Lenovo believes that the Australian market is ready for PC gaming with both Acer and Lenovo now looking to challenge Alienware.
Last night at a packed press conference in Berlin Lenovo rolled out a new gaming range with the Chinese Company now in discussions with both Harvey Norman and JB Hi Fi to range gaming products.
The audience in Berlin were told that the average age for PC gaming is 35, 50% are women and that PC gaming is bigger than console gaming.
Lenovo’s new gaming range, unveiled at IFA 2015, shows that the company is now serious about courting PC gamers.
The new ideacentre (yes, all-lower-case) Y700 and Y900 desktops sport the latest Intel Skylake Core i7 and i5 processors, with the Y700 most likely equipped with one of the newly unveiled mainstream Skylake-S chips, and the Y900 with a full-fat 95W TDP overclock able K-series Skylake chip.
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Most importantly for gamers, the ideacentres will be equipped with far better graphics cards than the Nvidia GTX 760 featured in Lenovo’s current gaming desktops. The Y900 goes all the way up to a 4GB GTX 980, while the Y700 tops out at a 4GB GTX 970. Both machines sport Blu-ray optical drives, 2×2 AC wireless, and the latest DDR4 RAM, which can be configured up to 64GB in the Y900. The Y900 also features support for faster PCIe M.2 SSDs.
The new case delivers easy access to the internals should you want to swap out any components at a later date.
Pricing and launch dates for Australia have not been announced.
But that’s not all: Lenovo is also getting into gaming peripherals, under a new “Y Gaming” banner. While it’s unlikely they’ll compete with the likes of Razer or Corsair on the features front, they are at least reasonably priced. There’s a headset, which features virtual 7.1 surround, a removable mic, and red LED lighting; a mouse with a 8200 DPI laser sensor, eight programmable buttons, and 1000Hz polling rate; a mechanical keyboard with as-yet-unnamed switches; a gaming backpack for lugging around up to 17-inch gaming laptops, and a mouse mat for, uhh, mousing. All will be available in September globally with JB Hi Fi tipped to trial the new range.
