Lenovo's IdeaPad Y560D 3D Laptop Reviewed

Game Performance: Half Life 2: Episode 2, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and WoW Gaming Performance

We ran the Y560D through our standard tests of Half Life 2: Episode 2 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, but, given how well the laptop did in these benchmarks, we threw in some World of Warcraft benchmarks with varying detail levels. Also note, we've substituted a couple of test machines to offer an array of results at the same resolution. 


The Y560D hammers the competition here thanks to the intersection of its low-resolution display and higher-end GPU. This is the one unintended benefit of a display with pixels the size of postage stamps—the graphics card has plenty of headroom left if you care to crank up the quality levels.

We experimented with Half Life 2: Episode 2 and found it was possible to run the game with 4x MSAA and all game details turned to full at 67 fps. If you prefer supersampling antialiasing, 2xSSAA brought the game to 55 fps while 4xSSAA was playable (if just barely) at 32.53 fps. That's with all detail levels at full—performance would improve if other graphical goodies were sacrificed for framerate.

In World of Warcraft we chose to benchmark both Dalaran and repeated runs through the 5-man instance The Halls of Reflection. While HoR is a small dungeon with relatively little scenery, it's an area where players tend to cast numerous spells with multiple, overlapping graphical effects.

Dalaran framerates are always terrible around 8 PM; 24.4 fps is near the best anyone can reasonably hope for on a midrange system. Without antialiasing enabled, Halls of Reflection was downright smooth; even enabling 2x supersampling left the framerate at a thoroughly playable 67 fps.