Buyer's Remorse? Asus N550JV or Ideapad Y510p

Barky

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Dec 3, 2013
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I picked up the Asus N550JV (i7-4700HQ, 8gb DDR3, NVIDIA Geforce GT 750M 2GB, 1 TB 5400 rpm, full HD IPS non-touchscreen) as a Gold Box deal for $850 yesterday.

I'm a moderate gamer/student/photoshop-user and felt that would fit my needs for a good price. However, now I see the Lenovo Ideapad Y510p (with the dual SLI gpus and hybrid drive) for about $980. Is it worth cancelling my order and picking the Lenovo up for about $130 more?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834313584

I imagine it's more future-proof, but I've had two Lenovos for my past two laptops and feel like their build quality has steadily declined.

Maybe it's just typical buyer's remorse, but I'm not convinced the ASUS was a good deal. I've read most of the threads on this particular comparison, and most seem to point to the Y510p as the better performer. Can anyone speak to differences in build quality, real-world battery life (I imagine it's pretty poor with the SLI), or general performance? I have a 7200 rpm HDD to replace the 5400 the ASUS ships with, but is the hybrid drive worthwhile? Waiting an extra few seconds to wake from hibernate isn't a big deal to me.
 
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Well there's no such thing as future proof no matter how much you spend. And the sad truth about laptops is the higher up you go, the more likely your system is to depreciate in value very quickly. I have a Lenovo Y500 (Core i7-3630QM, 8GB GDDR3, 16GB SSD cache, 1TB HD, GTX 750M) and it's easily the best laptop I've ever owned. The only thing I don't like on it is the somewhat finicky track pad although I use a mouse most of the time so it doesn't really bother me that much.

g-unit1111

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Well there's no such thing as future proof no matter how much you spend. And the sad truth about laptops is the higher up you go, the more likely your system is to depreciate in value very quickly. I have a Lenovo Y500 (Core i7-3630QM, 8GB GDDR3, 16GB SSD cache, 1TB HD, GTX 750M) and it's easily the best laptop I've ever owned. The only thing I don't like on it is the somewhat finicky track pad although I use a mouse most of the time so it doesn't really bother me that much.
 
Solution

g-unit1111

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Maybe it's just typical buyer's remorse, but I'm not convinced the ASUS was a good deal. I've read most of the threads on this particular comparison, and most seem to point to the Y510p as the better performer. Can anyone speak to differences in build quality, real-world battery life (I imagine it's pretty poor with the SLI), or general performance? I have a 7200 rpm HDD to replace the 5400 the ASUS ships with, but is the hybrid drive worthwhile? Waiting an extra few seconds to wake from hibernate isn't a big deal to me.

As far as the hard drives go my Lenovo has a 5400 RPM hard drive but with the SSD cache you don't really notice the slow load times. Hybrid drives aren't really worth it from my experience. If you're going to get an SSD get the real thing or don't get one. Samsung makes a 1TB SSD but it's ridiculously expensive right now.
 
The one thing to consider is that not every game will make use of SLI. The games that don't will more or less run just as well on both laptops. Games that can take advantage of SLI will run better on the Lenovo.

Personally, I prefer a single powerful graphics card / chip for laptop / desktops verses SLI or XFire, but that's just me.