looking for a gaming laptop, got a few questions:

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Avinoam73

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hey there!
here are my questions:
y400- does it come with 650m sli? what is the 650m sli desktop equivalent? what is the desktop equivalent to a single gt 750m?
will the y400/y410p have a dual gt 750m one day?
y510p- what can you do about the battery life? is there an option to buy an external battery? it comes with the GT 750m sli. this card is better (according to gameplays and benchmarks) than the 675MX and the 770m (in games that support SLI). having said that, how come the desktop equivalent of this card is only a 560 ti? why is not equivalent to the gtx 660, considering how that's the desktop equivalent of the 770m?
last question: what's better for next gen gaming: 750M sli @ 1080p or 650m sli (assuming you can do it with the y400) @ 768p?
any answer will be amazing! thanks for reading!
 
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Hello,
Answering your questions.
1. The y400 may or may not come with 650m sli. A link would be helpful, but I honestly don't think it will. The y400 series is kind of just last years version of the y410p. Going by Lenovo's site the y410p does not offer a sli setup. This is probably due to a lack of space on the smaller system and will likely never be offered on Lenovo's 14" systems.
http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/ideapad/y-series/y410p/
2. It is hard to judge performance against laptop and desktop graphics. Going by the architecture, process, number of cores, RAM, and data width the 650M is probably close to the performance of a mildly underclocked Nvidia GTX 650. Working in sli going by the same details as above the 650M SLI...
Hello,
Answering your questions.
1. The y400 may or may not come with 650m sli. A link would be helpful, but I honestly don't think it will. The y400 series is kind of just last years version of the y410p. Going by Lenovo's site the y410p does not offer a sli setup. This is probably due to a lack of space on the smaller system and will likely never be offered on Lenovo's 14" systems.
http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/ideapad/y-series/y410p/
2. It is hard to judge performance against laptop and desktop graphics. Going by the architecture, process, number of cores, RAM, and data width the 650M is probably close to the performance of a mildly underclocked Nvidia GTX 650. Working in sli going by the same details as above the 650M SLI probably comes somewhere around the Nvidia GTX 650 TI with probably slightly lower performance due to clock speeds and other factors. The 750M seems to be pretty much a rebadge of the 650M with minor adjustments and should perform very close to the same.
The reason for these cut backs are that clocks are typically lower so they need less power, and SLI gives worse performance than a single card with better hardware.

As for the battery issue you can probably find a better battery, but I am not sure. Also byogaimgpc is completely wrong with the not being able to play games on battery. Yes laptops have an option called "Power Saver" to reduce performance for better battery life, but in "performance mode" it sucks just as much power as when it is plugged in. Your battery will die faster but the performance compared to when plugged in the wall should be completely unnoticeable.

All of this being said, the y510p is still probably your best choice of computer and you should check Amazon for the best deal on it. Its at I think $999
 
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Avinoam73

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Thank you so much!!! you two helped me a lot.
i'm really sad for the y400/y410p because 14" is probably the best size. i'd probably go with the msi ge40 but i couldn't find it in $1000...
as for the battery, i'm not planning on playing games "unplugged" anyway, but i saw that it gets an awful 3 hours and less when in idle and i just think that 2-3 hours of just browsing the web is utter rubbish and that i might as well get a different/external battery if it's possible.
byogamingpc thanks for the offer but my budget is $1000. also 17" are out of the equation anyway since they're heavy and big.
 


Yea I wish you luck with the battery. I was shopping for laptops recently and found an awesome jsystem that had an AMD quad core CPU, and pretty good graphics for 530, and after adding a $60 stick of ram it would have 12GB total. It had 4 1/2 hours of battery life. I looked at Intel Haswell based systems cause they use like half as much power, but most of the ones I saw offered batteries half the size as well. Which irks me personally, I would so prefer 8 hours of battery life instead of 4 because they want the systems to have smaller lighter batteries. I have a felling a lot of Intel systems are going this way.
 

Avinoam73

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i think that a laptop should first *be* good instead of look good, or feel good. i mean, if you have a 0.5" thick laptop that has a 6-lithium battery than after 3 hours you're gonna end up with a useless piece of metal. i don't understand lenovo though: the 750m is a (sorta) weak model, meaning it has no optimus technology. 2 of those kills the battery and paired with a haswell i7 you're gonna run out of juice fast. so instaed of being nice and slap a good 8-lithium battery they've put a 6-lithium one. i mean, why? sure it's cheaper, but what's the point?
 
I agree that it should be all out performance then looks. It is a little more understandable though that the 750M kills the battery. Don't think of them like in desktops, in desktops they would be considered probably the highest rated main stream GPU's, lowest end ethusiast GPU's. In that sense they can be seen as sorta weak. However in Laptops thats straight into being high end.

But yea they have no reason. I mean users will be willing to pay for more battery life. Thats one thing everyone is happy to have more of. They should of put the largest battery with in reason inside instead of settling with this battery which would be decent without the good graphics cards, but with them its just really low
 
I know that some companies sell them, but I don't know if they do for your model. Also some laptops are being created with non-removable batteries. Or at least they are built in so that they violate warranty if removed and are meant to not be removed. I am not sure how your system is, but you might be able to find something.
 

challenger15

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I recently purchased the lenovo Ideapad Y510P, and what can I say, it has handled everything I have thrown at it and more. Mine was with a single 750M gpu (not the SLI version), and it still managed to play all the games I have thrown at it on high settings (haven't tried ultra though). And to answer your question, the 750m sli would be definitely better than the 650m sli. The sli version, although costing more, will be really useful if you intend to max out games at high resolutions and with anti-aliasing, vsync and the rest of it turned on. Downside though is that the battery drains fairly quickly. Lenovo claims a battery life of 5 hours, but I used mine for slightly more than 2 1/2 hours before the battery ran out. Not sure about the external battery though. cheers.
 


Actually the difference between the 650m and 750m is practically nonexistant. They are both Kepler architecture. So they both come from the 600 model of Nvidia graphics. They are both created with 28nm process, with the same number of CUDA cores, shaders, data width to the RAM, etc. So the 750m is a tweaked version but its a rebadge. Performance difference will be a few percent but very few.

That is very helpful to know though. His battery lasts 2.5 hours with only one 750m in it. Your battery life is probably going to be under 2 hours.
 

Avinoam73

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the y510p is really annoying... it has the performance of a much more expensive laptop but it's battery life is terrible!! is there any other laptop worth checking? unless i could find an external battery i'm not sure i want to buy it... i would love to find a 1K MSI GE40 though....
hey thanks! your answers are really helpful!
 
I think the other top name ones to look at would be the higher MSI models and another company called Segar. Sorry I don't have links right off but I am sure byogamingpc will be by soon an post links, he usually seems to have links to these sort of things ready to go.
 

Avinoam73

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i know sager as well but i couldn't find anything that could natch the y510p's performance in that price range....
also, i know we've talked about this already (a lot lol) but i think that the gt 750m can perform similar to a gtx 570.
i'm basing on these to videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ouHZ3-6btc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3j7JGFemtw

if you look at the description on the first video (gtx 570) you can see the guy says he gets between 40-60 FPS and that is very similar to what the GT 750m sli got. i know this is not logical and i read online that it is pretty much a 560 ti but still, look at this gameplays!
 
Yes it can perform similar the GTX 570. See here:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-750M.90245.0.html

The models with wit GDDR5 can come close to the GTX 670M according to notebookcheck, which is usually quite reliable. In this case I am more speculative that it probably doesn't match the GTX 670M. Reason being that the GTX 750 is a rebadge of the GTX 650, they have the same core, manufacturing process, same architecture, data width, and number of cores. It only has a few tweaks to improve performance. So we can also look at the GTX 650M.
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-650M.71887.0.html

According to it, it comes between the 460M and 560M, however I think that was with DDR3 RAM. So using DDR5 RAM it should be able to match the GTX 570.
 
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