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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JusSn - Friday, February 12, 2016 - link
Really impressed with this laptop, got the 1 TB/8GB RAM model and put in an m.2 mSATA for less than $980 total. Other than the screen (which is indeed horrible and has terrible PWM flickering at lower brightness), the only thing that bothers me is that the trackpad is slightly uneven. Does the review unit also have this problem? Can't really tell from the photos.On my unit the upper-left corner is millimetrically higher than the surrounding wrist rest area. It's nitpicking but I'm wondering if I should get it exchanged once I get back to living with my desktop.
Timings - Tuesday, February 16, 2016 - link
I was also disappointed the day I got this Y700 with just 1TB 5400 rpm drive. It was damn slow when booting as if it has Intel Celeron inside. I replaced the HDD with a Kingston hyper x SSD and then I liked it. Out of the box, the display is really horrible as you have said it. I peeled off the plastic on the screen the same day, still it did not impress me much. But here is a solution which you can do since you have already spent your money for it: calibrate it. 1. Go to Control panel then Intel HD graphics, then Display. Select colour settings then select Basic. Reduce brightness from 0 to -20. Leave gamma and contrast as default. Click Apply. Then select Advance. Increase hue from 0 to 16, increase saturation from 0 to 57. Click Apply and close Intel HD graphics. 2. While still on control panel window, select Display then select Calibrate colour. Click next next next until you reach Adjust colour balance. Move the Red and Green sliders from 100% to somewhere around 85% by eye. Leave the Blue slider at 100% (default) and click Next then Finish. If you thought of selling that laptop, you will now think twice after doing these settings.Michael Bay - Saturday, February 13, 2016 - link
Whatever OEM first makes a gaming laptop that doesn`t look any different from your run-of-the-mill machine will get incredible money.Those things aren`t just ugly, they scream loser.
GeorgeH - Saturday, February 13, 2016 - link
"It does include a number pad, but it is compressed into the rest of the keyboard when there is plenty of space on the laptop deck to stretch it out a bit."I very much doubt that. If they did stretch it out there'd be no room for the ports on the side unless they made the laptop thicker.
ET - Sunday, February 14, 2016 - link
I have a Y70-70, and I'm quite disappointed with it. Biggest problem is the laptop shutting down during gaming, probably due to overheating. The touch screen also acts occasionally, making the laptop non-responsive until I put it to sleep and out (with the power button). Keyboard isn't that great. In short, I'm weary of Lenovo's offerings right now.medi03 - Sunday, February 14, 2016 - link
Meh for no Carrize 380M... =(horrorwood - Tuesday, February 16, 2016 - link
It literally looks the same as the y50-70?Considering the GPU is the same and it comes with haswell instead of skylake (not much difference), I think the clearance prices on the y50-70 are a steal.
evolucion8 - Thursday, February 18, 2016 - link
Seeing how close the GTX 960M with its 640 cores can get when compared with the GTX 870M with its 1344 cores shows how nVidia stopped optimizing for Kepler and considering that Maxwell is essentially a distilled Kepler, it will face the same fate once Pascal is launched, the fast aging syndrome.deeps6x - Friday, February 19, 2016 - link
Why is it so much heavier than the MSI GS60 with the same specs? 2.7kg vs 2.0kg. Or if you prefer, 5.7 lbs vs 4.4 lbs.Billybadass - Monday, July 4, 2016 - link
This is the dumbest article I've ever read in my entire life and this guy has no idea what he's talking about.The Lenovo y700 (every model) comes with a battery that lasts UP TO 5 hours (http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/ideapad/y700-... but that lasts only 4 hrs 16 mins upon continuous web surfing (http://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/lenovo-y7... so there is NO WAY IN HELL this guy found it to last for EIGHT hours of continuous gaming.
Not to mention since I just bought mine and have been using it for light customization and light web surfing the battery has lasted me at, yep... just above 4 hours. Can you IMAGINE if I had been gaming?
Ignore this article.