

the heat pipe is bringing the heat from various places to the heat sink and typically it's the heat sink that's doing almost all the work to dissipate heat because it has the largest exposure to outside, however, if you open up more vents, the entire system is getting more exposure to air and thus gets cooled down overall rather than just that specific part of the heat sink. it's better for the entire chassis (cpu, gpu or even heat pipes) to cool down rather just the heat sink, since the heat sink is not the source of the heat.

you can check out clevo w740su, that laptop has no heat pipe and heat pipe, just two fans. it cools the laptop by simply sucking air in and open up the entire back for maximum air flow.

more vents is never bad if you don't mind dust. ideally it shouldn't even have a back cover for the best cooling

 

To elaborate, the reviewer doesn't know anything about gaming laptops or gaming laptop prices. If there is one thing everyone agrees on with the Y50, it is that getting an i7-4700 and GTX860 Maxwell at the Y50's price point is an amazing deal. And the computer can indeed perform extremely well for the price - FAR better than other machines the Josh Valcarcel (the dumb reviewer) looked at. Saying "Performance is largely uninspiring. The Y50 is outpaced by many Core i5 systems I’ve recently reviewed when considering general application performance (this is largely due to the relatively slow hard drive). Graphics scores are good enough for modest-quality gaming sessions but aren’t enough to let you push the system too far." when looking at the price point immediately ousts the reviewer as a fool. He even writes "Lackluster performance considering the price." in the summary...wow. How do these guys get hired? I love my Y50 FHD Touch and, though it could be improved in some areas, it deserves a much, much higher score than 4/10...

 

I hope you realize the point of him getting hired is to bash on products that other third parties want to bash. he probably gets paid to do all the bashing, that's just his job. if a review can't even have the basic neutrality then it just means someone paid the reviewer to do this kind of thing, whoever it may be.

 

After a few days with my calibrated screen I have to say that it has made a world of difference to me. I actually really like looking at the display now, and the whole thing feels "warmer" and brighter.

Again, if you are using a Y50 FHD Touch with the AUO36ED panel, I highly recommend installing the calibrated ICC colour profile from the following direct link (taken from Notebookcheck): ICC File (X-Rite i1Pro 2). The laptop in that review (Toshiba P50-A-11 2013) is different but has the same screen model as the AUO36ED Y50s. After calibrating colour I also recommend lowering colour brightness by 1 step and increasing saturation by 25 steps or so. The effects are subtle but slightly boosted "pop" for me without really ruining colour accuracy at all. Hope this helps someone else massively improve their display quality.

 

Surely there are more subtle ways of doing that...His review was just atrocious.

 

I also love how someone in the comments said they got an HP laptop with the same specs for $800. I would love to see where you can get a an i7-4700 and GTX860 Maxwell for $800.

 

Me too! Sounds like a decent deal, lol. It's shocking to me how so many people are ready to burn over $2000 on computers like Macbooks or Ultrabooks without going to minimum effort to figure out what they're even paying for. Or even $800! Macbooks are good machines and some Ultrabooks aren't bad too, but shouldn't a person understand what they're getting and what they're sacrificing before they spend so much money? Man...

 

How do yall feel about the surface temps of the y50 when gaming? Like 40C, 50C, or even 60C? Still wondering if the unit I had was defective and maybe cooling generally would be better, as my keyboard definitely hit the high 50s to low 60s range.

 

I'm pretty sure WASD is located right above either CPU or GPU so yeah my fingers get really hot too when I game. But that's pretty standard for gaming laptops; they might move the parts around but ultimately the heat is going to leak onto the keyboard.

 

I posted this over on the UHD screen calibration thread by Xentar and figure I'd post it here too. This is driving me nuts. Not sure if you guys have any ideas or experience with this but I really think it's contributing to the yellow issue.

 

Any answers here?

Turning off dynamic dimming of screen. - Microsoft Community

 

Seems like that person has the same problem/question, but the thread the only answer linked to is about flickering/ghosting on Nvidia cards.

I figured this was something being caused by the Intel driver, so I messed with various things related to that driver (tried both Intel's generic version and Lenovo's, changed registry keys, even tried disabling the driver entirely), but nothing made a difference. The Y50 doesn't appear to have an option to run everything on the Nvidia card, so I can't test that. I think it must be either something in Windows or a hardware thing. Hoping not hardware because I can't stand it.

 

I'm getting issues with some games (e.g., Shank) failing to launch on the Y50 UHD Touch. Anyone else have this issue? From what I can tell, it has issues with the UHD resolution. I tried running the game at a lower resolution by command line, and also tried lowering my resolution and launching the game, both of which didn't work. The only other thing I could try is having NVIDIA run a custom resolution for the game, but I don't have that option (340.43 Beta).

Does anyone else have issues with games/software failing to launch?

 

Anyone know why the Youtube Player's Play Bar is so mini in 4k compared to everything else? Can't figure out how to resize it. I'm using Firefox.

 

Most likely the bar is consisting of images with a constant pixel count. The 4k's pixel size is very small compared to most other screens. You can only reduce the screen resolution or wait until Youtube changes it.

 

yeah like N K said before the video bar is constant pixels so you'll have to wait until google to fix it. #early4kadopterproblem

 

It shows up fine in Internet Explorer though?

 

Part of the reason why I went back to the dreaded IE. FF doesn't handle 4K well at all.

 

that might a problem with mozilla's scalings. check your advanced setting for web content

check here https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1005923

 

Yes I want to this as well.

 

yes you can hackintosh it, but you just can't use 860m because there's no driver for it

 

Ok I've searched and looked through pages and pages mentioning the advanced BIOS settings but no one says how to access them. How do you? Just want to poke around.

 

In doing some quick research I guess the YouTube Center add-in for FF fixes the minuscule text size. But I also read it has a huge memory leak. Doesn't surprise me since FF sucks so much RAM compared to IE. I guess I'll stay with IE until it's fixed natively.

 

Thanks, that worked for me. One of the options that they mentioned changing causes more problems though. Instead of resizing the Player to "Small", simply uncheck the "Enable resize" box.

Ah, that's a shame. I'll keep using it for now anyways, but hoping a fix comes up. Can't go to IE.


Edit: This Addon also does the trick, and no complaints about memory leaks: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-all-html5/?src=api

 

Could anyone tell me if the Y50 Touch is compatible with this RAM?

Crucial Ballistix Sport 16GB (2 x 8G) 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM DDR3 1866 (PC3 14900) Laptop Memory Model BLS2K8G3N18AES4 - Newegg.com

This is the RAM I installed on my Y50 and suddenly after the installation my laptop was bricked... It wouldn't work at all. I sent it in to Lenovo and they replaced the motherboard, so apparently the motherboard was fried but I don't know how. The RAM is of course DDR3 204 Pin low voltage, but the RAM speed is 1866.. I'm not sure if the Y50 can only handle 1600 PC3 12900 or what. I am nervous about reinstalling the RAM when I get it back, so if anyone could tell me if this RAM is compatible with the Y50 it would be greatly appreciated.

Also, I just don't see how the RAM could kill the laptop. I used it for five-ten minutes after installation and it worked fine, then bam, the laptop died. But I don't know how else the motherboard would have messed up. I need to find out for sure if the RAM is compatible before I reinstall it.

Thanks!

 

The problem I've noticed is the video skips with FF. FF and Flash just don't mix anymore. I watched the same 4K video on FF and IE with Flash being the only add-on/plug-in/extension active in FF and the video skipped every so often. The video was smooth as glass in IE with the intel graphics. I even set FF to use the 860 and it still skipped. I'm a 60/10 connection so it's not my internet. I've used FF, IE and Chrome extensively since I got my Y50 and unfortunately IE offers the best experience on my rig. I'm hoping Mozilla's next major FF release is somewhat optimized for higher resolution displays because I'd switch back in a heartbeat.

 

As long as it's 1.35V DDR3L it doesn't matter what its running at. If the RAM won't work the system simply won't post. Did you put the old RAM back in? Crucial's website offers PC3-14900 and PC3-12800 as RAM upgrade options for the Y50. Something else is going on. Did you disconnect the battery when you put the new RAM in and no static discharge? I've been replacing RAM for 20 years and I've never seen it brick a system.

 

Any guide?

I am cool with GTX 860M not working as long as HD graphics work and it outputs.
Obviously WiFi wont work until we replace the intel card.
But what all works?
I will want to have Mavericks on it.
My buying decision is relied upon whether it can run OSX or not, this will be replacing my trusty Y500 if it can run OSX.
Thanks in advance.

 

why do you people all use the 512GB Samsung 840 Pro?

if you want more storage you could get a 1TB Samsung 840 EVO that is 0,1% slower in some uses

if you want the latest and greatest you could get a 512GB Samsung 850

The:
1 TB 840 EVO
512 GB 840 pro
512GB 850

here's a comparison of the 840pro vs 840evo

http://ssdboss.com/ssds/Samsung-840-Pro-vs-Samsung-840-EVO


all have the same prices. why do people use the 840 pro then? am i missing something?

 

Well as far as I can find:
-EVO uses TLC NAND while Pro uses MLC
-Estimated lifespan is much greater for the Pro(the difference appear to be 3-4 times)
-For Pro Samsung gives you 2 additional years warranty(5 years vs 3 years).
-Overall Pro seems to be more durable.

All this info is from the internet though, I can't confirm any of it.

 

yes I know that the 840 pro is clearly better, but why buy that? for 50€ more you can get a 850 which is even better, and has 10 year warranty!

 

I don't know, I guess because is more expensive and it was basically just released? You'll get more and better information if you ask in the proper forum: SSD Forum

 

I'm sure in a couple weeks, you'll see the 840 Pro go on a clearance sale. I doubt Samsung is making them anymore.

 

that is also the point. Why upgrade now?

yea but its just 50€ more expensive, if you are willing to spend 300€ to get the best, why not spend 350€ to get the absolute best?

Another question: all three are compatible with the y50 right? or the 1Tb EVO is too big? that would explain the mSata version of it

Allright, I'll try asking them too.

 

Can we switch the screens between Y500 FHD and Y50 FHD?
I have the Y500 and willing to get the Y50, a screen swap would be wonderful.


--------EDIT------
No we can't
Y500 (40pin) vs Y50 (30pin)

 

They are all about the same size and will fit. mSata is a completely different form factor and would only work with an adapter. TBH, if you don't mind spending the extra money, getting a msata evo and using an adapter isn't a bad idea. You'd set yourself up for a more compatible drive in the future since it could be used in both msata and 2.5" bays. Unfortunately msata is not included in any future laptops, so it won't be futureproof but it still opens up more options than just buyinf a 2.5" drive. I use my old msata as the boot drive in my wife's laptop now. When that retires, I'll probably use the 2.5" adapter again and throw it in my desktop.

 

Hey guys came across a decent review...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHOU2LdlC-A