Lenovo has launched a new 17-inch touchscreen gaming laptop

There are quite a few gaming laptops out there, and some are quite powerful and somewhat heavy, but few are touch-enabled, especially when they have a big 17” display. The Lenovo Y70 is the first such laptop from Lenovo, and Windows 8 users should appreciate the arrival of the touch option in this line of product from Lenovo. Inside, you will find a fast CPU and GPU combo, namely the Intel Core i7 and the NVIDIA GTX-860M with 4GB of GDDR5 video memory, that’s a lot. This should allow gamers to play with the highest resolution textures, which is very nice considering how much detail they bring to games.

Gaming laptops have always been huge boat anchors with questionable design decisions and plenty of power underneath the hood. In recent years, however, companies like Alienware and Razer have attempted to put the gaming laptop on a bit of a diet, slimming things down and muting the design language a bit. Lenovo, on the other hand, is taking things in a different direction. The company’s new Y70 Touch gaming laptop (the “Y” might as well stand for YOLO) weighs in at a whopping 7.5 pounds, and Lenovo claims that makes it “thinner and lighter” than most laptops in its class. That indeed might be the case, because the Y70 Touch eschews the piddly 13- and 14-inch screens found on Alienware and Razer’s latest laptops. Instead, it packs a 17-inch display, which used to be table stakes in gaming laptops until people realized that it was more beneficial to actually be able to transport their computers. However, the Y70 Touch does have a nice trick — as you might have guessed, that screen is fully touch-compatible. While most games won’t take advantage of this feature, it does add a nice layer of utility to the machine. Lenovo didn’t publish baseline specs, but you can max the machine out with a Core i7 processor, Nvidia GTX graphics, up to 16GB of RAM, and either a 1TB hard drive or 256GB of solid-state storage. Battery life is expectedly average: up to five hours, but we’re guessing that isn’t under a heavy gaming load.