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Oct 28, 2023

Lenovo LOQ 15 review: A great value gaming laptop

The Lenovo LOQ 15 makes clever sacrifices to keep this an affordable gaming laptop, without making it feel cheap. Lenovo LOQ is the new home for Lenovo's fairly affordable gaming laptops. Last year,

The Lenovo LOQ 15 makes clever sacrifices to keep this an affordable gaming laptop, without making it feel cheap.

Lenovo LOQ is the new home for Lenovo's fairly affordable gaming laptops. Last year, you might have considered a Lenovo Legion 5 or IdeaPad Gaming. This year, it's all about LOQ.

Or is it? There are naturally some sacrifices when shopping to a budget. You don't get per-key RGB lighting. There are no aluminium panels to class-up the joint, and at present an Nvidia RTX 4060 is your top graphics card option.

However, this is one of my favourite affordable gaming laptops of the year so far. It doesn't seem cheap in person, there are some thoughtful touches throughout, and thanks to Lenovo's sensibly priced upgrades, it doesn't feel like you are getting screwed when you want to bump up a component or two.

My review unit has some of those upgrades, and I'd recommend indulging in some of them, particularly the upgraded 165Hz display. It means that while the Lenovo LOQ 15 family starts at $950/£899, the spec reviewed here costs around $1249/£1245 direct from Lenovo, and includes bumps to CPU, GPU, RAM, display and more.

This is a quality budget gaming laptop with very few major issues as long as you dig into a few of the available upgrades - most notably the display. One potentially off-putting bit remains. The fans are quite loud and noticeable under strain compared with those of the top Lenovo Legion models.

Lenovo has taken the design fundamentals of its popular, and slightly higher-end Legion series gaming laptops and opened them up to a new audience with Lenovo LOQ.

For example, unlike the average entry-level gaming laptop design, the LOQ has connectors across three of its sides. It makes good-looking cable management far easier to achieve. The LOQ also has a stick-out thermal platform, which you might think of as a heat sink "butt", another design touch we usually associate with high-end models.

There's a sense, then, that Lenovo has gone at least a little beyond the basics here, and that's great. It does not extend to getting you next-level build, though. The Lenovo LOQ 15 outer is all-plastic. Some Lenovo laptops have metal lids and keyboard plates, but there's no aluminium here beyond the little shiny Lenovo logos on the lid and inside.

Still, that these logo plates are actually metal is a touch that shows classy attention to detail.

All this means the Lenovo LOQ 15 is one of the better-looking budget laptops, simply because it has these elements not always seen down the cheaper end. It's still very much a gaming laptop, though. At 2.4kg and 25mm thick, we wouldn't recommend using this as a portable PC, or one for university use unless you are dead set on a gaming laptop.

Lenovo sells two main screen specs of the LOQ 15. There's the basic 1080p version and a 1440p one, which we have here. While we can only speak to the quality of this one, from our testing it's easily worth the upgrade cost.

The resolution bump makes a big difference at this size when simply doing work. Text goes from a bit scraggly and pixellated-looking to fairly smooth.

This higher-grade of LOQ display also has significantly better colour than the entry-level one, according to Lenovo's own specs. I found the 1440p screen to have decent colour saturation without providing the wide-gamut colour of one of the recent, trendy (and expensive) OLED laptops. But to my eyes, it looks great, with 98.7% coverage of the classic sRGB colour gamut.

You don't get this vibe with the base spec, though, as the standard 1080p display has poor colour saturation. You have been warned.

The LOQ 15's maximum brightness of 380 nits is above average for an affordable gaming laptop, without breaking any records. Still, when you combine that brightness with an anti-glare screen, you end up with a laptop that can get by for work outdoors.

It shines for gaming, though, just as you'd hope. It has a maximum refresh rate of 165Hz, almost three times the norm. Once again, Lenovo has gone a little further to go significantly beyond merely providing the simple stuff.

The good news continues with the keyboard, at least on the substantive side. Lenovo seems to use a very similar keyboard here to the one in an older revision of the Lenovo Legion 5 I tested a while back.

It has very solid 1.5mm key travel, and no tactile sign this is anything less than a super-solid upper mid-range gaming laptop keyboard. Sure, some laptops made for games have fab mechanical keys I'd take over this. But that's typically a feature of a much pricier PC.

The price compromise is found in the backlight, not the key feel. Lenovo's LOQ 15 has RGB backlighting, but it's split into just four zones, not the per-key style seen in high-end models. Our advice: grow up and realise these backlights look much better when set to a single, consistent colour.

You can even ditch RGB lighting altogether and get a simple white backlight, but the savings aren't massive.

There's also a NUM pad to the right. I'd much rather this wasn't here from a pure ergonomic perspective, but at the service of one of the Lenovo LOQ's few weak parts, the touchpad.

I feel the limited budget much more here, because this is a classic plastic pad made up to look like a textured glass one. It doesn't feel anywhere near as good. But, to be fair to Lenovo, to use glass in this laptop would be a total misallocation of cash, and the clicker feels fine.

My biggest issue here is something more simple. The NUM pad ends up shifting the touchpad far left enough that you end up making accidental right clicks all the time. To avoid positioning your right arm all the way over to the left, just go full MacBook and use a two-finger tap to access the right clicker (a standard Windows feature). Or do what Lenovo actually expects you to do, and use a mouse instead.

Lenovo sent me one of the most impressive versions of the LOQ 15 to review, and it packs a real punch. It has the Intel core i7-13620H, 16GB RAM and a 1TB SSD capable of read speeds up to 4065MB/s.

This isn't cutting edge SSD performance these days, but there are few obvious compromises elsewhere.

Nvidia's RTX 4060 graphics card with 8GB vRAM is the star here, and as usual Lenovo hasn't messed it up by using an underpowered version. Maxed-out, the card can draw 115W. The card itself is limited to 90W according to the software, but it can borrow more juice from the CPU pile to reach the claimed 115W.

Cyberpunk 2077 plays well almost maxed-out at 1440p resolution, and you can even use the laptop-melting Overdrive ray tracing mode. However, this relies heavily on the RTX 40-series cards' killer feature: frame generation.

You can think of this as a super-smart version of the frame interpolation on your TV. Except where that kind of mode is horrible, this one is awesome. You'll also want to drop down the resolution to 1080p for the best results.

My favoured setting is to drop down to Ultra ray tracing, for a smooth 60fps. While this isn't a world-beating gaming laptop, for the money it's a powerhouse.

There's also a nerd-friendly GPU overclock mode that boosts performance by around 4 per cent with the default boost settings. For the benchmark nerds out there, I got a top 3D Mark Time Spy score of 11020, compared to 10600 without the overclock.

However, there's a sense you're fundamentally limited by the cooling system here - even if you upgrade to the optional 230W power supply. In more CPU-intensive games, GPU punch drops a little because it's no longer allowed to borrow extra power.

The Lenovo LOQ 15 doesn't have the most appealing cooling system I've heard from a gaming laptop recently either. While it can shift air effectively, blasting hot stuff out of both sides and the back, there is some of that classic "jet engine" character to the tone I never like to hear.

Lenovo avoided this much more successfully in the Legion 5 and 7 series, presumably because they were designed as all-rounder higher-end gaming laptops. I'm using the supremo, most power-sapping model in the family here, after all.

The cooling system works fine though, keeping the CPU and GPU well under within their limits. I just don't like how it sounds too much.

A lot of laptops that look a bit like the Lenovo LOQ have monster 99Wh batteries, an often futile attempt to offset the hugely power hungry components inside.

The Lenovo LOQ 15 has a somewhat more ordinary 60Wh battery, a capacity you might see in a decent productivity laptop or a larger ultraportable.

At default settings, we found the Lenovo LOQ's stamina to be pretty mediocre, at just four hours and 50 minutes of light work. However, you can do better with just a little effort.

When I set the laptop to use the integrated graphics rather than the Nvidia RTX 4060 graphics card, and brought the screen refresh down to 60Hz, it lasted a far more satisfying six hours and 49 minutes.

Clearly, this is not a laptop you can rely on to last for a full day of work, but I never expected that anyway. Just under seven hours is not a bad result at all.

The Lenovo LOQ also comes with an unusually slimline power adapter. Gaming laptops need a lot more power than an ultraportable, and this usually results in a thick, heavy adapter. This one seems purpose made to fit happily into a rucksack. However, just to reiterate: this is not an ideal laptop for get for everyday portable use.

It feels much more at home, well, at home. This is also where the rear-mounted connectors shine. There's a separate HDMI 2.1, Ethernet, and two moderately fast 10Gbps USB-A ports along the back.

These are joined by a headphone socket and USB-C on the left, a slow USB 2.0 on the right, which is clearly made for a mouse. There is no ultra-fast Thunderbolt 4.0 port here, which seems less of an issue when many of the day-to-day basics are covered. But there's also no SD card slot, which might bother some a bit more.

The Lenovo LOQ 15 has a 1080p camera, a big cut above the 720p gaming laptop norm. Its image still looks undersaturated in the average moderately lit room, but it is far better than the bad old gaming laptop standard. And the speakers? As expected, they're bad. Limited volume, zero bass. But they're not offensive, showing Lenovo has put about the right amount of budget into them - not much.

The Lenovo LOQ 15 is an above average affordable gaming laptop, particularly if you fork out for some of the available upgrades.

Lenovo’s 165Hz 1440p display? Worth it, as the base display is undersaturated. The Nvidia RTX 4060 graphics card? Absolutely. And unlike some other brands' upgrades, these ones are sensibly priced.

The keyboard is great, as is the overall look and feel of the Lenovo LOQ 15. It just doesn't seem as cheap and basic as much of the competition.

There's just one part I wish was better - the tone of the fan noise. As long as you're happy with this, the mediocre touchpad and lack of ultra-fast connectivity, it's a really great option.

Technology writer. Stuff, WIRED, TrustedReviews, TechRadar, T3, Wareable and others