Ramblings of the Slow and Strange Lenovo IdeaPad Y700-15ACZ
What has an underpowered CPU strapped to an old dedicated GPU and an integrated GPU that’s significantly more powerful than the CPU it’s strapped to? If you said the Lenovo IdeaPad Y700-15ACZ, you’d be correct! In all fairness, Asus, Acer and Dell, among others, would also get into the “strange all-AMD laptop” business, but among them, this is the most common one.
Introduced in 2015, this laptop was one of the final IdeaPads from their primary gaming lineup before Lenovo pivoted it into the Legion line. While Lenovo would still continue to sell gaming IdeaPads, they would become more budget-oriented and more conservative in styling. Which is funny to state given that this was the “budget” offering of the Y700 lineup.
These laptops originally came with an AMD FX-8800P, an AMD Radeon R9 M385X dedicated GPU (which is an R9 M280X with 4GB of VRAM), 8GB of DDR3 and a 1TB SATA hard drive. Notably, this laptop has an M.2 NVMe slot (which would’ve been nice in 2015), and owing to the fact that Windows wasn’t playing nice with the 8GB of RAM it had, I upgraded it to have 16GB of RAM, a 128GB M.2 NVMe SSD and a 240GB SATA SSD. All of that and it’s still slow as hell.
How slow? How about CPU performance barely comparable to a ULV Intel Core i3 of the era? The lack of cache REALLY kills any improvements to Bulldozer that Carrizo offered - and it really shows. Loading a web browser makes the system rethink its life. Running Team Fortress 2 makes it stutter harder than I do when I’m sleep depraved. And that doesn’t even note how useless the dedicated GPU is. AMD barely supported it, and in Lenovo’s infinite wisdom, it’s controlled by the integrated GPU, which more or less likes to insist that it’s the top dog of the system in a lot of games.
In short, don’t buy this laptop, and especially don’t spend $322 on it. This 39 minute unstructured ramble demonstrates how painful this laptop is, if you can sit through it all.
