I recently had the opportunity to visit Gamescom. For those of you who don´t know, Gamescom is an annual fair, which takes place in Cologne, Germany, and of course focuses on all gaming related things.
This year was the first time that Lenovo was present on Gamescom, and I got a hands.on with the three new Gaming-PCs they introduced there. All three products were equipped with a choice of Intel Core i5 or i7 Quad-Core CPUs, as well as newest Pascal-based GeForce GTX 1080 GPUs by Nvidia - these specs are of course a given, and they enable these PCs for 4K-gaming and VR. What I was most interested in: How do these products differentiate from other PC models?
IdeaCentre Y710 Cube
The “Cube”-formfactor seems to be getting a lot of interest lately, not only Lenovo introduced a cube, also HP has one. The key feature of Lenovos cube PC, compared to other desktop products, its portability. While its not lightweight, its chassis is fairly compact, and its even got a handle - this product is meant to be taken to LAN parties for example. Its design has a typical Gamer-PC vibe, with a fairly edgy and masculine look. The handle is made out of a rubberized material, so it has a good grip.
Besides the portable design, the Cube also seems to be a slight attack on consoles, as Lenovo offers it in conjunction with a XBox controller. According to Lenovo, up to 8 XBox controllers can be connected with the cube for multi-player games.
IdeaCentre Y910 All-in-One
For the first time ever, Lenovo introduced a gaming PC in the All-in-One (AiO) formfactor. What separates this AiO from others is its accessibility, which is an important feature for gamers of course, who like to upgrade their hardware them selfs. Because of this, the Y910 AiO has two removable back-plates, one of which conceals the upgradeable GPU. The other one hides the storage and memory.
Other than that, Lenovo uses a 27° 2K (2560 x 1440) display - different from most other AiO-PCs, the display supports a refresh rate of 144 Hz and also 1 ms reaction-time. Also, the AiO has a little hook at the left side of the chassis, where you can hang up a headset - very practical.
| Removable GPU | hook for the headset |
IdeaPad Y910
The third and last product Lenovo announced on Gamescom is the IdeaPad Y910, a 17” gaming laptop. This is Lenovos flagship in the gaming laptop segment, and it is an update of the IdeaPad Y900, which was introduced on CES. Thus, it shares the same interesting attributes: A mechanical keyboard with different backlit-colors (typical gaming-design), a Turbo-button, which automatically overclocks the CPU, as well as a soft-touch palmrest, which is supposed to make gaming very comfortable.
Summary
The gaming products Lenovo introduced on Gamescom all try to attack the competition not only by their raw specs, but also their design, which is the right way in my opinion. All three of them certainly aren´t your typical mainstream gaming rig (which Lenovo also offers in form of the Y700 laptops and Y900 desktops), which makes them interesting. For Lenovo the hardcore-gaming market is still a new field, so we have to see how Lenovo can perform in the face of established competitors like Asus and MSI.