I'm loving the laptop so far. Right now, I'm looking into getting the second graphics card for the Ultrabay and test out SLI. Also, I've been able to overclock the stock graphics card from 790 MHz to 1150MHz which is is way past GTX 660m levels. With two of those, that would be an outrageous amount of graphical power in a 14" laptop that is this lightweight and portable. I don't even know of anything close design wise, much less price wise (under $1000)
I paid $750 for the base model and ordered it direct from the Lenovo website. I don't know of anywhere else that carries the Y400 model. Newegg has the bigger Y500.
The thing about the base Y400 is that it comes with the Core i7 and 8GB of RAM for $750 while the Y500 is $800 for the same specs.
Yeah, it has what they call an Ultrabay which is basically the slot that the optical drive fits into. You can take out the DVD drive and put in some other things, including a second graphics card for SLI. They have hard drives, extra fans, and other stuff that can go in there too.
The second graphics card costs $230 though but that's not too bad considering your total cost would still be under 1k and your performance would be closer to that of a $1300 heavy gaming laptop.
I really like just about everything about it. The entire inside part that you touch is a nice satin finish metal and the outside feels like a carbon fiber like material (It probably actually isn't carbon fiber.) The back-lit keyboard is really nice and the keys just feel good to type on, not cheap like some other laptops do.
My biggest complaint is probably the screen which is really nice except it and the bezel around it are glossy and attract a lot of glare. Can't really use it in direct sunlight because of that.
Its only 1366x768 but that's not too bad on a 14" screen. It looks detailed enough for me. Plus, you really wouldn't want to game at something like 1080 because the card couldn't handle it. (at least not one of them by itself)
The speakers are the best I've ever heard on a laptop of any kind. They are very loud. My old Sony laptop wouldn't be loud enough to watch movies on it in the car with road noise. You could hear this thing loud and clear with all the windows down if you wanted to. I listen to rock and metal on it all the time while my $300 stereo system collects dust. Great for movies too with good bass. Way better than the lame "Beats audio" crap that is supposedly on the HP I got for my dad.
Battery life has been way better than what I expected. I've actually been on it all day (5+hours) doing web browsing and typing a paper with the brightness turned up all the way and I just now plugged it in when it warned me it was down to 20%. A little of this might be because I replaced the HDD with a Samsung Pro Series 840 SSD.
You can't really game on it much not plugged in though as the graphics card down-clocks itself to save power. I don't know if this can be adjusted but I don't ever do heavy gaming on battery anyway.
Overall, this thing feels and looks like something that cost twice as much, except maybe that area around the screen which is glossy and maybe even a little budget looking but not a huge deal.
One problem was that they shipped it from China and it took a little over two weeks to get here.