About the IdeaPad y560

For the IdeaPad Y560:
i7-720qm processor
Windows 7 Home Premium
ATI HD 5730 1 GB w/ switchable graphics
8GB DDR3 1333MHz
15.6" HD Wide LED 1366x768
500 GB 7,200 RPM HDD
6 Cell Lithium Ion battery

All of this is only for $1130, it seems perfect. Are there any known problems with these laptops or anything else that I should know before buying it? Does it have heating problems or awful sound quality? (seems rampant in notebooks) The price seems too low on it to be honest.

 

People are saying the screen sucks on the y560 and it does get a bit toasty under heavy load. There is a huge forum on the y460's and y560's(Should be on the first page of this forum). The JBL speakers are amazing though.

 

lenovo y560 with core i7 dont support switchable graphics but someone said battery life lasted approximately 3 hours.i think its enough for core i7 laptop

 

I just purchased the top-of-the-line Lenovo Y560 model 06462BU (Core I7,8GB RAM) primarily because of the RapidDrive and switchable graphics technology advertised for this model on the Lenovo website. After starting it up for the first time yesterday, I eagerly looked for these two features, and found that neither was included. I have pdfs of all the Lenovo webpages that would lead any reasonable person to conclude that these two features would be on this notebook.

All I can say is that now I feel used. I am going to try to get my money back as soon as the Lenovo (don't work weekends) salespeople get back in the office.

I don't understand how companies like Lenovo can stay in business scamming the public like this.

I tried to get help from Lenovo's technical support people. They have obviously outsourced their support to India and those folks are barely understandable, rude, don't know the products they represent, accused me of lying to them, and have absolutely no concept of customer service.

Do yourself a favor and get an Apple. Apple is the only notebook manufacturer who consistently gets good reviews for customer service.

 

Well there are a few things to remember. Firstly, the Intel i7's Do not have switchable graphics. Only i3 and i5 chipsets have them. This cart clearly shows that it is not available on all machines. Lenovo - Laptop computers - IdeaPad Y Series: Y450, Y550, Y650, Y730 - CompareAs far as the RapidDrive, they are not on any current y460 or y560. Sometime this summer they should be on the machines. All I have to say is that you should review and get as much information as you can before you buy any laptop.

 

I too am frustrated by the lack of information about these new machines (the Y560s). Is it so hard for Lenovo to put up a spec sheet for EACH MODEL rather than saying "select models" have this and this, but you'll have to guess what yours comes with! Just put up a PDF for gods sake! There is zero information about these available on the web, no user manual, no reviews, no nothing.

On the other hand, the cheapest model with the coupon is a FANTASTIC bargain, so I'm not complaining. I find it hard to believe that the poster above (DoctorG) really bought the laptop just for "rapid drive". The switchable graphics is a bigger loss, but ATI is not known for that feature anyway so it is not surprising.

I am more upset that the model does not have a displayport even though the card should support it.

 

Something like ipbook?

 

Which has no sign of the word "Rapiddrive" in it at all. But it does show which models have switchable graphics (If you'd done your research you know that all quad i7's don't have on-die GPUs)

HDMI should be more than sufficient.

 

Yes, only one that you do not have to post in a forum to find. There should be a link right on the product page, instead of a bunch of videos with false information.

 

Can you run 3 monitors with HDMI? I believe you can chain monitors together from a single Displayport, and according to Anandtech,

"ATI touts several features as being noteworthy, including GDDR5 and DirectX 11. One feature seems rather out of place, however: Eyefinity. While it can be pretty cool to run multiple monitors on a desktop system, we really have our doubts that many people will use up to six displays with any laptop. Nevertheless, that's exactly what the 5800 and 5700/5600 series support (in theory). Naturally, it would be up to the laptop manufacturer to provide six display outputs, which seems highly unlikely. "

AMD Announces ATI Mobility Radeon 5000 Series - AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News

Anyone who works with spreadsheets like I do could use as many monitors as they can get, but I'd mostly just like to be able to use 3.

A bit strange that they leave it off even though this is a multimedia machine with a very nice ATI card, and they have it on lots of other models (X301, T400s, R500, T500, W500, W700, W700ds, T410s, T410, T510, W510, W701, W701ds. (X200s, X200, X200 Tablet, X201s, X201, X201)

I just hope it can run two external monitors (VGA and HDMI), then I'll be happy.

 

ideapad machines are mostly ODM/JDM machines, where Lenovo probably do the joint design or contract out the majority of design to the contract manufacturer.

The contract manufacturer probably does most of the design on behalf of brand company (i.e. Lenovo), or the brand company chose an off the shelf design to save on cost.

HDMI is widely used implementation in most of the consumer laptops, since they were built with home movie in mind, and most consumer LCD TV set has HDMI input and not DP input.

But it would be definitely cool to run 6 external monitors off the laptop.

I would imagine the vidock2 with a 5xxx graphics card that has the 6 mini displayport should allow you to run 6 external LCD.

 

Yeah, but "switchable graphics" doesn't require an on CPU GPU. It would be normal for the general consumer to expect higher end models to include the more advanced features. Lenovo has criminally little info on site about system specs and features.

 

I'm not doubting that hiding this type of information from being seen is wrong. It's actually a bit ironic what you said, that such a feature isn't included on the more powerful notebooks where every minute saved battery life is a very good thing.

 

Thanks for the tip on ViDock 2, that looks like a pretty sweet device.

However, I also just discovered USB display adapters and "DisplayLink". These are $50 low-bandwidth video cards that simply use a USB port. I think this is the best solution for me since I only plan to use the extra monitors for displaying information (spreadsheets, documents, etc).