If the sun is beginning to go down on the era of 1080p gaming, the Lenovo IdeaPad Y900 is the absolutely stunning sunset that marks the end of the day. OK, that's a little dramatic, as full HD is here for a long time, but when it comes to high-end gaming, 4K has gone from expensive and pointless novelty to cutting-edge must-have.
While the $2,499 or £1,999 (about AU$3,340) Y900 doesn't pump out the pixel density of its competitors, its fantastic 17-inch 1080p screen sits atop a computer that trades boundary-pushing resolution for an eye-catching chassis and overall aesthetic.
Design
The Lenovo IdeaPad Y900 might be our favorite computer from a strict design standpoint. It's a BMW to the HP Omen 17's SS Camaro.
A gorgeous, brushed metal case on both the top and bottom of the laptop is accented with a striking red logo on the cover. The logo lights up when in use, but even when it isn't, the red is almost organic in its intensity.
Two bolts of hard rubber run diagonally down the lid, cutting the lines of the lid in an aggressive way. The rubber also breaks up the metal construction. It's was a pleasant surprise to run our fingers over the lid and have them touch, and slow down on, the hard rubber.
In addition to a tactile pseudo ASMR we never knew we needed in our life, the glossy rubber coating is smudge free, so the two accents keep their shine. It's a really nice touch.
Opening up the laptop, the attention to detail carries over to everything inside. The wrist support is a texturized rubber, a nice change from the cold metal or hard plastic of most laptops.
It has an almost tacky feel to it, as though it's coated with some manner of adhesive, but the tackiness simply a product of the friction between our skin and the furnished palm rest.
We were really worried it would pick up dust, but we never found it to be a problem. Like the rubber coating on the lid, the wrist support also has no problem with smudges or fingerprints. That's a welcome change considering so many computers now ship with microfiber cloths to wipe away evidence of their use.
The trackpad is bordered by a customizable light, and there's an additional light-up strip below the screen. A black and red honeycomb surface covers up the Y900's incredibly loud speakers, and on the right is the power button. Even the power button is brushed metal with the same red accents as the rest of the computer.
And for other neat feature, the Lenovo ideapad Y900 has a built in turbo switch for one press overclocking. The feature wraps into Lenovo's Nerve Center software, which controls everything from component clock speeds to the customizable lighting.
A 17-inch screen looks down from high on the entire interior, and even though it lacks the ultra-high resolution of the HP Omen 17 or the Asus Predator 17 X (which has an optional 4K display), the Y900 has a top-rate 1080p G-Sync enabled screen that's crisp, bright, and colorful.
The Y900, being a 17-inch laptop, suffers from the same problem as every other 17-inch laptop: it's enormous. Weighing in at just over 10 pounds, it's a monster on par with the heft of the Predator 17 X.
The 230-watt power brick is nearly identical to the one powering the Omen 17, so there's another extra few pounds to lug around. All that weight stuffed into a laptop bag means you need to have a lot of faith in the strength of the straps.
Our favorite keyboard
We've gushed about every part of the design of the Y900 and we haven't even gotten to our favorite part: the keyboard. We can honestly say this is our favorite keyboard we have ever used on a laptop, ever.
The Y900 sports a customizable, backlit, mechanical keyboard that just feels oh-so-right. Each key is an absolute joy to press, and they feel responsive and sturdy. No one key feels any less incredible than the other. It's like they hired an engineer to balance the responsiveness of every individual key to make them all give back that same satisfying click regardless of size or location. The spacebar is as much of a joy to press as the 'alt' key.
Look, we know it sounds silly, but we’re really going to have a hard time going back to our trusty, 5-year old Razer keyboard on PC. Or the keyboard on the Macbook Air. Or really any other keyboard at all.
To top off just how wonderful the chiclet-style keyboard feels, it looks incredible too. The WASD keys can be swapped out with a set of red keys, making them stand out from the of the rest, and keyboard lighting can be customized to your heart's content. Swapping between programmed lighting schemes is as easy as holding Fn and giving that snappy spacebar a smack.
We don't want to go back. We don't know if we can.
Just to the left of the wonderful keyboard is a momentary slider switch that turns overclocking on or off. It has a similarly satisfying feel to it, making it fit in perfectly with the rest of the keyboard. The only thing it's missing is a sound effect, maybe of a car revving up or some sort of jet-engine noise.
Performance wise, the Y900 holds it own, but against the Predator 17 X and especially head to head with the Omen 17, it comes in on the low-end of things. Relatively, that is, because it's still a powerful machine.
An Intel Core i7-6820HK processor and GeForce 980M graphics card do the heavy graphical lifting, but the Predator's desktop-grade 980 has a slight edge. Neither of them hold a candle to the absolutely beastly GTX 1070 crammed into the Omen 17.
The $2,499 or £1,999 (about AU$3,340) Y900 is a great 1080p machine, but the Omen is probably a better choice if you're looking for a desktop replacement VR machine. Your best bet with Oculus or Vive is to just throw as much computer as possible at it, and while the Y900 can handle both on paper, why risk it when you can have a desktop GPU in either of the other machines?
Especially considering the $1,799 (£1,599, AU$3,699)price on the Omen 17, which is a competent 4K computer, is more than $500 lower than the price on the Y900.
The total package is what brings the Y900 neck-and-neck with the more powerful Omen. Attractive and solid, the Y900 is almost the exact opposite of the Omen in that regard.
The Omen feels like a budget laptop, with creaky lid hinges and a plastic build. The Y900 is phenomenal in design through and through. The Predator is leaps and bounds ahead of the Omen when it comes to design, but it still falls short of the Y900.
Performance
The Y900 is no slouch when it comes to 1080p gaming. Grand Theft Auto 5 looks and runs great, with solid framerates at its suggested settings. Still, for $2,500, suggested settings are kind of a let down. Part of the fun of an audacious gaming rig is cranking everything up to 11 and melting off the faces of your friends.
One pleasant surprise while using the Y900 was how cool it stays. Even with the trillions of math equations it makes every second, it never felt hot on our lap. Our Macbook Air gets too hot to the touch. Lenovo's cooling system is impressive, even if the fan noise is hitting the ceiling of acceptable levels.
Get loud
We mentioned the cooling fans were a little on the loud side, but they're easily drowned out by the room-rattling speakers hiding beneath the futuristic black and red honeycomb.
They are loud – crazy loud. So loud they hurt our ears at full volume. We kept the volume on or around 50% in our time with the Y900, because anything more was too much for us.
The speakers also sound really nice, but at 100% volume there is some real clear distortion. It wasn't really an issue for us since, as we mentioned before, 100% is just way too loud for our sensitive disposition.
We can definitely see it coming in handy at someplace like PAX. The booming sound would help you rise above the cacophony of the bring-your-own-PC area.
One more thing we really liked about the Y900 performance was just how quickly it starts up. It's increasingly uncommon to find the operating system living on a hard drive, and the SSD in the Y900 is crazy fast. Start up seems almost instantaneous.
The 256GB SSD in the model tested filled up fast, but there is a 1TB 5400rpm hard drive for spill over. For games that run best on an SSD, though, you might want to spring for a bigger model. Installing The Division, Grand Theft Auto V, and our benchmarking tools on the SSD almost maxed it out.
We liked
Most gaming laptops are guilty of having an overbearing design that screams #gamerz, but the Lenovo Ideapad Y900 is sophisticated and timeless. What’s more it’s solidly built, with smart material choices throughout and hands down one of the best keyboards we’ve ever used – even compared to the multitude of mechanical desktop keyboards we’ve tested.
We disliked
While we feel the Y900’s design can stand the test of time, we can’t say the same for its components. Equipped with a last generation mobile graphics, its performance pales in comparison to current Pascal-powered machines.
For now it can run modern games with playable frame rates at high to ultra settings, but only just so. We imagine the graphical needs of future titles will quickly outpace the capabilities of the Y900 without an internal refresh.
Final verdict
High-end gaming laptops are about showing off as much as they are about getting the most performance from games. The Y900 is no exception, but it trades a little bit of its power for design decisions that are well worth it. That's not to say it isn't a powerful machine, because it definitely is.
However, much of the Y900's price tag is due to its flat-out attractiveness. It's a beautiful, quality laptop that feels like it will last years and years. This is the sort of computer that will survive long after obsolescence, and in the year 2022 will become the main Minecraft machine of some lucky kid.
The keyboard and fit and finish of the Y900 put it head and shoulders above the Omen 17's cheap feeling plastic, and the quality of the build is so good that it's hard to say which is the better machine. Pure power, the Omen wins hands down. Aesthetically, we think it looks better than the Predator 17 X, but that's a personal decision. It comes down to what you hold most dear.
If you want a relatively powerful computer that looks amazing and feels like it's going to last a hundred years, the Lenovo IdeaPad Y900 is a great choice. Solid construction, cranking speakers, aggressive design and the most satisfying keyboard we've ever tested makes the Y900 a great choice for anyone looking for a gaming laptop that offers more than just big frame rate numbers.
