Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 Laptop motherboard Repair

We repaired Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 motherboard for a customer from Toronto Ontario Canada.

Lenovo again ventures into the highly competitive gaming sector with the IdeaPad Y500. The UltraBay technology enables the 15-incher to be equipped with an optical drive, a second GPU, an auxiliary fan or another hard disk. A thrilling concept that lets the laptop stand out from the competition. We exhaustively tested the SLI alternative.
Lenovo and gaming? Does that match at all? The manufacturer, mainly known for its office laptops, now also wants to make a name for itself in the gaming sector. The IdeaPad Y500 is not just a copy of the devices from MSI, Asus or Samsung, but a unique product that in many ways treads new, or at least different paths.

For example, the UltraBay mentioned in the introduction is unique. In simple words, it is a special drive compartment that can optionally harbor a second graphics card. System fan modules (better cooling for 20 Euros/~$27), a hard disk module (750 GB HDD for 90 Euros/~$121) and a DVD/CD burner module (70 Euros/~$94) are also offered in Lenovo’s German shop.

Lenovo relies on a well-tried DirectX 11 accelerator from Nvidia for the GPU. While the 15-incher places itself in the midrange with a single GeForce GT 650M, the laptop is propelled into the high-end range when using an SLI configuration.

The other components can also compete with the contenders. The model we tested is dubbed MBG3DGE and sports 16 GB of DDR3 RAM (1600 MHz), a 1000 GB, 5400 rpm HDD and a small 16 GB mSATA SSD, which serves as a cache and cannot be used directly. Intel’s popular Core i7-3630QM takes care of CPU calculations. Its four cores can clock with 2.4 to 3.4 GHz in load. The glossy-type LED screen unsurprisingly has a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels. This bundle’s price: 1100 Euros (~$1481).

Buyers who do not want to spend more than 1000 Euros (~$1346) could opt for the MBG2JGE. The 100 Euros (~$135) cheaper family member sports a single GPU and a still fully sufficient eight GB of DDR3 RAM. The processor, screen and hard disk capacity are identical. Both laptops have Windows 8 64-bit in common.

Can the 15-incher attain a place among the premium gaming laptops? Our test shows whether the daring idea is successful or Lenovo goes belly up with it. Various complaints about the American version were made not long after its release (useless touchpads, non-functional power supplies, etc.).

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