Lenovo's new gaming laptop is surprisingly light for a 17-inch machine
Slimmed-down gaming laptops seem to be all the rage, but most of the designs we've seen don't have anything larger than a 14-inch display. Lenovo, however, appears to be taking a chance on big screens. The company just announced the Y70 Touch, a 17-inch machine that manages to come in at just 7.5 pounds, making it surprisingly thin and light for its size class. Other than having a larger screen, it features the same design as the existing Y50, which is to say it sports a brushed-metal chassis and red backlit keyboard (you can't have a gaming laptop without red accents, apparently). Tucked on the bottom you'll find a subwoofer with JBL speakers. Unfortunately, the touchscreen is slightly less impressive: It tops out at 1,920 x 1,080 resolution, whereas many smaller systems now give you the option of playing at 3,200 x 1,800 or 2,560 x 1,440.
Under the hood, the Y70 combines a quad-core Haswell-series Core i7 processor and up to 16GB of RAM and NVIDIA GTX graphics, with a 4GB 860M GPU being the highest-end option. As for storage, you can opt for either a 256 SSD or a 1TB hybrid hard drive with 8GB of cache. Battery life, meanwhile, is rated at five hours -- not that you're likely to travel without a charger. Look for it in October, starting at $1,299. As ever, Lenovo won't let you configure these to order; there'll instead be several pre-configured models to choose from.
Lastly, Lenovo also announced a new gaming desktop, the Erazer X315. To be clear, this won't replace either the existing X510 or X700; this is just meant to be a more affordable option, at $599. For the money, you get up to an AMD Kaveri A10-7850K processor, a 2GB R9 260 GPU, up to 12GB of RAM and up to 2TB of storage with 8GB of cache to go with it. Expect that to go on sale sometime in November.
