Searched for a great length of time to find the best laptop that fit my needs: portability, gaming, school, and aesthetics.
I believe that this laptop I purchased meets all of these requirements exceedingly well. The build quality is solid, and the soft touch material is very comfortable to type on. As for portability, it is pretty lightweight considering it IS a gaming laptop with a 15.6" screen built in.
When you first get this laptop, expect a lot of bloatware to remove. For me, I just went ahead and did a clean re-install of Windows 8.1 and reinstalled the ones I needed. Conveniently for me, all of the drivers are included in another partitioned drive, so that made it easier. Although it was a pain to update the NVIDIA driver to the latest, it wasn't a very big deal. What I did was Youtube "Update your Lenovo Y50 NVIDIA Drivers" by uploader Bee Ho and follow his instructions. Smooth sailing after that.
Battery
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On average, I was able to achieve approximately 4 hours and 30 minutes with light usage, such as browsing the web, word processing and the like with power saving battery usage. Brightness down to one above the lowest setting. However, the battery performance while I was gaming dropped significantly. From 4: 30 hours to a mere 2 hour battery life while playing games. My testing only included Portal 2, League of Legends, Heroes of Newerth, and Path of Exile. However, I am not disappointed at all given this laptop's powerful hardware.
Keyboard
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The curved ( red) backlit keyboard looks amazing especially with the black body surrounding it. The keys feel very satisfying to type on, and the keys are very well spaced out. However, my only gripe with the keyboard is the TINY Shift key, making me hit the up arrow key instead. However, it is very minor and I will get used to it. I wish Lenovo would have included a mute or music controls ( it has only volume up/down) in the keyboard.
Display
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To my knowledge, this Y50 uses a TN matte panel display. As a result, I think the colors are a little bit washed, compared to my computer monitor. Despite this, the display is still decent, as it is full HD ( 1080p) . The same images and games that appear on this screen make me think it is a higher quality compared to the monitor on my desktop, and is quite stunning. If this screen was an IPS display, it would have been perfect, but nonetheless a great screen anyway.
You can also spend an additional $90 to replace the display if the TN panel display is the only thing holding you back. An IPS display panel that is compatible with this Y50 is the LP156WF4( SP) (D1) by LG found at ( [.]) . You can choose a matte or glossy panel, depending on your own personal preference. The replacement process is shockingly easy to do as well, and there is even a YouTube video demonstrating the process, which can be found at ( [.]) . There's also a thread with more information and a list of compatible displays also, found on Notebook Review ( [.]) .
Trackpad
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One of the better trackpads I have used in a laptop since a long time. Although it isn't the best, finding a really good one is pretty hard. It looks sleek and is very smooth. The gestures work pretty well, even if there aren't that many. Pinch to zoom works pretty well, and two finger scroll is also pretty decent. I have not had any lags or freezes with the trackpad yet, so that is also very good. I believe this trackpad is suffice enough to work decently enough without a mouse, which for a laptop of this caliber, says a lot.
Audio
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This laptop features a built-in sub-woofer located in the back. The sound quality of this machine is a lot better than what most laptops offer. Audio from this laptop is actually enjoyable, to the point where I don't find it necessary to plug in my speakers. I am not much of an audiophile but I know good sound when I hear it, and this laptop mostly delivers. A+ .
Upgrade-ability
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The hard drive and RAM are relatively easy to upgrade as well. Huge bonus for this. On the back, you will see 12 Phillip head screws that you can unscrew to reveal the battery pack, RAM, and hard drive. The hard drive is held by 4 screws onto the caddy for easy replacement. The RAM sticks, as mentioned by the previous reviewer, is unfortunately a 2x4 ( 8GB) setup, which makes upgrading RAM to 16GB more expensive. Nonetheless, upgrading the hard drive to an SSD or RAM to 16GB is almost effortless. Definitely a bonus, + 1.
Hard Drive
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PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE consider to buying a good SSD along with this laptop. This hard drive is the only thing bottlenecking this entire system. It's slow 5400 RPM can become really slow and makes programs start unreasonably slow. Restart and boot times can reach up to a minute or even more in length. Just unacceptable for a laptop whose other components are high quality. I personally went with a Samsung 840 EVO SSD ( 250GB) . Boot times reduced drastically to 7-10 seconds and every program opens in under a second, which truly compliments the overall speed of the system.
Heat / Temperature
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After playing several hours of Watch Dogs with steady 40-50 FPS with High settings at Medium Textures, sometimes over 60 in some areas, the laptop never got hot to the point where it becomes concerning. The CPU never reached hotter than 77C over the course of over two hour constant gameplay. The ( only) areas that get hot in this laptop are the JBL Branded Speaker area, as well as the hinge. Nowhere else on this laptop gets hot. The keyboard can get warm but not to any level of discomfort or enough to make you "sweat." Even after prolonged intense gaming, the laptop's fan noise was well controlled and was relatively quiet throughout. All of this plus the thin profile design of this laptop, deserves another A+ here.
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