Toshiba Announces UHD Satellite Radius 12, Satellite Radius 14, And Satellite Click 10 PCs At IFA

Toshiba announced a trio of convertible notebooks today. The two Satellite devices offer a 360° hinge, and the third device is the Satellite Click 10 which is a tablet with an attachable keyboard. It looks like Toshiba has gone all out here with s…

Lenovo Launches Ideapad Y700 Touch Gaming Laptop, Y700 And Y900 Gaming Desktops, And Accessories

Lenovo has been busy at IFA 2015. They refreshed their consumer PC lineup, announced some ThinkPads, and are now announcing some updates to their gaming lineup. The Lenovo Y series sees an updated Y700 Touch laptop along with a couple of desktops, and Lenovo is jumping in on the gaming accessories with a mechanical keyboard, mouse, surround headset, and more.

The Lenovo ideapad Y700 Touch is a 15.6-inch gaming laptop powered by Intel’s 6^th generation Skylake processors. The laptop features a 1920×1080 display, or you can outfit it with a 3840×2160 offering. The GPU is a NVIDIA GTX 960M which is not unexpected at the starting price of $799. You can get up to 512 GB of SSD or up to 1 TB of HDD or SSHD storage. The battery life is likely going to be not fantastic with just a 60 Wh battery, but gaming laptops are never known for great battery life. Intel outfits the Y700 Touch with a red backlit keyboard, and stereo JBL speakers with a 3 watt subwoofer.

There will also be an ideapad Y700 without touch, and this will be available in both 15.6-inch models similar to the touch model, and a 17.3-inch version with a 1920×1080 display as the only offering. The 15.6-inch non-touch model will also be available with the Intel RealSense 3D camera system for Windows Hello support.

Lenovo is also rolling out some new gaming desktops. The ideacenter Y700 comes with a 65 watt Core i7 processor and a NVIDIA GTX 970 GPU. You can outfit the desktop with up to 32 GB of DDR4 memory, and it comes with up to 256 GB SSD storage and up to 2 TB of SSHD. As a desktop, there are more expansion bays as well with 4 x 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch bays, and all of this is powered by a 450 watt PSU. The Y900 offering bumps the CPU up to the Skylake-K series with a 95 watt TDP, and the GPU gets bumped to the GTX 980. Memory is once again DDR4 but with up to 64 GB available. The PSU is also bumped to a 625 watt unit. The 34 liter cases are styled in the same motif as the Y gaming laptops, and the Y900 is shown with a side panel window.

Lenovo is also rolling out accessories to go with their Y series gaming systems. The Y Gaming Surround Sound Headset is a USB 3.0 headset with a 40 mm Neodymium driver. The microphone is detachable on this 7.1 headset, and offers noise cancelling. The headset comes in at 350 grams and will be on sale for $70.

They are also offering the Y Gaming Precision Mouse, with up to 8200 DPI and 1 KHz polling, along with the Y Gaming Mouse Pad which is 350mm x 250mm with a braided locked edge design. The mouse will be available in September for $70.

Lenovo is also going to be offering a mechanical switch keyboard which has a detachable palm rest, a 3.5mm audio input and output, and six macro keys. It will be available for $140 in September.

If you need to carry all of this around, Lenovo is also offering a Y Gaming Active Backpack which will hold up to a 17.3-inch laptop and compartments tailored for gaming gear. It will retail for $100.

Source: Lenovo

ASUS Refreshes ROG Laptops With G752 and Liquid Cooled GX700 Series

Today at IFA ASUS is announcing some of its fall laptop lineup. As with the other vendors, they have been waiting on Windows 10 which launched at the end of July, and Intel’s Skylake processors which launched just a few hours ago. The combination of new operating system and new processor is likely going to mean there are a lot of new products coming out in the next while.

Specifically in this announcement is the refresh of the Republic of Gamers laptops. The G752 is an upgrade to the G751 that we reviewed. New of course is Windows 10 installed by default, as well as Intel’s Skylake quad-core processor. There will be two options depending on the model purchased, with the Core i7-6700HQ processor as the base. This is a quad-core, eight-thread Core i7 with a 2.6 GHz base frequency and up to 3.5 GHz Turbo on a single core. On the top tier G752 you can get the Core i7-6820HK model, which is 2.7 GHz to 3.6 GHz and bumps the L3 cache from 6 MB to 8 MB. Being a K part, it means that it is overclockable as well which may let adventurous owners squeeze some extra performance out assuming they can keep the laptop cool. The G751 that we tested actually had a great cooling system so I don’t see that being a big issue. As is usual for a mobile quad-core, these are 45W CPUs.

The G752 also keeps what is great about the G751, with the NVIDIA GTX 980M GPU available to handle the graphics duties. One of the great features from the G751 was the introduction of NVIDIA’s G-Sync technology and I am pleased to say this has continued with the G752. The big difference though is that the G752 will be offered with a 1920×1080 panel as the base model, but the top version will be available with a 3840×2160 panel for the 17.3-inch laptop.

The G752 is not just a spec upgrade either. ASUS is rolling out a new chassis with a new design. It is not a huge departure from the outgoing G751 but it does clean up the lines and make the laptop a lot sleeker in my opinion. It will also be available in three colors, with plasma copper, armor titanium, and lava red options. The keyboard is a gaming keyboard with anti-ghosting 30-key rollover and 2.5 mm of travel in the keys. Thunderbolt 3 will also be available, and clearly Intel is pushing this quite heavily now that it can be piggybacked on a USB-C port.

I quite liked the G751 but I found the chassis to be a bit dated, so these updates make it a pretty compelling gaming laptop. It will be available in Q4 starting at $1499.

The big announcement from ASUS though is a completely new gaming laptop called the GX700 series. This is a new flagship gaming laptop from the company and they have tried to pack in quite a few unique features to differentiate from the competition. Someone can correct me if I am mistaken here, but I believe this is the first modern gaming laptop to be offered with a closed loop liquid cooling system. We have seen what a dramatic difference this can make under load on the recently launched AMD Fury X GPU, and ASUS is just teasing us for the moment and will release more details about this later. It will feature a 3840×2160 17.3-inch display, and a yet to be determined GeForce GTX graphics system. The GX700 will feature the mobile K-series Skylake processors much like the G752 and will therefore support overclocking. With the water cooling system, this could make for a pretty powerful laptop. The GX700 will be released in Q4 as well but the price is not final yet.

Source: ASUS