Lenovo Ideapad Y430

Full Review

The Ideapad Y430 has distinctive design and a mix of multimedia and entertainment features. On the exterior, with its characteristic textured red screen cover coupled with a dropped hinge, the Y430 is a stylish laptop. The 14.1-inch widescreen display is glossy, bright and sharp, but has poor viewing angles; it’s integrated with a 1.3MP webcam on the top.

The laptop's built like a tank and its keyboard’s a treat to work on, with comfortable full sized keys and no flex whatsoever. The touchpad, with its twin mouse buttons, is fairly responsive, and there’s ample palmrest to work with. Above the keyboard, there’s a panel of touch-sensitive multimedia buttons with a volume control knob placed on the right. We liked the Y430's thoughtful design elements and unmatched build and keyboard compared to others like HP Pavilion dv4 and Acer Aspire Timeline 4810T.

The Ideapad Y430 is based on a 2-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 processor and the Intel PM45 chipset. There’s 2GB of DDR3 RAM, 320GB hard drive (5400rpm), and a GeForce 9300M GS 256MB graphics card. Along with all that, you get 3 USB ports, a DVD writer, draft-N Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity; and HDMI, Firewire, SPDIF, and VGA ports round up the gamut of entertainment and multimedia related connectivity options. Surprisingly, however, the Ideapad Y430 doesn’t support Gigabit Ethernet, a minor disappointment amidst the abundance of riches on offer. But it's still a pretty good mainstream laptop, on the evidence of its hardware specs.

The Ideapad Y430 comes with Lenovo’s VeriFace face-recognition technology, which lets you login to your laptop without having to type a password. It also has Dolby Home Theater Surround Sound speakers, placed on the front edge of the laptop, and a subwoofer tucked away on the bottom. Sound output is good, but nothing we haven’t heard. WorldBench 6 pegged the Ideapad Y430’s overall performance at 81. Gaming's good and so is high definition movie playback, both at 720p and 1080p video, on the GeForce 9300M GS. The 6-cell battery lasted an acceptable 2 hours 50 minutes in Mobile Mark 07’s battery benchmark, but it could have been better. However, the laptop has an annoying little alarm every time the battery drains below 10 percent, and try as much we did, we couldn’t quite find a way to mute it.

Bottom Line

An attractive laptop with its red mesh finish on screen lid. The Ideapad Y430 comes with a decent set of onboard speakers with a woofer tucked away in the base. The build quality and keyboard are unmatched. A worthwhile pick for a mainstream laptop geared for multimedia usage.