Decision on Gaming Laptop (Lenovo y500)

[zackk101]

Hi,
I'm in the market for a cheap gaming laptop. I know someone who is willing to sell me a lenovo y500 with an i7 3630qm processor and gt 750m 2gb ddr5 graphics card for $400-450. I know that the gt 750m is outdated, but will it be able to run modern games at medium settings? The benchmarks for it online don't show much. Anyways, should I jump on this deal? Or would it be worth it to spend $100-200 more on a new laptop? Also, I am able to purchase an extra gt750m to use in this laptops ultrabay port for about $100 more to use in sli. And as always, thanks in advance! -Zack

 

[hang-the-9]

That is not that bad for a deal, you won't find a laptop that fast for under 800 new. Just make sure you test it with a few games to make sure it does not crash.

Don't know about running the system in SLI, look at the specs for it and see if it offers that option. Won't be in the ultrabay thought, it would be a second slot on the motherboard.

 

[CRITICALThinker]

The y500 does have an ultrabay, but the battery life will take a significant hit. Also, the SLI support for games is normally not always perfect, or even there for smaller games. http/www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-750M.90245.0.html

http/www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-750M-SLI.91280.0.html

 

[BananaTrain]

I have the older 650M SLI version. Like what others have mentioned many games will not show noticeable performance increase.

I tried seeing for myself by removing the spare graphics card and it seems throttling is sometimes a bigger deal than the benefit of a spare card. I usually saw around a 20-60% increase from running SLI.
By the way im not sure if the 750M is the same, but the plastic surface near the exhaust ports gets too hot to touch. Which cant be good on the electronics. So like what others have mentioned if you are buying a 2 year old laptop, make sure you try the laptop on some games to check for any hardware issues.

You wont be running Crysis 3 on this thing, but I could play many online games are fine on max until throttling started dropping my frame rate close to 20 fps.