The Good - The Lenovo Y50 Touch has great style for a gaming laptop, plus a touchscreen, and it balances performance, size, and price to the benefit of mainstream gamers.
The Bad - The display suffers from poor viewing angles and the midlevel graphics card means you can't run newer games at the highest detail settings.
The Bottom Line - With the Y50 Touch, Lenovo has created a reasonably priced, not-too-big gaming laptop that doesn't look like a throwback. But the most serious PC gamers may want to
Lenovo, a brand best known for its conservative ThinkPad laptops and flexible Yoga hybrids, also makes some killer gaming laptops, even if few people are aware of them. That's a shame, because they generally look much nicer than the brick-like boxes from Origin PC, Alienware, and other gaming specialists, and they offer decent enough performance for mainstream gamers who just want to play the latest games away from a living-room console.
The newest entry in Lenovo's gaming lineup is the Y50 Touch, a 15.6-inch laptop that combines a slightly geeky style with decent (but not top-of-the-line) gaming components. First profiled at CES 2014, the Y50 is easily one of the computers I've received the most emails, tweets, and inquiries about from CNET readers. That says to me that there's a real hunger out there for a gaming laptop that can work as a full-time midsize home or work computer, balancing gaming and nongaming tasks equally.
A few different versions of the Y50 are available, with changes to the screen, storage, and other features, but the base configuration, consisting of an Intel Core i7 CPU and Nvidia GeForce 860M graphics card, remains the same.
Our test unit was the Best Buy configuration, combining an Intel Core i7 4700HQ CPU, 8GB of RAM, a 1TB HDD/8GB SSD storage combo, Nvidia GeForce 860M graphics, and a 1080p touch display, all for $1,149. If you look at the Lenovo website, you'll find several slightly different configurations, most without the touchscreen. The single touch config costs $1,399, while an intriguing option to add a full 4K resolution display starts at $1,299.
In the UK, the Y50 starts at £1,000, but isn't available with a touchscreen. According to Lenovo's website, the Y line is not yet available in Australia.
If you're searching on the (often-confusing) Lenovo site, note that the Y50, Y50 Touch, and Y50 UHD models are all on separate pages, so you'll have to click around a bit to see all the options. Frankly, the Best Buy configuration feels like the best overall value, especially if, like me, you think Windows 8 really needs a touchscreen to work for non-gaming tasks.
Sadly, there's one thing holding this otherwise excellent system back from being close to perfect. The display is clearly not one of the newer IPS (in-plane switching) panels that we're seeing in more and more laptops this year. Off-axis viewing angles are poor, and even dead-on, the display appears more washed-out than the best laptop and tablet screens.
That may be a deal-breaker for some. But the other aspects of the Y50, including the powerful overall performance, excellent design and build quality, touchscreen, and price, all combine to make it a great overall value. It won't compete with $2,000-plus specialty rigs, but instead leads the small field of crossover systems that can satisfy mainstream gamers who want to skip clunky, thick gaming laptops that sacrifice portability.
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