Price Analysis & Conclusion
The Lenovo IdeaCentre Y900 Razer Edition appears to give gamers everything they could want in a powerful PC with an attractive and stylish chassis (adorned with RGB LED lighting), Razer-branded RGB peripherals, and the ability to overclock the powerful Core i7 CPU with the push of one button. However, our testing revealed a mixed bag of performance, with all signs pointing to a CPU and GPU that don’t have the proper power delivery to maintain their respective boosted frequencies, resulting in sub-par performance against even our stock-clocked Z170 reference rig in many of the gaming benchmarks.
The cause of this appears to be a combination of Lenovo’s Nerve Center overclocking software overhead (which consumed up to 5% of the CPU’s resources, even at idle) and the platform’s power phase design (CPU and GPU clock rates weren’t consistent). The Lenovo IdeaCentre Y900 Razer Edition had occasional moments in the sun (see the Rise of the Tomb Raider and storage test results) where it seemed to be performing as intended, but its inconsistency left us disappointed.
The single 16GB module of DDR4-2133 memory has a lower peak memory bandwidth than a dual-channel kit, and we saw lower performance in memory-intensive workloads because of it. However, the 256GB Samsung PM951 M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD actually performs above par for the device’s specifications, with impressive sequential read and 4K random read and write IOPs performance.
At its original price of $2,500, the Lenovo IdeaCentre Y900 Razer Edition wouldn’t even be a consideration for most enthusiasts, but at a reduced cost of $1,700, it wouldn’t be the worst starting point for those looking for a powerful and flashy gaming PC with Razer-branded peripherals included. The only downside is that we had to wait until Skylake processors were being cleared out for it to reach that price.
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