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After a pandemic-induced hiatus, which saw prices soar, we’ve seen the return of some truly budget-priced gaming laptops in the past year, and this Lenovo LOQ 15 model (starts at $649.99) seeks to hit the lowest price of all. Running an older 12th Gen Intel chip and discrete Intel Arc graphics cuts the cost, but not without steep compromises. A dull display and cheap-feeling build undermine the package, and the Intel Arc GPU can’t keep up with the demands of modern gaming nor its entry-level Nvidia peers. The $849.99 Acer Nitro V 15 model we tested is simply a better value and notably a superior performer—and it starts at $699.99, not far off the LOQ. Different configurations of the LOQ 15 look to be better values than this model, though they will share the same build issues.Design: The Legion-Inspired LOQWith its simpler aesthetic and silver-gray color, LOQ’s look stays in lock-step with Lenovo’s more expensive gaming line, Legion. It’s not necessarily the most exciting, but this system can blend in perfectly fine as a general-use laptop in any environment, and it doesn’t scream “gaming laptop.”
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(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
For a gaming laptop that may be your go-to system for all uses outside of gaming, it’s pretty portable, too. It measures 0.94 by 14.2 by 10.2 inches (HWD) and weighs 5.25 pounds, which is hardly an ultralight, but mobile enough to take to class, to work, on a trip, or just to your living room. This is also a bit trimmer than the previous Lenovo LOQ 15 we reviewed, which was a touch thicker (1.01 inch thick) and heavier (5.4 pounds) than this model. Acer’s competing budget Nitro system comes in at 1.06 by 14.3 by 9.4 inches and 4.66 pounds—a similar footprint, but a bit lighter.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Lenovo’s build quality leaves something to be desired; you don’t want to describe budget or entry-level systems this way, ideally, but this laptop does feel on the cheap side. The exterior is textured plastic, and the body has some flex when pressured. The touchpad feels particularly chintzy, with a loud click on every press. The keyboard bucks the trend—Lenovo often puts up superior keyboards, and these are comfortable keys with decent feedback while typing.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Budget gaming laptops often compromise on screen quality to keep the price extra low, as is the case here. The base specs clear the bar for what you need from a gaming laptop—this is a full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) panel with a 144Hz refresh rate. The picture quality is fine, but the screen is rather dim, even at maximum brightness. It’s a dull panel overall, but it’s passable enough for the cost, and your games will run more smoothly at this resolution than anything more ambitious.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Also following the lead of the Legion laptops, most of the ports are located around the back. You won’t find any on the left edge, while the right side holds a USB Type-C port, a USB Type-A port, and the headphone jack. You’ll also find a physical switch here to shutter the webcam for privacy.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The rear of the laptop houses the power connector, two more USB-A ports, an HDMI connection, and an Ethernet jack. That’s a packed suite for a budget laptop, particularly the Ethernet port for faster online gaming and downloading today’s huge games more quickly.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
You won’t find too many fancy extras on a laptop at this price. I mentioned the webcam, which records barely HD 720p video, and it’s not high quality. The camera doesn’t handle low-light settings that well, and the picture is fuzzy. Lenovo’s included Vantage software also includes some monitoring and power options, including the ability to swap the laptop among balanced, quiet, and performance modes. (We tested the laptop in performance mode.) You won’t find any lighting customization options here—the keys are lit with only single-zone, single-hue (white) backlighting on this unit.Configurations: 12th Gen Intel and Arc GraphicsThis super-budget model, priced at $699, is hard to beat on cost alone. But what does it get you in terms of components? Our unit includes an Intel Core i5-12450HX processor, an unusual 12GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and an Intel Arc A530M GPU. The graphics chip is not to be confused with an Intel processor’s integrated Arc graphics (a feature of some recent-model “Meteor Lake” Core Ultra CPUs). Intel also offers discrete Arc GPUs for laptops and desktops, as a relatively new option, and that’s what we have here. Arc doesn’t play in the same spaces as Nvidia on the high end, so you’re more likely to see a lower-power GPU like this in a budget gaming machine. Just how closely it can perform compared with Nvidia’s and AMD’s entry-level GPUs will bear out in the testing below.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
You can buy more powerful configurations of this laptop, too, which leave the extra-cheap tier, behind to varying degrees. The LOQ 15 comes in other models that use newer Intel 13th Gen CPUs and Nvidia GPUs like the RTX 3050, and you can even find a unit that pairs an AMD Ryzen 7 processor with an RTX 4050. These models sit at or around $1,000, so you can find deals outside this especially affordable version if you’re patient.Testing the Lenovo LOQ 15 (2024): Intel Arc Fails to RiseTo judge the effectiveness of our budget system, we put it through our usual benchmark suite and compared the results with those of the following laptops…
The Acer Nitro V 15 (ANV15-51-59MT) ($849.99 as tested) is the best current deal on a budget gaming laptop, while its cousin, the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 ($1,199 as tested), is included to demonstrate what a foray into a higher price and bigger screen can get you. The MSI Cyborg 15 ($999 as tested) falls somewhere between. Finally, the LOQ 15 ($1,279 as tested) we tested in 2023 was a more highly configured AMD-based model, which shows how this laptop scales up.Productivity and Content Creation TestsWe run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL’s PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance. It also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.Our other three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).Finally, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems, a testing utility that uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s famous image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters. Several of the competing systems had trouble running this test, so the results are spotty in that bar chart.
This LOQ system was not much slower than its competitors on average, but it’s not going to lead any group for processing speed. This is a somewhat older chip, but 12th Gen processors were whip-fast in their own time. So, even at a slight disadvantage, this LOQ laptop is quick enough for everyday use and gaming. Just don’t plan to do heavy multitasking, stream gameplay at high settings, or do much media editing on this Core i5 machine.Graphics and Gaming TestsFor gaming laptops and other mobile gaming hardware, we run both synthetic and real-world gaming benchmarks. The former includes two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for systems with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Additionally, we use the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which gauges OpenGL performance. These GFXBench tests are rendered offscreen to accommodate different native display resolutions; more frames per second (fps) means higher performance.Our real-world gaming testing comes from the in-game benchmarks of F1 2021, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege. These three games—all benchmarked at 1080p resolution—represent simulation, open-world action-adventure, and competitive/esports shooter games, respectively. Valhalla and Siege are run twice (Valhalla at Medium and Ultra quality, Siege at Low and Ultra quality), while F1 2021 is run twice at Ultra quality settings with and without AMD’s and Nvidia’s performance-boosting FSR and DLSS features turned on.
These are the more interesting results, as we don’t see Intel’s Arc discrete GPUs in the wild too often. As you can see, this Arc-based LOQ ran at a graphics deficit to the other systems, sometimes by a wide margin. This laptop is gaming-capable, no question, but more demanding titles like Valhalla will barely meet or clear the 30fps mark. These are closer to what you’d get out of integrated graphics systems, albeit with a higher ceiling. Less-strenuous titles fare a little better, like competitive multiplayer games such as Siege, but even F1 with FSR active didn’t clear 30fps by much.Ultimately, the performance gap is not worth the extra discount compared with something like the Acer Nitro. I recognize that a couple hundred extra dollars may be pushing some people’s budgets too far, and for those shoppers, you can hardly get another gaming laptop for this cost. Regardless, it’s hard to justify this as your sole gaming system if you can only buy one, and it will be underpowered for gaming from the moment you buy it. With that in mind, it’s worth saving your money for however much longer it takes to get a more capable Nvidia or AMD system.Battery and Display TestsWe test each laptop’s battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
Lenovo’s LOQ battery runtime was mediocre, particularly if you were hoping to use this laptop as your daily driver outside of gaming. Most gaming machines aren’t too long-lasting, but you can see that this was still the shortest-lived of the bunch. As for the screen, color coverage was wider than others, while the brightness results back up the eye test. This is not an excessively bright display, hitting an adequate mark at full brightness, but nearly too dark to use at anything less.Verdict: When Affordability Comes at Too High a CostThe 12th Gen- and Intel Arc-based LOQ 15 succeeds in reaching the lowest price point possible in this category, but the concessions are too steep to recommend it. For shoppers who simply can’t spend any more than this on a laptop, you do have an option, but it’s not near the best value just because it’s the least expensive. For a couple hundred dollars more, the Nitro V 15 is a much better deal, relative to its build and performance. The other LOQ configurations are more worth your consideration, too. But, since we didn’t test those, we suggest hitting up the Acer Nitro V 15 next in your search for an affordable gaming laptop.
Pros
Super-low price
Competent CPU for the cost
Full HD 144Hz panel
Useful selection of ports, including Ethernet
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The Bottom Line
While Lenovo’s LOQ 15 does serve up basement pricing for a gaming laptop, Intel’s Arc discrete GPU is too much of a compromise. Seek a more capable budget system for a little more cash.
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