Lenovo Y710-200 Gamers Edition

David Hollingworth wants so very much to like this machine...

We wanted so very much to like the Y710-200 from Lemovo. For one thing, the Lenovo brand is a super-reliable benchmark for quality mobile machines with a pedigree that stretches back to when it operated under the IBM moniker. For another, the new IdeaPad range – the consumer cousin of the more well-known ThinkPad – features some very sexy kit. From the desktop-replacing entertainment behemoth that is the Y510 to the ultra-portable and ultra-stylish U110 (which we’d take over an EeePC any day), Lenovo’s doing some good work bring its corporate expertise into the shoulder bags and loungerooms of everyday computer users.

Unfortunately, despite looking pretty good on paper, the Y710-200 is bit of a disappointment in reality.

It’s a good looking unit, at least, with a piano-like mirror finish on the upper fascia that just can’t wait to soak up your finger prints. On either side of the chassis you get all the usual ports, including four USB, and the leading edge houses a multi-card reader alongside audio jacks and controls. Flip the clamshell and you’re treated to a gorgeously bright 17in display, well-spaced keyboard and something that Lenovo calls the Game Zone.

This is a delightfully cheesy and chunky LCD display in old-school orange, a switch to throttle or increase fan and processor performance, and some random buttons between a set of curiously placed arrow keys The arrow keys might be more useful if they were on the left-hand side to use as an alternate WASD set-up, but over here all they do is remind you of why you should always plug a mouse in to play games on a laptop.

The other four keys are customisable hotkeys, to bind however you see fit.

There’s a lot of thoughtful little flourishes spread about the Y710-200, from the LED backlit touchpanel to control Dolby setup to the Blu-ray drive and surprisingly effective subwoofer. But all the bells and whistle in the world cannot help this laptop in the performance stakes.

The Turbo setting doesn’t really effect processor speed – which sits at 2.5GHz on the display, oddly enough – but it does ramp up the fans. It only really gets you an extra frame or two per second, but when the normal setting can barely top six FPS in our Crysis testing, those extra frames are mighty important. The onboard Radeon HD 2600 simply isn’t up to such a challenge, despite being backed up by 2GB of RAM. None of this is helped by Crysis finding itself locked into the screen’s native 1920 x 1200 resolution. No matter what we tried – no dice. But at least it ran…

3DMark06 simply failed to launch due to a recurring Direct3D error. Suspecting that a previous reviewer might have introduced some instability to the system, we sent it back for a refresh, but the same problem occurred. It just feels like, deep down and at a basic hardware-talking-to-software level, the Y710-200 is struggling to live up to other machines in the gaming arena.

One culprit for a performance bottleneck is the rather old-fashioned hard drives. Though having two 250GB drives is a fine and dandy thing, you’d hope they’d run a little faster than 5200rpm. Not so. The two drives are also set up little atypically – while D drive is the full 250GB allocation, C drive has had the windows partition limited to 30GB. This might increase performance, but means you’ve got to be careful about where auto-installers put any large apps.

At least the games you can’t quite play sound good while the action stutters along on screen, with the 4.1 speakers sounding far better than many we’ve seen come through the labs. Solid construction means you’re not picking up any extra buzz or vibration off loose parts, either. The Y710-220 is, at least, a great machine to watch movies on.

Older games, especially anything using the Source engine, run quite nicely though, but the lack of high end performance leaves this a hard product to recommend for its intended purpose. True, it’s not as expensive as some gaming machines we’ve seen, but that’s hardly going to comfort if it falls over in a pool of its own body fluids every time you even show it the box Crysis came in.