Final Thoughts
I think that Lenovo really has done a great job on the Y700 Touch and it is an gaming laptop that I can recommend in its price-range. Again, and I mentioned at the beginning of this review Lenovo might not be a brand you think of if you are looking for a gaming laptop, but they really should be.
Performance is most important to gamers, and the Y700 Touch did great in all of our tests. The Intel Core i7-6700HQ quad core processor, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M dedicated graphics, and 16GB of DDR4 memory do a really great job. I was able to play all of my favorite games, and quite well. Modern games like Star Wars Battlefront, GTA V, and Paragon played just fine. Not only is this performance great for gaming, but you have a pretty powerful system for multimedia, photo and video editing, and more! It was nice having a powerful machine on the go that did not slow me down if I had too many Chrome tabs open or I wanted to edit a few photos in Photoshop.
The screen on the Y700 is very vibrant and bright, although because of the semi-glossy panel you are going to experience some glare, especially in natural light. You do get display options of 1080p and 4K, I would honestly hold off on the 4K model as you are likely not going to be able to play games in 4K at the quality setting you want. So this is going to save you some money. The 10-point touch on the display works great and I did not have any issues with it. Again if you want to save some money you can get the normal Y700 and not the touch version.
I really appreciate Lenovo putting some decent speakers on the Y700. I played quite a lot of Star Wars Battlefront and the speakers made me feel like I was really in the action! These are definitely better speakers than what are on most laptops out there. The keyboard is very comfortable, although for gaming I would have liked to have a keyboard with keys that had deeper travel length. The red backlighting on the keyboard is nice and you have the ability to turn it off if you want. It would have been nice to see some macro keys on the keyboard or software to customize it, but that is missing here.
The Y700 has great build quality all around. It is not super heavy either, which is nice. While the aluminum lid is nice it is a huge fingerprint magnet, along with the screen and palms rests. I found myself cleaning the laptop quite a lot. If you are worried about battery life the Y700 has Optimus support for longer battery life. This means the CPU will run as low as 900 MHz and the GPU at 135/202 MHz (core/memory) when in the Power Saver profile.
As we highlighted in this review Lenovo has a full line of gaming products to compliment their gaming laptop and desktops. These include a gaming keyboard, mouse, headset, and backpack. I used the gaming headset and mouse with the Y700 and I was actually quite impressed. The backpack is perfect if you are a gamer on the go on intend to travel with the Y700. It is one of the better laptop bags that I’ve seen lately.
At the end of the day I’ve really enjoyed my time with the Y700 Touch and would fully recommend it to anyone looking for a gaming laptop in this price range. The model we reviewed today (80NW0010US) is currently selling for $1184.99 at my favorite online retailer. Overall ThinkComputers gives the Lenovo Y700 Touch 15-inch Gaming Laptop a 9 out of 10 score and our Recommended Award!
Pros:
– Great Performance
– Impressive build quality
– Backlit keyboard
– Plays all current games at good graphics settings
– Good speakers
– Optimus support for longer battery life
– Lenovo gaming accessories
Cons:
– Semi-glossy screen causes glare
– No USB type-C or NVMe support
– Fingerprint magnet
