Performance – Synthetic GPU/Gaming

Synthetic GPU Benchmarks

The most interesting question today is how well the Y50 fares versus the Y500 in spite of its slimmer form factor and lighter weight. We should expect at the very least acceptable results thanks to the inclusion of an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 860M with 2 GB of GDDR5 VRAM. There’s also a variation with 4 GB of VRAM, but as previously mentioned, it’s only available on the 16 GB DDR3 RAM configuration of the machine. Still, depending on your priorities, it may well be worth springing for the upgrade; after all, the difference in cost is only around $90.

To quickly recap, again, the Y500 featured not one but two GT 650M video cards (each with 2 GB of GDDR5 of their own). For other comparisons, we’ve chosen the most appropriate candidates from the lineup of other gaming PCs we’ve recently reviewed: the ASUS G750JX (GTX 770M w/ 3 GB) and the top dog MSI GT70 (GTX 880M w/ 8 GB), specifically.

Let’s dive right into benchmarks.

3DMark

Not a bad performance; predictably well ahead of the MSI GE40 (GTX 760M w/ 2 GB), and (in Fire Strike), a whopping 33% above the Y500. The Y50 even somehow beats the G750JX here, though it lags a bit in Cloud Gate. Naturally, the GT70 wipes the floor with the rest of the field, with a score 36% above even that of the Y50.

3DMark 11

Much the same here in 3DMark 11, except the G750JX retakes its appropriate position between the Y50 and GT70. There’s also a GT60 from 2013 in the mix, as well as the aging Origin EON17-S, which just a couple of years ago was state of the art. My, how things change with age.

Gaming Benchmarks

Now for real games.

Just Cause 2

The Y50 Touch has no trouble here, beating even the more powerful G750JX and MSI GT60. It’s worth mentioning that those two notebooks were running Windows 8 with switchable graphics, and a special hack was necessary to make JC2 even run on the machines—so that may very well be the reason for the discrepancy. Nevertheless, the Y50 Touch earns a good result.

Bioshock Infinite

Looking more like it. That is to say, a solid performance, but nothing comparable to the high-end beasts at the top of the graph. This is about the discrepancy we expect to see when moving between these configurations.

Metro 2033

Metro isn’t nice to anyone, and the Y50 Touch hardly cracks playable frame rates in the automated benchmark script. In fact, the only notebook of the bunch that does is the MSI GT70 with its 41 fps. The Y50 Touch is again over 35% off (40% in this case) the GT70’s pack-leading score here.

StarCraft II

Due most likely to continued updates, these last two games have seen shifting in performance results over the course of the past few months in our benchmarks. We continue to provide them for reference, but it’s purely referential and less helpful in a comparative sense. In light of that, it’s fair enough to simply say that the Y50 Touch should be able to handle SC2 without any trouble on all but the very highest of settings.

Diablo III

Diablo III is a game that continues to seriously improve with every subsequent patch, but like StarCraft II, continued updates have had called into question its efficacy as a comparative benchmark candidate. Nevertheless, it’s certainly more reliable than SC2 has recently proven to be, and by looking at the graph, we can see that running bounties and Greater Rifts on the Y50 Touch should pose no issues for the player.

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