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I haven't seen any laptop displays that were too grainy. LG was notorious for heavy AG coating on their IPS models, but stopped that practice when Samsung's PLS came with a low grain coating and looked a heck of a lot better. Glossy has more vivid color usually in the dark, but once it's bright, it makes up for it. Blacks become hell and all apparent contrast gets lost quickly. My MSI GT685 doesn't have a strong anti-glare grain on it, but it can't be overclocked. No side effects. I started with 96hz for a while, but since I rarely watch 24fps video, 108 became my standard. I also tried 120, but that introduced snow in games which tells me that something (RAMDAC, panel PCB) did not support that speed. Weirdly enough the problem only showed up on gaming, not desktop. Sorry for the late reply, as I have been hella-busy lately. Haven't tried it but I plan to and let you know.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that requires 3 antennae doesn't it? To do that you'd need to find a place to run a third antenna wire. Intel 5300 cards are 450mbps, but from photos they look to be a triple antenna model. Here's an example photo: Intel 450Mbps WiFi Link 5300 agn MIMO An HMW Mini PCI E Half Size WLAN Card | eBay

Why spend money when you don't have to? If it's covered under warranty he may as well have it done regardless. These are relatively new laptops with some teething pains obviously, so better to send them back a faulty unit and have them look at it and examine what is wrong, hopefully improving the "next batches". You have no idea how much money I've spent on "backup" parts for PCs that went down due to motherboard, CPU, or video card failures. It's a never ending cycle downwards.

You may want to reduce the RAM speed. I had it at some amount like that between 2500 and 2600mhz, and it was slower on benchmarks than 2240. GDDR5 has an error checking mechanism that causes bus retries when errors begin to happen. You could probably push the RAM to 3000 but it will cause so many retries that performance will be lower at higher speeds. The 1210 on the core sounds pretty good though. I can only go to 1100 and then artifacts start, but I am not over volting, and often I use boost modifier so that it will drop clock speed when temps are too high.

At 1100mhz on the SLi'd adapters I get artifacting so I backed down to 1080, and with Unigine my best performance has come at 1080-1090 mhz on the core, and RAM at 2200-2250 as well, and so far it's mostly stutter-free and smooth in Skyrim and Borderlands 2. I will install more intensive games like Crysis 3 and Sleeping Dogs this upcoming weekend to play around some more. Anything above 2260-2270 on the RAM and my minimum and maximum frame rates drop. Strange with Unigine, that while the peak speed of the SLi'd adapters far outstrips what my MSI GT685 does with the i7 2820qm and GTX 580m, with an overclock to 720/1650 from 620/1500, the OC'd GTX 580m outscores the Ideapad Y500. This is where we get into the SLi'd minimum frame rate difference, and this can also impact the score. Alternatively, the overclock-able LED panel on the Y500 makes gaming and movies a bit nicer. Less judder on 24fps movies and less tearing on games that occasionally exceed the stock 60hz frame rate withOUT v-sync.

There's also this: 15 6'' Anti Glare Cover Keyboard Skin Protector FOR IBM Lenovo Ideapad Y580 Y500 | eBay I can't attest to the quality, as generally applying an anti-glare film after-the-fact will induce a highly grainy appearance. I'm loathe to replace the panel, now that I've figured out that I can overclock the panel to 108hz without frame skipping. This allows me to keep v-sync off and not worry about tearing except in quite old games with obscenely high or spiking fps.

It would be nice if we had a memory-only benchmark or error-checker type utility like Memtest that could tell us if the GDDR5 error checking is slowing things down, or even something that reads GDDR5 registers that tell us if error checking is working. I might try the Folding@home memory tester Memtest CL/G80 and see if there is any meaningful data that comes from that. I know with Furmark I haven't been able to get both GPUs active so far on the Y500. I can't remember if it worked both GPUs with SLI'd cards on a desktop as well. I'll take a look when I get my desktop back together, as it's currently dismembered. I agree on the 750m versus 650m though. It is just a voltage and core bump. Not very useful unless the owner is not interested, or capable of overclocking the 650m. I remember looking at the gt 750m, thinking that I was losing out by getting the retail/distribution version of the Y500, and then I read some posts here and got info from Anandtech and saw that it was architecturally a re-badged 650m that just pushes the thermal envelope more, which can be an issue with the shared CPU/GPU cooling on these units. Edit: It's an error-checking and re-transmission architecture as shown here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2841/12

Hey there, I have an MSI GT685-818US (GT683 with the GTX 580m and i5) that I've recently upgraded from an I5 2430M to an I7 2820QM. It is using the 3.0Z BIOS of the GT683. The laptop runs great without issue on this CPU. Any issue here using the modded BIOS with the upgraded CPU, or should I switch back to the original i5 2430m? I was thinking of re-flashing the stock BIOS with the new CPU to ensure this would work. Thanks!

Sorry for somewhat reviving this thread, but keep in mind that wide gamut, while gorgeous, is a result of over-saturated and ultimately inaccurate colors. The wide gamut is suitable for color-managed applications with a proper ICM profile which should be generated as a result of calibration. The color managed apps will read the ICM (color) profile and perform the proper changes to show an accurate image. nVidia cards will throw out any calibration data when a 3D application (DirectX, OpenGL) is loaded, and only the nVidia control panel color controls have any effect, while on AMD GPUs you can preserve color calibration in games using PowerStrip with the VGA color look up tables that can be captured and saved in a PowerStrip profile. I've done this and it works, but with wide gamut display you will have balanced, but still over-saturated color. So while the stats might sound good, the resulting image is not necessarily accurate. Also it's a 6-bit display, so it's trying to display a larger color range with the same number of bits, which can cause banding and weird effects. It's a 1080p 15.6" display so it won't be any different in terms of resolution than a regular MSI display. Hope that helps.

I've gotten 1080/2600 with both GT 650m cards gaming in SLi mode in Borderlands 2 and SkyRim, and each never went above 75 celsius with the sensors reading 1025mv in Gpu-Z and NVidia Inspector 1.9.7.1. This is without any laptop cooler while sitting on a flat desk in a room at about 25 celsius. I didn't track GPU utilization, but I found that to be pretty impressive. The big deal for me though is that it's quiet. I also have an MSI GT685 with a GTX 580M and I have to game with a headset on if I'm doing multiplayer, because it's quite a bit louder and intrusive. This is with the GPU at lower than stock clock speeds under battery.

I just bought the Ideapad Y500 about a month ago, the 59359559 version with the SLI'd 650ms, 16GB mSata cache and 1TB drive. I've also post-ordered the ultrabay DVD-RW for occasional writing/reading tasks. I love the overclock-ability, SLi and the overclockable LCD panel on this. 96hz is visible smoother and better for gaming than the stock 60hz giving better FPS for v-sync on and less tearing for v-sync off.. Its bang-for-the-buck factor is huge. Unfortunately in Canada from Lenovo it comes with the hated English-French keyboard, but through retail it comes with (my) preferred U.S. English keyboard. I removed the 1TB 5400 RPM drive and replaced it with a 1TB Seagate SSHD and installed the drivers from Lenovo's web site. I have gone back and forth between both, usually just backing up certain data to an external or network when I need it sync'd between the two "installs", opening the notebook and re-installing the other drive. Windows 8 is ok, it just is better with a touch screen. I have been using it on a tablet like the Surface RT versus a PC or laptop and it's like night-and-day. I think they rushed it out the door a little too much and it needs a bit of an "expert mode" toggle. For example, some Wifi stuff could be more streamlined (like handling of hidden networks) and the upgraded driver security, while needed, can be a PITA with some drivers even "Win8 ready" ones. On this laptop, Windows 8 does run really well though. I would have liked the initial start menu to be a docked or configurable start menu so that we can separate out a part of the screen for desktop style and Metro style. When you get a "legacy" app Win8 will switch to desktop mode anyways, while stuff coming from the MS Store is usually Metro-friendly, so a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde. My issue right now with this laptop is that SLi with the 650ms is a bit flaky under Windows 7. Cold boot, both adapters appear, and warm boot, only the first one does. Edit: Thanks octiceps, the v2.02 BIOS worked great and three re-boots later we're good to go!