Following the resounding success of its Legion line of gaming laptops, Lenovo recently introduced an alternate line with a deeper emphasis on budget. With a starting price of $949 ($1,279 as tested; model APH8), its first effort is the LOQ 15, which we had hands-on time with earlier this year. It runs on modest specs and within a tamer build versus the Legion series, but it borrows some of that DNA for an appealing budget gaming laptop. If you're strapped for cash, the LOQ 15 will serve you just fine, but the cheaper Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF outperforms it and beats it on features, keeping a lock on its Editors' Choice award for the category.
A Cost-Cutting Design Done Well
With the LOQ 15, Lenovo dialed down the build a bit to break into the budget bracket. While the fairly affordable Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 and Lenovo Legion Pro 5 Gen 8 both featured metal display lids and sturdy plastics elsewhere, the Lenovo LOQ 15 gets an all-plastic chassis. It’s still rather firm, with little flex, thanks to a solid stuffing of components. To try and mask this materials downgrade, Lenovo added more flourishes, with blue accents on the speaker grilles and radiator fins (though only the fins are visible while actually using the laptop).
(Credit: Molly Flores)The plastic bezels are another obvious downgrade—not because they’re plastic, but because they’re bigger than most would like. Despite the Lenovo LOQ 15 being thicker and larger from front to back than, and just as wide as, the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8, it has a smaller display. Its 15.6-inch panel uses the more typical 16:9 aspect ratio and is left with more bezel width as a result. The LOQ 15 also proves the heavier laptop, at 5.4 pounds, despite its lower-end hardware, which is a real shame.
Nothing special about Lenovo's screen used here; it's typical of screens I've seen in late-model budget machines. It displays a 1080p native resolution at a 144Hz refresh rate. That might seem super fast, but 144Hz has become mostly standard for gaming machines. The panel doesn’t produce a wide color gamut or high brightness, though it does have an anti-glare coating that makes for relatively easy viewing compared with a glossy display with similar brightness levels. (We've got data on our screen tests later in this review.)
(Credit: Molly Flores)The Lenovo LOQ 15 comes in just two configurations. The higher-end APH8 unit, which we tested, comes in at $1,279 with an AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS processor alongside an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 graphics chip, 16GB of DDR5 memory, and a 1TB PCIe 4.0 solid-state drive.
At $949, the cheaper model runs on a Ryzen 5 7640HS CPU and actually opts for a previous-generation RTX 3050 GPU while featuring just 8GB of DDR5 RAM and a 512GB SSD. Lenovo also notes a downgrade to QLC NAND as opposed to the TLC NAND in the 1TB drive. Despite Lenovo’s pair of models, our test unit didn’t line up with the sold options. Our model had the higher-tier CPU and GPU pairing and should have come with 1TB of storage and 16GB of RAM, but instead shipped with 512GB of storage and 8GB of RAM. It's also important to note here that the Lenovo LOQ 15's memory and storage are upgradable after purchase, with storage upgrades made especially easy, thanks to an extra M.2 slot.
One of the more positive traits that the Lenovo LOQ 15 inherited from its higher-end siblings was their excellent keyboard arrangement and engineering.
(Credit: Molly Flores)By offsetting the arrow keys from the rest of the keyboard, Lenovo avoids weirdly shrunken keys and can provide a number pad with the standard arrangement. It has simple, white backlighting however—sorry, RGB-fan gamers. The touchpad Lenovo includes is reasonably sized, though it's the least you can expect from a 15-inch laptop that’s bigger than some 16-inch models.
The LOQ 15 also gets a 1080p camera like I saw on the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8. Unfortunately, it’s just as disappointing here. It hardly feels like a sharp image. Lenovo doesn't provide facial recognition or fingerprint scanning for this laptop, either.
(Credit: Molly Flores)Lenovo had to make a few more sacrifices to get the LOQ 15's price down, some of which shaved down the connectivity. The LOQ 15 includes just a single USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port on the left side, though it at least supports DisplayPort 1.4 and 140-watt charging. That comes alongside a combo headset jack. The right side includes a USB 2.0 port and a webcam shutter switch.
(Credit: Molly Flores)Meanwhile, the rear edge of the laptop has two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, an HDMI 2.1 port, an Ethernet jack, and Lenovo’s proprietary power input port. It’s not a terrible assortment, but it trims a few extra ports from the higher-end options, particularly faster USB-C ports like Thunderbolt 4. Gigabyte was able to squeeze one into its Aorus 15 BMF, which makes this a letdown for the LOQ 15. At least Wi-Fi 6 is supported for fast wireless connectivity.
(Credit: Molly Flores)The Lenovo LOQ 15APH8 packs a pair of 2-watt, down-firing speakers at the front corners of the laptop, which will be detailed below.
Using the Lenovo LOQ 15: Serviceable or Better
As mentioned, the Lenovo LOQ 15 has a similar keyboard setup to its siblings, which is a huge boon for it. While I often have to spend a little time adjusting to a new laptop’s keyboard to get up to speed, I was able to hit 113 words per minute typing with 97% in Monkeytype on the first go. It’s downright comfortable to type on. Plus, with the keyboard's well-arranged number pad and full-size arrow keys, number crunching and navigating is a breeze.
(Credit: Molly Flores)The touchpad is pleasantly smooth and spacious enough for large, scrolling swipes or multi-finger gestures. It clicks from a fairly light, though not too light, touch, and doesn’t feel at all flimsy.
However, the display is something of a letdown. Visibility is respectable, thanks to acceptable brightness levels married with an anti-glare finish. But it’s not all that colorful, and the peak refresh rate is not terribly fast next to the pricier competition. The 16:9 aspect ratio also disappoints when it comes to how much is displayed at once on the screen, given the trend toward more squarish panels of late. The screen is still relatively useful for multitasking, but anyone who’s spent much time with a 16-inch laptop will feel the squeeze.
With the fairly weak speakers firing down, expect little from the audio, which lacks both volume and depth. In a quiet setting, it’ll provide enough sound for listening to presentations and speech, and maybe sound loud enough to move your bones to some tunes, but it can’t compare with even an ultra-cheap portable speaker.
Lenovo keeps up its reputation for relatively clean Windows installations with the LOQ 15. The laptop has the handful of social media apps and games I’m now all too used to seeing on new models, but it’s not crowded with excess Lenovo ones. Lenovo’s Vantage app provides some hardware controls, and the Nahimic App enhances audio. (It’s even weaker and thinner without it.) However, Lenovo’s Legion Arena doesn’t feel essential, serving as a gaming and social hub on top of the other game libraries or stores where you actually buy your games.
Testing the Lenovo LOQ 15: Respectable Low-End RTX
The Lenovo LOQ 15 sits at the affordable end of the gaming laptop market, with a squarely budget starting price of $949, though the APH8 configuration we tested inches up into midrange territory with its price of $1,279. The reality of this test unit, due to its missing 8GB of RAM, is that it falls somewhere in the middle of the performance you might get from Lenovo’s commercially available models.
Given the price, its RTX 4050 GPU is easily matched. The Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF and the MSI Cyborg 15 both cost less, with the same GPU alongside Intel "Raptor Lake" 13th Gen CPUs. The MSI Cyborg 15 even comes with 16GB of RAM for its $999 price. Gigabyte’s Aorus 15 BMF has an altogether better design and faster performance, though its keyboard is less comfortable.
Acer's Predator Helios Neo 16 is another competing option that may have a higher starting price but makes up for it with 16GB of RAM by default and a robust "HX"-class Intel Core i5-13500HX processor. Then we have Lenovo’s own Legion Slim 5 Gen 8, which packs the same CPU but upgrades the GPU to a GeForce RTX 4060 and brings an altogether superior design and display. With these four machines, the Lenovo LOQ 15 faces formidable opposition.
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
We 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 and 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, which 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.
At PCMag, any score of more than 4,000 points in PCMark 10’s productivity benchmark is viewed as respectable and a strong sign that the machine will hold up well in everyday office work. Scores of more than 5,000 are a mark of excellence, and it was no surprise to see the high-performance internals of all of these systems easily cross those lines.
That said, the LOQ 15 didn't enjoy dazzling results in these tests. For the most part, it was simply slower than at least one competitor in each benchmark. It had the slowest storage, even trailing the weak MSI Cyborg 15, though this could have been a different story for the 1TB drive had that been included.
CPU performance from the LOQ 15's AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS was also inconsistent. It held up well in Cinebench R23, which pushes all the cores, but that fact gave both Lenovo machines an edge, thanks to the chip's eight all-performance cores. However, the Lenovo LOQ 15 lagged dramatically behind the Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 in both HandBrake and GeekBench. Given they have the same CPU, this hints at a deficit in cooling for the CPU or could leave the blame at the feet of the LOQ’s lesser 8GB of memory.
While the performance presented by the Lenovo LOQ 15 will be more than enough for everyday computing (assuming you install more RAM), the rest of the lineup will let you get more done faster. That's especially so with the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16, which shined in these benchmarks, thanks to fast storage and a hot-rod CPU.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
For 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). Also part of the test suite: the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which we use to gauge 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 comprises 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 once at Ultra quality settings and, for Nvidia GeForce RTX-based systems, a second time with Nvidia’s performance-boosting DLSS anti-aliasing turned on.
Our suite of synthetic benchmarks painted an interesting picture of how much performance from the same GPU can vary from device to device. Four of these laptops featured the RTX 4050, but results varied widely. Why? Much of it comes down to how much system power each GPU is allowed within each laptop model, which changes drastically. The CPU can also come into play.
The Lenovo LOQ 15 did a decent job squeezing out more performance from its 95-watt RTX 4050 than both the 140W Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF and the 45W MSI Cyborg 15 in the synthetic tests, with an unsurprisingly poor showing from the Cyborg. To its credit, the Aorus wasn't terribly far behind and largely turned this around in the real game tests.
Meanwhile, we saw the inverse for the Aorus-matching 140W Acer Predator Helios Neo 16, which uses a larger frame to possibly better cool its GPU at that higher wattage. The Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 easily cleaned up with its 125W RTX 4060, though had it had a lesser cooling get-up inside, we could have easily seen it sink below these results. Regardless, the LOQ 15 proved it's capable of reliable 1080p gaming performance.
Where it counts, though, the LOQ 15 proved just a little bit weaker than the leaders in the category. Its performance was respectable, ensuring playable frame rates even with settings cranked for the laptop’s built-in 1080p display. Plus, it has more than enough power to get esports games running at the high frame rates necessary for more competitive play with the display refresh rate to support it. This is a fine RTX 4050 gaming laptop, but it's simply not the best one.
It's important to address that both Lenovo laptops showed a surprising deficit in Rainbow Six Siege that appears to stem from the CPU they have in common, as evidenced by the trading leads between the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 and Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 when more demand shifts onto the GPU with increased graphics settings. Running the game using the Vulkan API also enables a marked performance boost of 10% to 20% on both Lenovo systems.
Battery and Display Tests
We assess each laptop’s battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) on a continuous loop with the system fully charged. We turn off Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting, and set the display brightness to 50% and system volume to 100%.
Additionally, we analyze the screen using a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its software to measure the display's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the screen can show—and its 50% and 100% brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
The LOQ 15 rang up average among budget gaming laptops on display and battery life. With a 5-hour-and-17-minute runtime, it trailed the 6-plus hours typical of newer machines of late, thanks to their larger batteries. (Still, it lasted longer than the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16.) That short battery life is all the more disappointing because the display was pretty dim during our battery test as well, with its peak brightness at just 44.3 nits when set to 50%. Maxing out brightness, the laptop will more realistically run for about 3 hours on the battery.
Of course, the display is more useful when maxed out, at which it measured a respectable 353.4 nits. Combine that with an anti-glare coating, and you’ve got easy visibility in most conditions. However, you won’t get killer HDR or even decent color here. The LOQ 15 produced a meager color gamut, not even coming close to covering the common sRGB color space. It performed a little below the MSI Cyborg 15, a low bar.
These kinds of results are largely expected with budget gaming laptops, but they don’t have to be. The Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 includes a much better display, with a wider color gamut and higher brightness levels, while costing less. Meanwhile, the Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 also got a big display upgrade alongside all its internal improvements for a marginal price increase.
Verdict: A Solid Debut, But No LOQ on the Value Crown
Even after a short time with the LOQ 15, you'll find it has a lot going for it, but ultimately it's just "good"—not quite a star. The performance is respectable for the hardware it’s running, but Lenovo had to make some design sacrifices to trim the price. One of the better aspects is the keyboard, making it one of the better low-cost gaming laptops to actually put your hands on. If budget allows, the pricier Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 is a considerable improvement on the LOQ, while the Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF remains our top pick for budget gaming laptops. Even so, the Lenovo LOQ 15 still has a place as a low-cost, high-utility gaming laptop, especially if (or when) you can find it marked down.
