IdeaPad Z570 - Perfect Value for Money

This time it’s not about a completely new laptop - the Lenovo IdeaPad Z570 was introduced last year, but it is relevant now. In the line of "home" mobile computers, the Z series is located approximately in the middle between the relatively more expensive Y470 and Y570 , and the very cheap Lenovo G-series laptops. Deprived of some of the proprietary advantages of the Y570 (such as a hybrid SSD + HDD, proprietary speaker system, etc.), the IdeaPad Z570 is very attractive in price, and in high-end configurations it provides very good performance.

Although I still use the fast, reliable, and long-lasting ThinkPad X-series as a mobile laptop, it is not entirely suitable for home use. But the Z570 would have suited this role ideally: a powerful machine with a quad-core Intel Core i7 processor does an excellent job of converting music and movies, plays video on an HDMI-connected LCD TV and serves as a central data warehouse for all other devices in the house. You get a sort of home server, very powerful and at the same time compact, if necessary, easily moving to a new place. Read more about what configurations Z570 have, how much they cost and what a powerful laptop with a price tag of up to 30 thousand rubles is capable of - read on.


My version of IdeaPad Z570 has the following specifications :

Processor : Intel Core i7-2630QM 2-2.9 GHz
Memory : 4 GB DDR3 (two 2 GB modules)
Storage : 750 GB HDD 5400 RPM
Screen : 15.6 inches 1366x768 pixels glossy
Wireless : WiFi 802.11n / Bluetooth
Connectors : headphones, microphone, 3xUSB 2.0, 1xUSB / eSATA, HDMI, VGA, Ethernet, card reader
Dimensions : 376x250x20-35.5 mm
Weight : 2.6 kg



As you can see, this laptop is inferior in iron to more powerful models (in particular, Y570) only on the part of the video card. NVIDIA GeForce 540M - provides quite decent performance in games, but it is hardly suitable for real fans, and when an external monitor or TV is connected, the frame refresh rate will drop sharply. In my case, games were not in the highest priority, but a powerful accelerator can be used to quickly convert video using CUDA.

The appearance of the



IdeaPad Z570, to my surprise, caught the attention of my girlfriend, who usually prefers extremely compact models like the U300s. Why did you like the far from the most compact and rather heavy Z570? The argument was murderous: "He is blue!" Indeed, the bright blue color of my specimen may well outweigh the rather modest design and large size. However, this laptop looks quite modern, and the cover of the display lid and the panel around the touchpad is very scratch resistant.



The island-style keyboard is equipped with an additional numeric keypad. By the way, the Fn button on this year's Idea models has moved to a more familiar place for most users to the right of the Ctrl key.



There is only one claim to this keyboard: the cursor keys are not separated from the rest, and at first it is quite difficult to “find” them without looking. However, this is a matter of habit.

The laptop is equipped with a full range of ports, including eSata for quick access to external drives, HDMI for connecting an external monitor or TV, and 4 USB ports (unlike the Y570, there are only 2.0).



At the leading edge are the wireless switches (right) and graphics (left). The latter allows you to disable the NVIDIA graphics card to save battery power.

Performance The

quad-core Intel Core i7 processor operates at a standard frequency of 2 GHz, and if necessary, it automatically accelerates to 2.9 GHz. In performance, it is slightly inferior to the capabilities of the desktop quad-core processor in the IdeaCentre B520but in synthetic tests it is about 60% ahead of the Y570 laptop with a dual-core Intel Core i5 processor, as well as previous-generation Core i7 dual-core models.

The GeForce 540M graphics installed in the Z570 are inferior to the GeForce 555M graphics cards installed in the Y570 by about 20% in artificial tests, and by more than a third in real games. Finally, this model uses a rather slow but capacious (750 GB) WD Scorpio Blue hard drive. Its performance indicators are not record-breaking, and perhaps in the future the owner of such a model will want to change the hard drive to a high-performance SSD.

Prices and specifications



The minimum cost of the IdeaPad Z570 is only 12 thousand rubles. Laptops for this price are equipped with the most basic Intel Pentium processors, and only integrated video. So this is a good option for a very cheap home laptop, exclusively for web surfing and similar, onerous matters. All other configurations differ in the amount of memory used by processors, hard drives, but the video card remains unchanged. The cheapest model with Intel Core i3 will cost about 20 thousand rubles. The most expensive option - with a quad-core Core i7 - costs a little less than 30 thousand rubles. Between these two price tags, there are many other configurations for every taste, including versions without an operating system. In general, the cost of the IdeaPad Z570 is about 5-8 thousand rubles less than that of the Y570 in a similar configuration.

Verdict

As I said at the beginning of the article, the IdeaPad Z570 with a top-end processor, but not the most productive graphics card, is quite successfully used as a home desktop and multimedia server. For any non-gaming tasks, this model is an excellent alternative to the powerful Y570. In the latter one can understand a higher price tag: a video card and, especially, a hybrid disk system justify this quite well. And the Z570 turned out to be the golden mean between budget models and top-end home laptops. Powerful, good looking and comfortable, at a very reasonable price.