 I sometimes avoid reviewing certain products when I know the internet has a massive raging hard-on for them. If I like it, then I'm not telling anyone anything they don't already know, and if I don't like it, then I get to deal with a bunch of vitriol just for having a contrary opinion. Not worth it. I don't need a few video views that badly. That's actually why I've never reviewed the Audio-Technica ATH-M50s. I have a pair, they're good for the money, but they don't blow me away or anything. So that, along with not having a contact for review samples, is actually the reason that I hadn't planned on reviewing the Lenovo Y50 up until now. I thought everyone knew about it and loved it already, until I tweeted that I was looking into it and someone said, Lenovo does cases? What? I was like, no? So I resolved to double my efforts to get one, and here it is. So let's get this show on the road. The Flash Voyager GTX USB 3.0 drive from Corsair provides SSD-like performance and fits comfortably in your pocket. Click now to learn more. Lenovo classifies the Y50 as a gaming essentials model, and honestly, I would agree with that if it wasn't so darn good at everything else. But let's back up for a second. We'll start with a physical tour. The top has a striking brushed finish that manages to be clean and professional while hinting at the horsepower underneath. And the bottom looks the same, adorned only by a subwoofer for the shockingly good JBL-designed audio system, as well as a large air intake. The front has the usual indicator LEDs for power and whatnot. The right side has a Kensington lock, a USB 2.0 port, an SD reader, a headset jack, and a Spit-if audio output. The left side has two USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI output that I wish was DisplayPort, a Gigabit Ethernet port, and a reversible power jack. Back to how to categorize this notebook, though. It's not just for gamers. It's more of a sensible option for pretty much anyone who doesn't mind the size kind of thing, if that was a category. Even though it is a bit on the big side, with sizable bezels around the screen, I feel like it compensates by weighing only 5.3 pounds and being a mere 0.9 inches thick. Both very reasonable values for a 15.6-inch notebook. And it also helps me forgive the size to see Lenovo use that space to equip this bad boy with one of the best keyboards that I've ever used on a gaming notebook. It's got a striking red backlight and matte wrist rest, commits no cardinal sins like short shifts or backspace keys, includes a full number pad for productivity, has correctly laid out arrow keys, and most importantly, the tactile feedback is excellent. My two complaints are that it lacks mute and media control keys, even with a function modifier, and the tops of the keycaps are a little bit slippery out of the box. But that didn't prevent me from being at full speed within two minutes of using it. Although given how many business notebooks Lenovo makes, I guess it shouldn't surprise me that much that they know a thing or two about how to make a keyboard. It's just a shame that this didn't carry over to the touchpad. To be clear, there are some really good things about it. It almost never misinterprets multi-touch and Windows 8 gestures, a big problem with my XPS that forced me to disable them all, the positioning is perfect, allowing me to easily type without touching it, and whenever I intentionally brush my palms on it to test it, it did a great job of palm rejection. Tracking in the surface finish are alright, but even with all those positives in mind, I wasn't a huge fan of using the mousepad two-handed, with clicks often registering as downward movements, and the overall fit and finish left a fair bit to be desired for me with some noticeable rattling when using tap to click, and the clickpad functionality on the rest of the pad being extremely inconsistent with the middle, requiring a little bit of force and the edges, much more. I guess it makes sense that there would have to be at least a few compromises like this on a notebook that costs anywhere from around $1,000 to around $1,500, and delivers these kinds of specs, though. The $1,300 model on Amazon has a Core i7 2.4GHz quad-core, 16GB of RAM, a GTX 860M with 2GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD, and last but not least, a 4K IPS display. And think about that, for less than the cost of buying a 4K IPS monitor, you can buy an entire notebook with one attached to it. The world is a funny place. Speaking of the 4K display, what a great value. My unit even has a touchscreen, although a quick search on Newegg didn't reveal an option available like that, so your mileage may vary, but back to how it looks, it's beautiful. No, it's not perfect. Mine has some noticeable backlight bleed, especially along the left edge, but man, that kind of pixel density is amazing, even with my nose 10cm from the screen. Correctly scaled text looks astoundingly crisp, viewing angles are easily suitable for sitting and watching 4K videos with a group of friends with no one getting a crappy view or lousy colors, and doing my usual drag windows around and see how noticeable motion blur is quick and dirty test didn't reveal anything unexpected given that we know it won't have the same speed and responsiveness of a TN panel. Now, I've seen a lot of people online being very harshly critical of Lenovo's use of a 48Hz display here instead of a 60Hz one, but to be honest, it doesn't bother me that much. 30Hz is unbearable, but I've used 50Hz by accident on my computer before, and while things do feel a little bit off, and I'll notice and I'll change it back eventually, it never really bothers me in 2D work, and frankly, in games, your IPS panel, slow response time, and GTX 860M are going to likely be bigger performance bottlenecks than the maximum refresh rate of your screen being 48Hz, especially if you're gaming at 4K, which leads us nicely into the overall gaming experience, which isn't as seamless as I think it needs to be. While more casual games like Dirt 3 were actually playable at 4K on high settings with minimum frame rates around 30fps, hardcore titles are not going to run at that resolution, which wouldn't be a problem, except that due to the way Intel's driver handles scaling on this display when you're running at native resolution, DirectX 11 games, the ones that I tried anyway, will run at the resolution you set, like 1080p, in the middle of the screen with black bars around them. There are a couple of workarounds, but the first is to force the lower fidelity DirectX 9 render path, which can involve weird config file or registry edits, so not everyone will want to do that, and the second involves changing the desktop resolution, which will likely require you to change the text scaling, which by default is set to the maximum and will push a bunch of UI elements off screen, so then in order to do that, you have to log out of Windows and log back in every time you want to run a DirectX 11 game at 1080p. I hope a driver can fix this, but given that the Nvidia control panel doesn't control display scaling in dual graphics mode, and the most recent Intel graphics drivers validated for this model are over three months old, I don't know if I would hold my breath for that fix, but... And there are some other issues too, like the GPU power limit throttling that occurs sometimes when gaming at high settings on battery, causing large frame rate fluctuations, even when I set the Nvidia control panel to prefer maximum performance for the GPU. It's not all bad or anything though, the battery lasts for over an hour of straight gaming and about four hours doing other things, an acceptable result, and the system runs really cool with neither the CPU nor the GPU reaching over 70 degrees, even after an hour straight gaming, and only the top of the keyboard between the E and Y keys developing a bit of a toasty hotspot, something that really didn't affect me much. The problem is I just don't think these things are enough to turn my conclusion into a super positive one. The Y50, at least the 4K model, just isn't easy for me to recommend as a gaming notebook. Honestly, it's issues, most of which are relating to the cutting edge screen, are not Lenovo's fault. It's hardware or driver limitations that are beyond their control, but for the customer spending his or her own real money on the product that says Lenovo on it, I don't know how much that matters. With that said, while gaming on the Y50 had problems, other than the frustrating touchpad, it was a pleasure to use in every other way, so I still have no problem recommending it as a powerful, CUDA capable, productivity, and multimedia notebook. It delivers astounding specs, great build quality, a fantastic keyboard, a rich content enjoyment experience, basic gaming functionality, and to my eyes, beautiful, stealthy looks, and it does it all at a price that real people can afford, so I have to give kudos to Lenovo for all of that. But as a gamer, I feel like option one is settling for the 1080p model with the much less beautiful screen, and option two is waiting for either a driver fix for this one or a next generation product to iron out the wrinkles, which is IMO not a terrible choice because once they fix that stuff, this baby is going to be really hard to beat. Speaking of hard to beat, audible.com's massive selection of over 150,000 audiobooks. Embarrassingly enough, I still haven't gotten around to reading The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, someone whose work I admire very much, so when it came time to pick this month's audiobook, and I had Sy show open in another tab, I was like, oh snap, Hank Green is hosting that, I still haven't read his brother's latest critically acclaimed book, gotta pick that up, and that's basically how the monthly audiobook membership works. You sign up to get your first book for free, and then every month after that, you get one included with your membership and discounts on additional audiobooks. Check it out now at audible.com slash Linus. Guys, thank you for watching, like if you liked, dislike if you disliked, leave a comment letting me know what you thought of the video, future video suggestions, all that good stuff. Don't forget to check out the support us link in the video description, you can buy a sweet t-shirt like this one, you can change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code in it, so we get a small kickback, and if you love us so much that you need to contribute to us making more videos about notebooks like this, then you can also give us a monthly contribution outright, which we will appreciate very much, and love you long time for, thank you. That's not very politically correct. Has this show ever been politically correct? I think we're done here.