Lenovo IdeaPad Y530

The IdeaPad Y530 is a multimedia notebook from Lenovo with surround speakers and subwoofer, HDMI out, touch-sensitive media controls, and a "frameless" display panel. With a wide range of multimedia features this notebook is aimed at dorm rooms or even acting as the media hub for a home theater system. Priced at $999, just how well does the Lenovo IdeaPad Y530 stand up against the competition in a pretty packed market segment?

Performance

The performance of the Lenovo IdeaPad Y530 with an Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 processor and NVIDIA 9300M graphics card was slightly under multimedia oriented notebooks like the Gateway MC7803u which offered a better graphics card. For day to day use or enjoying high definition video content the Y530 performed quite well. For the average user, both machines performed at roughly the same speed for web browsing, watching movies, typing documents, and fast startups or shutdowns. Gaming is where the Y530 falls behind the competition, equipped with only a 9300M graphics card while others use a more powerful graphics card such as the ATI 3650. This could mean the difference between running some of the latest games with at moderate resolution or lowering the resolution and heavily tweaking the detail settings.

WPrime is a benchmark similar to Super Pi in that it forces the processor to do intense mathematical calculations, but the difference is this application is multi-threaded and represents dual core processors better. Lower numbers indicate better performance.