Today I have with me the Lenovo LOQ, what’s cools about it is that it’s the first time I’m trying out intel Arc graphics in a laptop.
This is the Lenovo LOQ 15, it comes equipped with the intel core i5 12450hx processor which comes with 8 cores of which 4 are efficiency cores with a boost clock of upto 3.10 ghz and 4 more are performance cores with a boost clock of 4.4 ghz.
We’ll have to see how it performs in CPU benchmarks.
GPU is Intel’s ARC A530M, which has a 95 watt TDP and comes with 8gb of VRAM. The CPU also has an integrated GPU which we are not using for these benchmarks.
The body has a silver gray colour , we have the LOQ and Lenovo logos on the lid.
Display is a 1080p 144 hz IPS panel , with Anti-Glare, Non-Touch, support for 100% sRGB colour space, and max brightness of 300 nits.
The laptop is a budget alternative to Lenovo’s legion line, and even though it’s built solid, it does come with a thick plastic chassis, which is not bad.
The laptop weighs 2.45 Kg, which doesn’t include the 600 grams you need to add for the power brick.
It’s heavy, if you plan to lug it around everyday.
The hinges are sturdy and it keeps the display supported and can be angled to almost any angle you need.
The laptop also opens up flat 180 degrees, and this lip here gives us a good anchor point to open the display, which can also opened with one hand.
The bezels are moderately thin, and we have a 720p camera on top here.
The matte finish body and screen makes it fingerprint resistant which is a plug if you’re into long sweaty gaming sessions.
The keyboard is standard, no bells and whistles including no RGB, just plain white led light.
There is only an led on the power button which changes it’s colour as per the mode the laptop is in.
The keys are well placed, some might find it small but it’s similar to my legion 5.
The keys are clicky enough, with moderate travel.
It’s not bad for a budget laptop.
The track pad is large, and is offset to left instead of the center, just like other Lenovo’s.
Ports wise we have a USB-C port on the right, a physical camera lock switch, headphone jack, and a USB-A port.
The left is devoid of any ports.
The back is where we have more ports, like two USB-A ports, HDMI 2.1 port, ethernet and Lenovo’s custom power port.
I like the way the edges taper on the sides and we have the vents at the back, we can see the fins.
Let’s boot it up.
We have windows 11 home provided as the operating system.
Connectivity wise we have Wi-Fi 6 802.11ax, Bluetooth 5.1. Gigabit Ethernet.
The laptop has a 512GB PCIe x4 NVMe SSD off which we are provided only 474 gb to use for storage ,which is sparse in this day and age. It is upgradable so that’s a plus. The ram is 8GB, and are DDR5 so-dimms so they can be upgraded too. They run at 4800 mega transfers per second.
I’ve installed steam and epic games to download my games and also 3dmark to benchmark the GPU.
Starting off with the CPU benchmarks, in Cinebench r23 we get a score of 8924 in multicore and 1533 in single core tests.
3Dmark tests
We have 5454 points in Time Spy
11,979 in Fire Strike
755 in Port Royale even though it has some raytracing capabilities it is not it’s strong suite.
Gaming
GTA V, it’s not a very demanding game but is still a favourite of many and this is how it fared in the benchmarks. I had Vsync on and the fps topped off at 75 fps, once I turned Vsync off the fps averaged around 120 fps with a high of 160 fps.
Make sure to turn off Vsync to get higher framerates.
Cyberpunk 2077 we get a decent framerate, nothing noteworthy to write home about.
Cyberpunk supports intel’s XE super sampling which allows to churn out more frames.
I had raytracing on at low but due to that the average framerate was at 29 fps. It did go down to 13 fps at times.
Turning off raytracing the fps went up to 36 fps.
Valorant we get about 120 to 140 fps on high settings.
Counter Strike 2 ran at a decent 70 fps at medium settings.
When the tests and benchmarks were run the fans did ramp up quite a bit and are not really loud but they are audible.
Battery life is around 2 hours and with this laptop it is recommended to have it always connected to power for best performance.
Speakers are also decent, loud enough for gaming and also for streaming video.
With this laptop costing around 60k, it’s not a bad laptop for the price. It’s a budget laptop which is value for money for first time gamers who don’t want to spend too much. Good for students who need a powerful enough laptop for college, and allows for gaming on the side. There are models with NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics, including RTX 3050, 3060, and 4060 options but the Arc A530M is the most affordable of the lot. *Gb is too low for a gaming laptop, and with games starting to take up 50-100 gb 512gb is too small. We can upgrade the ram and storage ourselves which is a plus, if you know how, else you could always get your neighbourhood computer store or Lenovo store.
The Lenovo LOQ 15IAX9I is built well, has a good looking design and performs admirably too. So what do you guys think, is it worth it?
Make sure to comment below.
Vinayak Nair is a self-confessed geek from the days when computer memory was measured in Kilobytes. I create YouTube videos on 3D Printing, DIY Projects, Everyday tech reviews and also delve into gaming.