LENOVO IDEAPAD Y480

The Y series of Lenovo is the trademark for the game lovers, music lovers and film buffs, entertainment machines with quad core processors, lots of storage and efficient GPUs. The Ideapad Y480 is the new kid on the Y series having a Quad core i7 processor, 8Gb of RAM and GeForce GT640M LE GPU at $999, which is quite acceptable but whether is it worth it or not?
The Ideapad Y480 is not today’s slim machines; its 1.3 inches thick and weighs just over 5 pounds along with the 14 inch screen. The look isn’t that bad the brushed metal lid gives a clean look and once you open it the metal motif continues surrounding the keyboard. JBL speakers are given on the ends just for the entertainment to be enhanced.
On the left there is a VGA port, a pair of USB 3.0 port and an HDMI port. While on the right you will find microphone and headphone jacks, a pair of USB 2.0 ports and the DVD- burner. Under the hood it is a full on machine with its quad-core Intel Core i7 processor clocked at 2.3 GHz , 8gb of RAM ,750 Gb hard drive and the Nvidia GeForce GT640M LE GPU makes it a beast. If you are willing to spend more additional aspects which can be added includes 1TB hard disk and Blu-ray player.
IdeaPad Y480s 14 inch screen, 1366 x 768 resolution display isn’t that bad and gets the job done. It offers fairly well viewing with good colors. It has some viewing problems if you lean too forward and backward and you lose the sight. It is the weakest component but gets the job done. The JBL speakers pump out the sound fairly and with rich sound. It has no sub-woofer but still works quite well but sounds get distorted at high volumes.
Lenovo’s “U” shape keycaps are quite comfortable, as Lenovo’s keyboards are one of the best, and the Y480s keyboard is comfortable and spacious due to its new design. The keyboard comes with a backlight, if you keep holding the function key and tap the spacebar it will be activated. The trackpad works well, Y480 has one key aspect, if you swipe four fingers in any direction you get a different function. If you swipe up you can get the Windows task switcher, similarly down sticky notes, left wallpapers app and right takes you to Quick notes app. The glossy texture picks up the oils on the fingers which is a drawback otherwise its appealing.
It’s an entertainment device but the Nvidia GeForce GT640M LE GPU isn’t well suited for most of the today’s games, battlefield 3 on medium settings on Y480 gave a high 30 Frame per second and at some points only 20 which is disappointing. The witcher 2 goes to a smooth 30 fps but at low settings and at a resolution of 1024 x 768. The core i7 isn’t that bad and works quite well and fasts but lacks behind as compared with MSI GT70 and Razer blade.
The battery is quite good and can last for 4 hours if the Y480 is being used for multiple tasks at the same time. While heat and noise aren’t a issue under a normal use and the fans noise is very low, which is a positive point.
At the end there’s nothing wrong with the device but the 14 inch screen is not that good and the graphics card won’t run the high end graphics that are about to be released which will eventually steal away its entertainment purpose.