The Lenovo Ideapad Y700 Laptop Review
by Brett Howse on February 11, 2016 8:00 AM ESTBattery Life
When you think of a gaming laptop, battery life is generally not something that springs to mind. But with Optimus to limit GPU power consumption and a larger chassis to accommodate a big enough battery, it can be acceptable. With that said, the Lenovo Y700 only has a 60 Wh battery, which is unfortunately only barely larger than the average Ultrabook. Otherwise the more hardcore gaming laptops can struggle to get only a few hours, but then other devices like the Razer Blade achieve pretty reasonable runtimes.
To test battery life, we run the devices through two tests, both with the display set to 200 nits to keep the test as comparable as possible. The light test is just web browsing, and with Windows 10 we’ve moved from Internet Explorer to Edge for this test, since it’s the default browser. The heavy test increases the numbers of pages loaded, adds in a movie playback, and a 1 MB/s file download to keep the network card active.
Light Results
The light results kind of took me by surprise. Most gaming laptops struggle to get even six hours of battery life, but the Y700 does very well at around 7.5 hours. The combination of Skylake’s power enhancements along with a new network card have certainly helped. Another big help is likely the display. The same narrow-band backlight which caused so much grief on the display testing, likely uses less power since its not covering the entire sRGB color space. This is a much better result than I would have expected with the 60 Wh battery though.
Heavy Results
Here things come back down to earth a bit. Clearly Skylake is much better at idle power, and the backlight has a bigger impact on the light test too. On the heavy test, the results are much more in the range of what I was expecting. But still an almost four-hour runtime on the heavy test is a good result for a gaming notebook.
Normalized
For the normalized results, we divide the runtime by the battery capacity to get an overall platform efficiency result. Once again the Y700 does very well here. Without being able to measure individual components, the backlight is likely a major factor here, but the newest CPU and wireless card from Intel are also both in play too. This is a good result for a gaming notebook, and the overall run times are now moving devices like the Y700 into the realm of being useful unplugged from power. The overall battery life and efficiency is nothing like the latest Ultrabooks, but its still a big step forward.
Charge Time
The other half of the battery life equation is how long it takes to charge the device. Lenovo ships the Y700 with a 135-Watt power adapter, which is significantly larger than you’d get on a smaller notebook.
With a charge time of just 120 minutes, the Y700 is one of the quickest notebooks to go from 0-100% charge. That’s not unexpected, with such a large power adapter and a relatively small battery. But regardless combined with the decent battery life offered by this notebook, it should be fairly good for travel.
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neo_1221 - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link
Brett, you mention a couple times that the 960M can come equipped with either 2GB of 4GB of VRAM, but you never say how much your review model has.extide - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link
I believe he mentions it is the 4GB one in some of the gaming results.neo_1221 - Tuesday, February 16, 2016 - link
You are correct, it's under the Dragon Age results - "even with the 4GB GTX 960M option, it pushes this card to its limits". Though it really should be listed in the spec table on the first page.jahu78 - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link
Bought one, to my wife for christmas, managed to configure windows etc. left it running overnight...boom next day doesn't turn on, keyboard flashes red once and screen is blank....returned it. Got a brand new one after 3 weeks. Enjoyed it for 2 weeks, left it on the table lid opened overnight, boom another bites the dust. Doesn't turn on... So either I am extremely unlucky...or their is something going on with that HW. Now I'm waiting for the 3rd replacement. My specs i5 6300hq, 15'', 8GB DDR4. Also as stated in review bleeding from the screen is just awful. So be warned...Redstorm - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link
I brougth one of these last year with a 1TB HDD, stuck a Samsung 950 Pro in it even though is not listed is being compatable. works fine. Boots native nvme and makes this laptop fly.Samus - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link
It's a shame they got so much right in a well balanced package only to use what amounts to be a run of the mill $50 LCD panel. I'm sure the QHD screen is better (because even the cheaper AU optronics screens are relatively good) but the point is well taken the 960m isn't adequate for that gaming resolution. Even the 980m would struggle in QHD FPS's.I wonder if the non touch matte panel is better. I think a matte screen is more appropriate for a gaming laptop anyway.
Shadowmaster625 - Friday, February 12, 2016 - link
That is way too much cpu for that gpu. The quad core i5 plus a 970M would seem a better combination for what should be roughly the same price.JusSn - Friday, February 12, 2016 - link
Au contraire, streaming with an 8 thread i7 is much smoother than with an i5. I get CPU encode bottlenecks on my 4690K/980 Ti when streaming 1080p/60 but this machine has no problems with it.I used to agree with you too but now I have to be able to stream at LANs. The games I run are low-spec but it's the streaming itself that most laptops can't handle, so this combination is perfect for my use case.
jjunos - Friday, February 12, 2016 - link
Any chance you guys could snag one of the new P50/P70's? Would love to see if the xeon mobile cpus are worth their weight!!vision33r - Friday, February 12, 2016 - link
I have the Y50 which is a 15.6" version and it's a good gaming laptop for work and play. The only issue I have is the touchpad is very tricky and not big enough.