Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 Review

Build and Design

The Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 sports black brushed metal casing that extends around the majority of the chassis. The metal casing employs a horizontal texture that serves to accentuate the slants and curves of the chassis' design. The dark protective metal contrasts beautifully against the bright red-backlit keyboard. The fierce and vibrant design is a staple of the gaming notebook, and Lenovo manages to capture that appeal with its cost-friendly Lenovo IdeaPad Y500. 

Measuring in at 15.2" x 10.2" x 1.4" and weighting just over 6 pounds the Lenovo Y500 is actually surprising slim for a gaming machine, especially for a device that incorporates Scalable Link Interface (SLI). It's not light, but users will have a hard time finding many gaming notebooks that are more portable than the Lenovo IdeaPad Y500. 

The metallic frame also offers a solid level of durability. The chassis proved to be extremity resistant completely withstanding applied pressure. The display case also tested well only giving slightly to pressure with no noticeable rippling occurring on screen. The Lenovo IdeaPad boasts impressive portability with the durability to take the wear and tear that travel incurs.

Ports and Features

The Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 offers a wide array of ports. The left side offers a VGA port, Ethernet port, an HDMI port, and two USB 3.0 ports. The right side offers separate mic and headphone jacks, and an always on USB 2.0 port.

The only serious issue with the ports is the placing of the two USB ports on the left-hand side of the machine. The two ports are congested making it difficult to access both ports simultaneously. Other than that everything is spaced adequately and easy to reach.

One of the key features of the Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 is its ultrabay, which is located on the right hand side of the chassis. The ultrabay allows users to customize the notebook by adding a number of different Lenovo components to the machine. The notebook that we tested came with a second (SLI-enabled) NVidia GT 650M GPU, but users could also include a HDD tray, cooling fan, or an optical DVD burner.

It's important to understand that only these Lenovo accessories are compatible with the ultrabay; other GPU cards or components will not work. While that makes the versatility of the bay rather limited, the ease of adding and removing components through the ultrabay is a welcomed addition. Changing the ultrabay component is relatively simple as well. Users simply need to shut down the device, remove the battery, unlock the bay, and then replace their ultrabay component. It's still not incredibly easy, but it's a great alternative to manually installing and removing components.

Display and Speakers

The Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 houses a 15.6" TFT color Vibrant View display with a 1920 x 1080 resolution. The display offers an incredibly clear image with a 500:1 color contrast. Both text and media reads great on the machine, and the games we tested looked beautiful on the glossy display. The one missing feature of the display is touch-capability, which would have been nice for Windows 8 functionality; but ultimately it's not a huge deal considering this is a gaming focused machine.

The display also offers extremely generous viewing angles. On the horizontal axis the display holds up well past 100 degrees with no noticeable distortion. The display fares just as well on the vertical axis with images remaining clear and crisp even at extreme angles. The only issue with the display is that the glossy surface sometimes causes background images to reflect on the display. Reflections are fairly limited though and only an issue in direct light.

The Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 houses a pair of RealTek HD speakers above the keyboard on the right and left side of the chassis. The speakers offer solid sound quality and robust amplification that can easily fill an entire room with audio. The boisterous speakers paired well with the games we tested, as the bass filled reverberations added another layer to the experience. While certainly powerful, the RealTek speakers struggle to capture the nuances of more subtle recordings. While playing an orchestral piece on the device, several distortions could be heard throughout. The faint hum wasn't too much of a deterrent, but it was certainly noticeable. Users who plan on playing games where ambient noise is important or want a high quality experience will want to use an external device.

Keyboard and TouchPad

The Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 offers a Chiclet style keyboard complete with number pad. The bright red back-lit keyboard clearly provides the aesthetic expected of a gaming device, but it also delivers the quality as well. The squared keys are braised on the top with an inward curved design providing additional friction and grip. Each key has solid compression with crisp tactile feedback allowing users to be secure in each stroke, making the keyboard perfect for typing. The lightning quick response and consistent performance ensure that the keyboard meets the lofty needs of gamers as well. Users looking for optimal performance may want to opt for a high-end external mechanical keyboard, though the built in keyboard offers more than sufficient quality.

The Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 offers a generously sized touchpad located directly below the spacebar of the keyboard. The touchpad is equipped with Synaptic drivers and devoid of buttons. Instead the pad designates the bottom left and right portion of the pad to act as mouse buttons, as denoted by a small graphic and slight downward slant of the pad. While the lack of buttons can be confusing, the slant of the pad along with the graphic allows users to know where the left and right click portions of the pad are located.

In terms of performance the pad is serviceable reading most clicks and swipes easily.  Multi-gestures read well, though there were a few instances where the touchpad failed to read input. There is a bit of friction on the pad that can make detailed functions (such as selecting a portion of text) a bit difficult; but as a gaming focused notebook, users will likely use an external mouse anyways.

View the original article here

IBM's potential x86 server sale to Lenovo highlights oncoming train

IBM is reportedly talking to Lenovo about selling its x86-based server business to Lenovo and the move would make a lot of sense.

If the talks, flagged in the Wall Street Journal and CRN, sound familiar that's because Big Blue famously unloaded its PC business to Lenovo in a win-win deal. Lenovo went on to be one of the premier PC makers and IBM focused on software and services and got ahead of trends such as analytics.

To say the IBM's PC situation then and today's server state of affairs rhyme would be an understatement. You could argue the situations are the same thing. When IBM offloaded its PC unit, no one saw tablets coming. All IBM knew is that the margins stunk and it wanted higher value wares. The post-PC era was years away.

Also: Servers, datacenters to see same upheaval as PC industry | IBM's Q1 closes weak as software, mainframe deals slip | IBM reportedly in talks to sell server biz to Lenovo

Fast forward to the server market, which is ripe for disruption. Server sales are doing ok. Companies will have to buy servers right? Of course they will---for about another three to five years. The reality is servers are going in the following directions:

Specialization by workload. Think IBM's PureSystems and Oracle's Exadata efforts.

Commodity-ville on the x86 front. You can't ignore that companies like Google and Facebook go right to white box makers for servers. That reality isn't so hot for HP, Dell and IBM.You need to own the silicon and intellectual property to really work the server business. IBM's Power systems won't go anywhere. Oracle has SPARC. Hewlett-Packard is going processor agnostic with Moonshot, a server line that appears to be innovative.Fewer server buyers. As companies move to the cloud, demand for compute will only increase. The problem. Server makers will be selling in bulk to fewer customers and cloud computing farms. There will only be so many cloud providers. Enterprises large enough to roll their own data centers will be few and far between.

Now let's talk timing here. The server market won't unravel tomorrow. It won't unravel in a few years. But Armageddon will occur and the clock starts ticking right about now.

Why? An enterprise that buys a server right now will start a tax depreciation clock that will run about three years. Once those three years are up and those assets depreciate, the CXO in charge will weigh the costs and benefits of the cloud vs. running a data center, server cluster or whatever. I'll bet that in three years the cloud will win by a wide margin. Let's face it---the cloud is already starting to win and all you have to do is show up at one of Amazon Web Services' customer powwows to know the writing is on the server rack.

IBM may unload its commodity server business on Lenovo. It's a smart move.

On Thursday, I caught up with Cycle Computing CEO Jason Stowe. There's a lot to like about Cycle Computing. First, the company is bootstrapped so there's instant respect. Second, Cycle Computing is at the forefront of making high performance computing clusters for the masses. And third, Cycle Computing has top insurance and pharmaceutical companies as customers. Cycle Computing had massive customers from day one. In other words, Cycle Computing is the real deal, hooked up with Amazon Web Services and will enable a lot of science to happen just by democratizing HPC for smaller companies.

Stowe noted that Cycle Computing is starting to land manufacturing and engineering customers now for its HPC management software and cloud connections. In other words, this HPC for the masses is catching on. If you play this out, there will be fewer servers sold because folks will be using Rackspace, AWS or some other former hardware focused vendor.

Today, it's big data and research compute driving Cycle Computing demand. Tomorrow every company will have the mathematic models and horsepower to simulate just about anything. You won't buy your own servers for that computing power.

Stowe said servers will become like wheat fields not things you name. "Today servers are hugged, named and managers know their quirks. There's an attachment. In the future server clusters will be more like wheat fields. You grow the wheat, reap and sow, eat and replant the seeds. There's no attachment to the wheat," said Stowe.

In other words, Stowe's excellent analogy on servers and meeting compute demand translates into cloud farms and fields. Most companies are going to hit the brakes on new server buying as soon as the depreciation ends and new compute demand has to be met. Play this out and the profit margins on servers aren't going to look so hot.

IBM sees all of the servergeddon scenarios developing and that's why it's ditching its commodity server business now. Let Lenovo, which has the scale and ambition to do the commodity server game, carry the ball from here and duke it out with HP and Dell.

View the original article here

IBM's potential x86 server sale to Lenovo highlights oncoming train

IBM is reportedly talking to Lenovo about selling its x86-based server business to Lenovo and the move would make a lot of sense.

If the talks, flagged in the Wall Street Journal and CRN, sound familiar that's because Big Blue famously unloaded its PC business to Lenovo in a win-win deal. Lenovo went on to be one of the premier PC makers and IBM focused on software and services and got ahead of trends such as analytics.

To say the IBM's PC situation then and today's server state of affairs rhyme would be an understatement. You could argue the situations are the same thing. When IBM offloaded its PC unit, no one saw tablets coming. All IBM knew is that the margins stunk and it wanted higher value wares. The post-PC era was years away.

Also: Servers, datacenters to see same upheaval as PC industry | IBM's Q1 closes weak as software, mainframe deals slip | IBM reportedly in talks to sell server biz to Lenovo

Fast forward to the server market, which is ripe for disruption. Server sales are doing ok. Companies will have to buy servers right? Of course they will---for about another three to five years. The reality is servers are going in the following directions:

Specialization by workload. Think IBM's PureSystems and Oracle's Exadata efforts.

Commodity-ville on the x86 front. You can't ignore that companies like Google and Facebook go right to white box makers for servers. That reality isn't so hot for HP, Dell and IBM.You need to own the silicon and intellectual property to really work the server business. IBM's Power systems won't go anywhere. Oracle has SPARC. Hewlett-Packard is going processor agnostic with Moonshot, a server line that appears to be innovative.Fewer server buyers. As companies move to the cloud, demand for compute will only increase. The problem. Server makers will be selling in bulk to fewer customers and cloud computing farms. There will only be so many cloud providers. Enterprises large enough to roll their own data centers will be few and far between.

Now let's talk timing here. The server market won't unravel tomorrow. It won't unravel in a few years. But Armageddon will occur and the clock starts ticking right about now.

Why? An enterprise that buys a server right now will start a tax depreciation clock that will run about three years. Once those three years are up and those assets depreciate, the CXO in charge will weigh the costs and benefits of the cloud vs. running a data center, server cluster or whatever. I'll bet that in three years the cloud will win by a wide margin. Let's face it---the cloud is already starting to win and all you have to do is show up at one of Amazon Web Services' customer powwows to know the writing is on the server rack.

IBM may unload its commodity server business on Lenovo. It's a smart move.

On Thursday, I caught up with Cycle Computing CEO Jason Stowe. There's a lot to like about Cycle Computing. First, the company is bootstrapped so there's instant respect. Second, Cycle Computing is at the forefront of making high performance computing clusters for the masses. And third, Cycle Computing has top insurance and pharmaceutical companies as customers. Cycle Computing had massive customers from day one. In other words, Cycle Computing is the real deal, hooked up with Amazon Web Services and will enable a lot of science to happen just by democratizing HPC for smaller companies.

Stowe noted that Cycle Computing is starting to land manufacturing and engineering customers now for its HPC management software and cloud connections. In other words, this HPC for the masses is catching on. If you play this out, there will be fewer servers sold because folks will be using Rackspace, AWS or some other former hardware focused vendor.

Today, it's big data and research compute driving Cycle Computing demand. Tomorrow every company will have the mathematic models and horsepower to simulate just about anything. You won't buy your own servers for that computing power.

Stowe said servers will become like wheat fields not things you name. "Today servers are hugged, named and managers know their quirks. There's an attachment. In the future server clusters will be more like wheat fields. You grow the wheat, reap and sow, eat and replant the seeds. There's no attachment to the wheat," said Stowe.

In other words, Stowe's excellent analogy on servers and meeting compute demand translates into cloud farms and fields. Most companies are going to hit the brakes on new server buying as soon as the depreciation ends and new compute demand has to be met. Play this out and the profit margins on servers aren't going to look so hot.

IBM sees all of the servergeddon scenarios developing and that's why it's ditching its commodity server business now. Let Lenovo, which has the scale and ambition to do the commodity server game, carry the ball from here and duke it out with HP and Dell.

View the original article here