Lenovo IdeaPad Y560 Laptop

The latest Lenovo IdeaPad Y560 and Y460 laptops are indeed spruced up in terms of performance, thanks to the hardware. Today we have with us, the mainstream variant of the Lenovo Y560, and we’re expecting quite a bit from this machine, let’s see if it is able to deliver.

Design
The Ideapad Y560 is quite overtly distinguished as a multimedia desktop replacement. Apart from its 15-inch form factor and 2.7 kg lofty weight, its rugged chassis and solid lid confirm that it’s a machine meant to be kept at home for watching movies and enjoying music. Now, it’s not that you can’t carry it around, but you really don’t want to lug it everyday, unless you want a sore shoulder.

The coffee brown and black theme looks pretty cool on the machine, and the light bronze rim adds to the aesthetics. The lid is mostly matte with a glossy pattern covering the lid partly, and on top is the chrome ‘Lenovo’ logo. The wrist rest is of a darker tint, which is cool, except that it’s all-glossy, which makes finger prints and stains unavoidable. It can make the laptop look quite messy. Overall, though not jazzy and loud, the laptop has something quite funky about it, but in a very subtle way.

Build quality one of the strongest points in this laptop, perhaps it’s borrowed from the Thinkpads. Ofcourse, it’s not build like a tank or it’s not as slick, but this IdeadPad is quite a rugged thing to handle. Even in terms of ergonomics, there’s nothing to complain about, the large textured touchpad and the chrome mouse buttons are pretty convenient to use.

Thankfully, the mouse clicks are not at all audible. Even the keyboard is good to type on, with the well-sized keys. The one thing you might see as a hindrance when typing, is that the function key is at the bottom-left in the place of the Ctrl key.

Features
The overall functionality, core hardware and affordability are aspects that will take this machine places. While the laptop is designed for movies and music, you can even play games at medium resolutions and settings. So we’d say that, it’s an ideal machine for home users.

You can even watch cable TV, all you have to do is connected the bundled dongle to connect cable TV to the TV socket on the right-hand side of the unit.

Built around and Intel HM55 chipset, this multimedia powerhouse runs off an Intel Core i5-430M CPU, which is clocked at 2.27 GHz with 3 MB L3 cache. It has 4 GB DDR3 RAM (max 8 GB), a 500 GB hard drive and the discrete graphics is courtesy an ATI Radeon HD 5730. Now, this is one area, where this laptop evidently has an upper hand (a much better GPU), over other laptops that feature the Radeon HD 5145 or the Radeon HD 5470. However, considering that it’s a mainstream multimedia machine, that much more value for money is given, nonetheless, it is a plus point.