Lenovo Y550 Review- $799 Newegg special

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834146584

I just recently purchased this notebook for college (engineering major). I upgraded from a sager 5720 17" monster that cost well over 2000. For the price, this notebook is hard to beat. A good dedicated video card can play all games out and many to come for a while, however I won't be reviewing the performance so much as the quality and build of this laptop. I feel there are plenty of resources for very similar laptops that will have benchmarks to tell you how this will perform in games.

Build Quality

The build quality on this is about on par with any mid-range notebook. It's all plastic. However, there is very little flex, and I am satisfied with it. The one thing i did notice, however, is the screen has a bit of a wobble to it. If you poke the screen a little, it will wobble back and forth. This is something slight and probably will not amount to anything anytime in the next few years.

For build quality, I give it an 7/10. Nothing wrong with the build quality, and is on par with any notebook you would see at best buy.

Screen Quality

This is part of a new breed of LCD screens appearing in laptops everywhere. The 16:9 LED display with a 1366x768 resolution. Personally, I like the lower resolution. It is very easy on the eyes, great for doing homework or just casual internet surfing or whatever. I feel it is more a matter of preference, and after using a 1920x1200 17" laptop for the past 4 years, it is definately a nice "upgrade" (for my personal tastes). The brightness is more than sufficient for any use, even on power saver mode it still is more than enough. The contrast on these new screens I feel is slightly low on the contrast end. However, colors are still vibrant still looks great, but the blacks aren't too black and darkness does have a slight white tint. However, compared to my friends asus notebook, it is good. The LED backlight is easier on the eyes and has a softer appearance than CFFL screens. As for light leakage, the lighting looks uneven when its a black image on the screen, but in normal use it is not visible.

Screen- 6/10. Nothing really bad about it, but when you are focusing on the flaws like I am now there are some things to point out that the average user probably wouldn't care much about or even notice, but they are still there. Overall good screen, sufficient and nothing too extreme. No dead pixels, thankfully.

Design

I love the design of this laptop. The inside of the notebook has a glossy finish to it, but still not a fingerprint magnet. The screen feels well protected with a large plastic casing for it. When pressing on the screen, there is very little flex (as in the actual screen bending). When you first open the notebook, you will notice all the lights for nearly every button. There is a "scrollpad" right above the number keys that I guess is used for preset applications. I think I deleted some software so it only lights up when I'm turning it on, but it worked when I first used it.

The power button lights up too, and is to the left of the keyboard. On the top left side are activity icons, one for harddrive activity, one for bluetooth (which I dont think this laptop even has), wifi activity and something else that appears to look like an antenna. On the top left is some preset applications it comes with, OneKey theatre (never use it) and a dolby program that lets you adjust 2 settings with the sound : natural bass (kind makes it sound like ) and some "space extender" which I guess gives it fake surround? Sounds bad so i dont use it.

The laptop has a small size. One thing i noticed is how much wider it is than most other notebooks. Compared to my old 16:10 laptop, it is a more rectangular shape. The weight is also good. The feel of the plastic gives it the feel of being lighter than it actually is. At about 6 pounds this is a feather.

The back of the screen also is a nice feature. It feels like a fake leather design, somewhat hard to describe, but has a vinyl-like texture to it. Gives the notebook some class, IMO.

The DVD drive, however, seems a bit on the flimsy side. It ejects quite easily, such as if you tried to push the laptop on a desk by putting your hand the dvd tray. When you pull it out, the plastic tray wobbles quite a bit. I haven't really tested its use at all, tho, so I can't comment on its speed and noise level and such.

Overall design- 8/10

Speakers

The speakers are quite good. The built in subwoofer (on the bottom) adds a depth to the sound, but won't really add much bass or anything. One thing I didn't like is that the speakers seem to produce much more low sounds than high. For some music, it can give it a muffled sound. It seems to be more of a problem with low quality music, like from youtube, rather than from 320kbps mp3 files. However, for most things that make sound, the speakers sound great and is a little different at first to have laptop speakers with actual depth. I'd compare these to a cheap set of amplified speakers, like some that run off batteries for like $5 at walmart or radioshack. Also, its nice that on the right side of the laptop it has volume adjust buttons and a mute button. Work great, but don't light up. Speakers have slight distortion at higher volume, but still listenable. depends more on the song or whatever.

Speakers - 9/10. Beat most laptops speakers and are loud enough to watch a movie or whatever with across the room. However, could use a bit more treble and high sounds.

Touchpad/Keyboard

The touchpad is a little different from my old one. The texture of the touchpad feels like the surface of a basketball with little rubber dots on the surface of it. The touchpad can be a to use if you are used to applying a lot of pressure on one to move it. You need to move your finger lightly across it. Touchpad buttons are great. Also has a scrolling bar which is really quite small and is easy to miss or slide off it. Also has a feature that lets you zoom in on text and websites on the touchpad. Touchpad may be a little smaller than some are used to, but is perfectly fine for me. with my old laptop, I used to accidently touch the touchpad when I was typing, sometimes throwing me into another paragraph on an essay or whatnot, but I can say this hasn't happened at all so far.

Touchpad- 9/10

The keyboard is a keyboard, really. I preferred not having the numpad because I never really used the one on my old laptop in 4 years. The keyboard has plenty of room so the keys are basically full sized. The one thing I don't like is the fn and cntrl keys are switched, which can be wierd for people used to playing games and such, like me. Also throws off the ctrl+c for copying and pasting. The keys also feel very light, as in low density plastic. Not really good or bad, I guess it just depends on preference. Fn+F6 allows you to disable the touchpad if you want to use a mouse with games.

Cooling

This laptop has nice cooling. I've only had it for a day, but it does not get hot to the point where I would even consider a cooling pad and it almost suprises me it has a dedicated card in it. From what I can tell, the only exhaust is on the left hand side. The bottom has little grates on them but doesn't seem to exhaust any heat. The air coming out gets pretty warm when gaming but nothing too bad. Laptop is comfortable sitting on your lap and the handrest area doesn't go above warm.

Cooling- 8/10. Can barely tell it has a good video card.

Performance

I haven't been able to test much in terms of gaming performance, but L4D ran at full res with med/high settings at full fps, online with hoards in versus mode. At all high settings it gets slightly framey but still very playable at around 40fps.

For basic computing and web surfing, this thing is more than enough. Dual core processor, good video card, DDR3 ram, its all good. the 5400 rpm harddrive is a little slow, levels can take a bit to load compared to a 7200rpm but its not very significant. One thing I didn't like is how the harddrive comes partitioned into 2 drives. One is 250gb and the other is 30gb (remember that harddrives never are as big as advertised due to kilobyte conversion or something). The 30gb comes with the drivers on it (this laptop comes with 0 cd's) and i guess is for doing backups or something. if i ever need to reformat I;m going to format both.

I may update this with more benchmarks, but for now thats all I have.

battery

Battery is great considering the gpu and cpu. The gpu is a 23 watt card and the cpu on this model is 35 watts (only major downside of this laptop). However, the battery still is good. I unplugged the laptop at the start of this review at 10:45 and it is now noon. On power saver mode with steam downloading counter strike and music playing most of the time, it is down to 57% with an estimated 2 hours and 13 minutes left. This laptop should last over 3 hours taking notes or doing homework or whatever.

wireless

The wireless on this is great. supports pretty much everything, b, g, N. the wireless signal strength is great, better than my desktop with an external 6dbi directional antenna at times. gets a full 5 bars to my house from upstairs. if you like leeching off your neighbors wireless this should serve you well.


Overall, this laptop is more than enough for my needs. I have a custom gaming rig I have for most of my games, but for the casual gaming I want to do at college this is great. It also has a small size, light weight and long battery life for classes.

 

+1, awesome review. Its about time we get a nice, thorough review on this laptop. You have confirmed my decision and I think I am going to order it tomorrow. With regards to that screen issue, does it just feel a litttttle wobbly or is does it feel cheap like the HP laptops?

Thanks again

 

Nice review. That looks like a great price.

 

Can you run your battery down to near depleted a few times? I've read that the battery meter is inaccurate over in these forums, although owners are reporting 3+ hrs web browsing. http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board?board.id=ideaPad

also, do you have the nvidia 130m gt? Edit: I see you have the 23watt gpu, so its the 130m gt am I right?

 

Great Review. I already ordered Y550 from lenovo. After reading your review I feel like I made good decision buying Y550.
My Y550 Configuration.
Intel C2D 2.4 GHz
4gb ram
250GB Hard disk
GT130M
White Keyboard and Bluetooth.
ETA 14 Aug 09
I got it for $840($754.57+ Tax $69+ CA Recycle Fee $16)

 

@GJW200- its just a little bit wobbly, not sure about the hp notebooks. Its nothing to even worry about but i just wanted to point it out.

@pi3guy- if i get time in the next few days i'll try. But yea thats the exact one i ordered (the newegg link up top). And yea its the 130m gt, notebookcheck's website listed it as 23 watts which is pretty good considering some lower end notebook gpu's use over 30. I originally wanted the ati 4650 but that uses 35 watts for what seemed to be a kinda small upgrade in performance.

and to the rest of you, its a great laptop I have no regrets. I was playing some cs/tf2/l4d last night, they all run great at 1366x768 with high and medium settings. I think I've heard people claiming to play crysis at high but can't imagine you'd be able to get more than like 20fps

 

I have a question... I have heard a lot of bad reviews of the touchpad... How is the scrolling area? Does it work all of the time and is it super hard to use? Some people have said that it is a pain and it doesnt even work most of the time. Is it a comfortable touchpad to use?

 

the scrolling pad is kinda crappy. I mean it works but its just like a thin strip on the right side of the pad. it can take a few tries sometimes to get it to scroll. I like the touchpad tho, the buttons are nice, i never really "bump" the touchpad. I used to always do that on my old laptop when typing an essay and would find my cursor like in another paragraph then, got annoying. The surface isnt really that smooth though, its sort of rubbery but some of the new HP laptops are 5x worse IMO.

But yea, I don't think the touchpad is bad or anything I just think the scrolling bar could've been better. I still prefer scrolling on the touchpad vs the one on screen, so its not THAT bad.

hope that helps

 

How big is it? I just read some reviews saying that it is huge... I just ordered mine and Im thinking about cancelling it and getting the Y450. Is it much bigger than a standard 15 inch? I know its about an inch wider but does it seem monstrous? Does anyone know if there would be a downside to getting the Y450 instead of the Y550? I want the 14 inch screen but I dont want the excessive heat issue that I have heard about on the Y450..

 

its not huge at all, my previous notebook was a 17" so it may be bigger than some 15" but to me its pretty normal size.

 

Dimensions of the Y550: 15.2" x 10.0" x 1.02-1.5"
It's not huge, but it's not small either. Since it has a 16:9 screen, it is more than an inch wider than my T500, yet has the same depth.

I would suggest that you look at the Thinkpad T400 instead if you care a lot about the computer running cool. On integrated graphics mode, T400 and T500's run extremely cool and quiet.