Buying the Y570!

mikado_80

Distinguished
Feb 2, 2012
4
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18,510
I have decided that from my game/pc needs the Y570 is quite the perfect computer for the price. Now the thing is to get the best price on it! Unfortunately I live in Canada so the cheapest config isn't on sale right now on the lenovo page:
http://shop.lenovo.com/ca/en/laptops/ideapad/y-series/y570

Now the second and third model ARE on sale, and are only 70 dollars more expensive than their american counter parts. Should I go for the higher models? Also I can hardly see any difference, is the i7 really worth the extra buck? (I think the GPU would be the bottle neck for this laptop. Also I don't mind spending the extra 30 bucks for quality, so should I get the second or the third one?

I'm kind of new at buying laptops online so I reaally appreciate the help! You guys are great!
 
Solution
As stated above, a quad core CPU will provide better processing power for applications that can make use of 4 cores and Hyper Threading. Most games only use 2 cores, but there are a few games out there that can use 4 cores.

The graphic card is certainly not considered a "fire breather", but at 1366x768 is will be enough to run most games with medium quality and pretty high frame rates, 40+ FPS without many issues. The GT 555M used in the Y570 is really an overclocked GT 540m.

The Y570 is going to be replaced by the Y580, but there is no news about when that's going to happen. It will be based on the new Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs (like the Y480 laptops) and is expected to have a nVidia GT 650M with a possible upgrade option to the GT 660M and an option for a 1920x1080 resolution screen instead of the standard 1366x768 screen.

The estimated starting price is $900 USD and of course choosing the possible GT 660M and 1920x1050 resolution screen will increase that price; probably by $300. It is possible that Lenovo will change the specs for the final product like they did for the Y480. I believe the Y480 was suppose to have the GT 650M (or maybe 640M), however it got stuck with the lower performing GT 640M LE (but they dropped the "LE" designation).
 

astropj1

Honorable
May 17, 2012
1
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10,520


I bought a y570 about 6 months ago, and I think it was a great purchase. I bought the last model on that list; the one with RapidDrive.
I do alot of high-end calculations with parallel processing, so the i7 was definitely worth it. The graphics card is good. I haven't run into any issues with it, but I run only medium-intensive games (Portal, Rise Of Nations, Starcraft). It works on high detail with those games.
Mine has switchable graphics. I don't know if the ones you're looking at does. I find that the Intel HD Graphics can run everything, but the quality is slightly poorer.

Hope this helps.
 
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