After setting up the Lenovo IdeaCentre Y900 Razer Edition and starting to use it, I was hit with the last thing I expected from such a state of the art machine–intense nostalgia.
What Were My Initial Reactions
Before I get into the guts of this review, let me explain by taking a little trip down memory lane. When I was 13 years old, my dad passed away. That year for Christmas, my mom and brother, in an effort to take my mind off of it, I suppose, bought me my first PC–an overclocked gaming warhorse (you know, 7 mHz processor, 640K RAM, a 20 MB hard drive, etc). And for many years, I constantly upgraded and built my own gaming PCs. I haven’t owned a gaming PC for about 15 years now, and the excitement of firing up a new machine felt exactly like firing up the Y900. And to top it off, typing for the first time on the mechanical keyboard (a Razer BlackWidow Chroma) brought an instant flood of memories of late nights spent playing MUDs and RPGs on Prodigy (and my mom yelling at me to quit all that typing).
So, yeah, before I even really used this machine, I was in love with it and all the feels it brought. But I’m sure what you’re more interested in is how the Y900 performs, which I’m happy to oblige. I even did some comparisons to my current gaming machine–a three-year-old Asus gaming laptop.
The Lenovo Y900 is a beautiful machine. I love the sleek black lines and the LED lights. As someone who modded a case with tin snips long ago, I especially dig the windowed side panel that allows the glowing “GEFORCE GTX” to shine through. The Razer keyboard and mouse (a Razer Mamba Tournament Edition) are also quite a sight to behold. The lighting effects are something I’m not familiar at all with and are mesmerizing. Will it get old? Maybe. But it sure is fun! And lastly, the 27″ curved screen Y27g Razer Edition monitor is also gorgeous and packed with tons of features.
How Cool Are the Razer Peripherals
The Razer BlackWidow Chroma keyboard and the Razer Mamba Tournament Edition mouse are pretty cool! I’ve never had a keyboard or mouse that did the whole light up thing, so seeing the lights and being able to tweak the settings was a lot of fun and added a nice little wow factor, but it’s just the icing on the cake. These are also powerful tools!
The Razer Mamba mouse features a 16,000 DPI sensor and nine programmable buttons along with a tilt-click scroll wheel. If you’re a serious gamer, you can program the heck out of this thing, and it’s so responsive, it actually took a little bit of getting used to. It’s also ergonomic, very comfortable, and would surely be nice for those late nights of gaming.
The Razer BlackWidow is also an amazing piece of craftsmanship. I won’t go into full details since GeekDad Mike LeSauvage did a review of the Razer BlackWidow Chroma already, but I’ll reiterate how much I love the mechanical nature of the keys, and the tactile and auditory feedback is really nice.
Lastly, the Razer Y29g 27-inch curved widescreen gaming monitor is a wonderful experience in immersion without making you feel claustrophobic. The Y29g features a huge 178-degree viewing angle along with many ports (HDMI, DisplayPort, audio, and USB-for easy attachment of extra devices or charging of phones and tablets) and a pop-out headphone hanger. Sporting a max resolution of 1920 x 1080, the Y29g is just about all the monitor you could ask for.
What About the Desktop Itself
As is typical nowadays, the Y900 sports a ton of ports for all of your needs–a memory card reader, multiple USB 3.0 charging ports, regular USB 3.0 and 2.0 ports, headphone and microphone jacks, HDMI, and more, with plenty of room to upgrade inside. This particular model boasts a Core i7-6700K (4.0 GHz) processor, 16GB of DDR4 2133MHz RAM, 256GB PCIe SSD plus 2TB of hard disk storage, and the NVIDIA GTX 1080 Founders Edition video card with 8GB DDR5 memory.
And finally–the proof in the pudding. I got Mass Effect: Andromeda specifically to test out the Y900. Obviously, you can’t see the speed and smoothness of gameplay on the new machine, but the images on the left are from my gaming laptop and those on the right are from the Y900. The difference is pretty clear–smoother edges, better light and shadow depth, just everything!
How Easy It Is to Upgrade
This probably isn’t a big deal to everyone, but Lenovo has made it extremely simple to get into the case of the Y900 and to upgrade hardware. As someone who used to build his own machines, this is great to me. Also, when certain other manufacturers make it harder for end-users to upgrade, this allows power users to really make their machines their own, and also make their machines last longer.
What’s the Final Verdict
Sometimes ignorance is bliss! But now that I know how much worse it looks on my current machine, I don’t even want to play Mass Effect: Andromeda anymore since I have to return the Y900. If you’re a gamer looking for a great price on a super powerful, kick-butt gaming desktop, look no further than the Lenovo Y900.
NOTE: I was loaned this system for review purposes from Lenovo, but all thoughts and opinions are my own.
