You’ll notice that the HDMI, VGA, and DVI-D ports on the motherboard are blocked off by rubber stoppers, as the motherboard’s graphic outputs are disabled; instead, you'd use the GeForce GTX 970’s full-size HDMI, DVI-D, or three DisplayPort connectors to connect any monitors.
There’s more connectivity on the front of the IdeaCentre Y900's chassis. Angled along the top, you’ll find four USB 3.0 ports, the seven-format flash-memory-card reader, and separate headphone and microphone jacks. The metal power button is on top of the chassis, softly illuminated in white when the system is powered on. To open the optical drive, you'll press the shiny black strip below the right side of the upper 5.25-inch bay.
That's it for the wired stuff. If you want to pursue wireless connectivity, the IdeaCentre Y900 includes built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi wireless—that isn't necessarily common in desktops, so kudos to Lenovo for that—as well as integrated Bluetooth.
Bundled Peripherals
Lenovo includes a keyboard and mouse with the IdeaCentre Y900. Although we normally don't give much weight to the included peripherals on a desktop, these deserve special mention.
The keyboard is Lenovo’s snazzy new Y Gaming Mechanical Keyboard, which goes for $139.99 by itself. It has an outstanding click-clack feel thanks to its mechanical, red-backlit switches. All of the keys, including the macros, are backlit, with five brightness levels.
The keys have a matte finish, with the exception of the aggressively textured spacebar. At the upper right you’ll find media playback and volume-control buttons. The gaming macro keys on the far left side have three functions each, in conjunction with the M1 to M3 keys at the upper left, for 18 total macros you can trigger directly. The backlighting controls are also located at the upper left, along with the Windows-key disable button. You can even individually turn on and off the backlighting for the WASD cluster, should you desire.
Conveniently, along the keyboard’s right edge are a USB pass-through port and two audio jacks, meaning you don’t need to have your headset cables snaking all the way down to the tower. The keyboard also includes a detachable palm-rest portion. The only awkward part about this keyboard is that it has two USB connectors – one for the keyboard, and one for the USB and audio connections. But that's the norm for any keyboard with a USB pass-through port aboard.
The Lenovo Y Gaming Precision Mouse is also included with the IdeaCentre Y900. It retails for $69.99 by itself. Lenovo says the specialized switches under its main buttons are good for 20 million clicks. Indeed, the clicks have a solid feel, and we also liked the rubberized mouse wheel.
There are a total of nine programmable buttons via the included software, and the resolution/dpi is switchable on the fly. Like some higher-end gaming mice on the market, this mouse has removable weight cartridges, accessible by turning a circular cover on the mouse’s underside…
We found the mouse fit our hands well, though we actually preferred the more compact shape of the less expensive mouse included with the IdeaCentre Y700. This is a big mouse, especially in length; if you have small hands, it may feel a bit overwhelming. The rubberized surfaces and textured patterns on the back edges help keep your hand secure during quick movements. It’s only available in a right-handed design.
Components
As we mentioned earlier on, our IdeaCentre Y900 is a Best Buy-specific version (model Y900 34ISZ 900D) that retailed for $1,599 at this writing. This is but one configuration of the Y900; others are available on Lenovo.com.
As configured, our IdeaCentre Y900’s crown jewel was its “Skylake” Core i7-6700K processor, the fastest quad-core offered by Intel. It runs at a scorching 4GHz, with Turbo Boost support for speeds up to 4.2GHz. The chip has a thermal-design-power (TDP) rating of 91 watts, as opposed to the 65 watts of the standard Core i7-6700, which runs at “only” 3.4GHz, with a Turbo Boost to 4GHz. The “K” indicates the i7-6700K has unlocked multipliers, though we found no overclocking support in the IdeaCentre Y900’s BIOS. It probably wouldn’t be a good idea anyway, as the standard air CPU cooler likely wouldn’t have much, if any, cooling overhead. That’s actually one of the IdeaCentre Y900’s major downsides; an entry-level liquid-cooling setup would have been much preferred.
Our review unit came with 8GB of RAM (in the form of two 4GB modules), which is about half as much as we’d like to see in a desktop with this caliber of components. The price difference between 8GB and 16GB in the aftermarket was about $50 at the time of writing. That said, 8GB is sufficient for most games and moderate multitasking. As previously mentioned, the IdeaCentre Y900 is easy enough to upgrade with more memory via its four DIMM slots. Two DIMM slots are free in this model, so you can purchase a two-DIMM kit and add it to the already-installed 8GB. The IdeaCentre Y900 officially supports up to 32GB, and is sold as such, but we suspect it may work with up to 64GB, the maximum supported by Intel’s quad-core “Skylake” processors.
The 120GB SSD in our review unit is a Lenovo-specific variant by Samsung. It wasn’t the speediest, but it is certainly far more responsive than a regular hard drive. The IdeaCentre Y900 we tested also included a secondary 2TB drive for mass-data storage, and you’ll likely have to use it judiciously, as the 120GB SSD will fill up quickly. It's worth noting that the models on Lenovo.com all include 256GB SSDs as standard equipment, a more realistic baseline boot-drive capacity, if you ask us, for a gaming tower. Game installs munch up the gigs fast.
The GeForce GTX 970 4GB graphics card in our review unit has plenty of power to run modern games at a 1080p or 1440p resolution. As we’ll see in the next section, its performance is typically at least 50 percent higher than what we saw from the GeForce GTX 960$189.99 at Amazon, which is standard fare in the IdeaCentre Y700. The Y900 is also available in configurations from Lenovo with an even more powerful 4GB GeForce GTX 980$715.00 at Amazon card, though that’s overkill if all you’re doing is 1080p gaming on one screen.
To our disappointment, the IdeaCentre Y900 isn’t available in customizable configurations. There’s a shell configuration available on Lenovo.com for $899.99 with no graphics card, 4GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD, and no secondary hard drive. It also doesn’t include the mechanical keyboard or laser mouse of our review unit. It might be the way to go if you want to add your own graphics card, upgrade the RAM yourself, and expand the storage. But otherwise, you have to order off the fixed menu.
We had no heat-related issues while testing the IdeaCentre Y900. We noticed its CPU cooler tended to kick into high gear while gaming and running CPU-intensive applications, and it wasn’t all that quiet. The 120mm case fans are also louder than expected, but at idle and during general usage, we were hardly able to hear them.
Software-wise, the IdeaCentre Y900 is mostly free of bloatware. There’s a McAfee trial and a couple of Lenovo apps, but it’s otherwise clean.
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