Lenovo is pushing into the entry-level gaming market with some aggressively priced PCs as a part of its LOQ brand. Most manufacturers use their fresh lineups as an opportunity to reinvent the wheel and deliver something new and unique. Lenovo hasn't gone that far, though. It's instead selling laptops and desktop towers that look and feel very similar to the existing ones in its Legion lineup. As a result, you get solid gaming laptops that not only have a premium design but also some solid specs for the money.

Lenovo's LOQ family (pronounced "lock") has a handful of 15-inch and 16-inch gaming laptops and desktop towers that can be had for a fraction of the price of the more expensive gaming rigs. I've been testing the LOQ 15 (15IRH8) model for the past couple of weeks, and it has convinced me that Lenovo is cutting the right corners for a deeper emphasis on budget instead of aggressively trimming the specs and features to attract a broader audience.

About this review: Lenovo provided XDA with a LOQ 15 laptop for the purposes of this review and did not have any input into its contents.

Lenovo LOQ 15: Pricing and availability

Lenovo's LOQ family has both 15-inch and 16-inch laptop models, and you get them in both Intel and AMD flavors for starting at $650 in the U.S. The lowest trim will get you an AMD Ryzen 5 7640HS with Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 laptop GPU in a 15-inch chassis, but I recommend grabbing the one with an RTX 40-series GPU to ensure smooth gaming performance.

The LOQ 15IRH8 model featured in this review is configured with a 13th-generation Intel Core i7-13620H processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 GPU, 16GB DDR5-5200 memory, and 512GB M.2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD. A similarly specced variant with a 1080p 144Hz display can be had for around $1,200 from Lenovo's official site, which is where you'll find the configurator to build your own machine. You can, however, buy the pre-configured units from retailers like Amazon, Best Buy, and more as well, which often offer good discounts on most Lenovo laptops.

Design, ports, and keyboard

Good design and build quality, and a great keyboard

The LOQ laptops, as I previously mentioned, share a lot in common with Legion notebooks in the design department. The fact that it uses the already established design aesthetic of the Legion laptops makes it instantly recognizable, and it looks and feels great while using. But unlike its more expensive siblings in the Legion family that use materials like metal and forged carbon fiber for the chassis, the LOQ 15 features an all-plastic body with a bit of flex.

The LOQ 15 is not the thinnest nor the lightest laptop on the market either, weighing over 5 pounds and measuring 0.87 inches at its thinnest point. It makes up for those things with a good selection of ports located at the back, a full-sized keyboard with four-zone backlighting, and a decently sized touchpad. The Strom Grey color picks up a lot of smudges and fingerprints, but it goes well with the blue-colored accents used on the speaker grille and radiator fins at the back. You can also grab it in a darker shade called Onyx Black.

The LOQ 15 sports only a single USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port that's located alongside a combo headset jack on the left, but it supports both DisplayPort 1.4 and up to 140W charging. The right side includes a USB 2.0 port and a handy webcam shutter switch for the 1080p IR camera. The list of ports located at the "trunk" of the laptop includes 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 a decent selection of ports overall, and you also get Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1 for wireless connectivity.

One of my favorite aspects of the LOQ 15 is its keyboard, which is the same one you get on the Legion laptops. It's one of the most comfortable laptop keyboards I've typed on, and the concave keycaps are an absolute joy to use. Despite being a full-sized layout with a number pad off the right side, this one doesn't feel cramped whatsoever. This is one of those keyboards on which you should be able to comfortably type without having to buy a separate keyboard.

The touchpad is smooth and spacious for comfortable tracking, and it's a great surface to use when you're not using a gaming mouse. The LOQ 15 also has plenty of vents to throw hot air outside the chassis, and it also has speakers grills at the bottom that get decently loud. I wouldn't necessarily use them over a pair of good gaming headsets, but they're good enough for casual usage.

Display

A 16:9 display that leaves me wanting more

There's nothing to write home about the Lenovo LOQ 15's display, though. It's a standard 15.6-inch WQHD IPS panel with 2560x1440 resolution and support for up to 165Hz refresh rate. The anti-glare coating helps keep the reflections at bay, but the panel doesn't get bright enough, with just 350 nits of peak brightness. I could even see some backlight bleed on the display of my unit when viewing darker images, although your mileage may vary.

The display lacks a bit of vibrancy overall, and it was particularly noticeable while using it side by side with other monitors on my setup. Lenovo touts 100% coverage of sRGB for the LOQ 15's display, which is the same as it does for its more expensive laptops in the Legion series, like the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i, but I definitely recommend some manual calibration as it doesn't look the best out of the box.

The LOQ 15 also has sizable bezels around the display that stick out like a sore thumb on an otherwise good-looking laptop. A taller 16:10 aspect ratio display would've solved the problem, but the LOQ 15 has only a 16:9 panel option. Even the model with a 144Hz display is 16:9, and you'll have to get the slightly more expensive 16-inch models to get a taller 16:10 display. Support for 165Hz refresh with G-Sync makes it a smooth display, though, and it feels fast and responsive, both in and out of games.

You also get a 1080p webcam on top of the display, which, as I mentioned earlier, comes with a physical shutter switch for extra privacy. The quality of the webcam is serviceable for the most part, but I am glad that Lenovo didn't compromise with a 720p camera here to keep the price low. It's another example of how it managed to cut the right corners instead of lowering the quality overall.

Performance and battery life

Reliable performance, but the battery life could've been better

As a quick reminder, the LOQ 15 model I tested for this review was fitted with a 45W Intel Core i7-13620H processor with 10 cores and 16 threads and boost clock speeds of up to 4.9GHz. It was paired with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 laptop GPU, with total graphics power (TGP) of 95W. The laptop also packed 16GB of DDR5-5200 RAM and a 512GB M.2 NVMe SSD. You can also choose to configure the LOQ 15 with up to an Intel Core i7-13700H and an RTX 4060 GPU if you'd like but remember that those parts will add more to the cost.

The overall performance here is on par with what you'd expect from a mid-range gaming laptop in 2023. The Core i7-13620H and RTX 4050 GPU play nicely together to deliver reliable performance for gaming and other workloads. Here's a quick look at a table highlighting the average frame rates I was able to record using Nvidia's FrameView software on a slew of modern AAA titles running at QHD resolution:

The LOQ 15, as you can see, could comfortably hit the 60 FPS mark on most modern titles, provided you sacrifice a bit on the visual fidelity. It wasn't exactly a terrible experience with Ultra graphics present on titles like Cyberpunk 2077 (2.0 patch) and Far Cry 6, but I recommend going a setting or two below to get the best experience overall. Gaming shouldn't necessarily be an issue on titles that support Nvidia's DLSS, as the RTX 4050 takes advantage of its 80 tensor cores to support DLSS 3.0.

I also ran a bunch of benchmarks on the LOQ 15 to see how it compares to other laptops, and here are the results for those:

The scores put up by the LOQ 15 are almost on par with similarly specced laptops on the market like the HP Victus 16 and the Legion Pro 5i, both of which cost slightly more. I recommend upgrading to the Core i7-13700H for an additional $20 if possible, as it would allow it to go head-to-head with more options on the market with a slightly more headroom.

As far as the thermals are concerned, the LOQ 15 tends to run really hot. I recorded maximum temperatures of 97 degrees Celsius during a Cinebench R23 run, with the CPU constantly throttling down to reduce the overall performance. The GPU was also sitting close to 90 degrees Celsius, which is definitely on the higher side. I saw these temperatures despite the fans soaring at max RPM, producing a ton of system noise. The fan noise during a stress test was constantly at around 60dBs, which is again a bit on the higher side compared to a few other laptops we've tested here at XDA.

The built-in Kioxia BG5 KBG50ZNT512G M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD offers reliable read and write speeds for day-to-day usage and gaming. It's also worth mentioning that the LOQ 15 has an additional M.2 slot to add another SSD, meaning you can easily expand the storage on this machine.

Moving over to the battery life, the 60Wh unit inside the LOQ 15 lasted less than an hour in PCMark's Gaming rundown test, which I'd say is on par with most laptops with a 60Wh battery. It lasted for almost four hours in PCMark's modern office run with the performance mode set to balanced. The battery life is definitely not as good as the Victus 16, but it should last you for around four hours on a single charge when you're only using it for basic tasks and not pushing it to its absolute limits. Your battery life mileage may vary, though, so it's best to keep a charger handy.

Should you buy the Lenovo LOQ 15?

You should buy the Lenovo LOQ 15 if:

• You are a casual gamer looking for a relatively affordable laptop with an RTX 40-series GPU.
• You want a laptop with a full-sized keyboard that's comfortable to type on.
• You want a laptop that offers reliable performance for both gaming and office work.

You shouldn't buy the Lenovo LOQ 15 if:

• You want a thin and light laptop for everyday carry.
• You can't live without a 16:10 display.
• You need a color-calibrated display with high peak brightness.

My time with the Lenovo LOQ 15 was spent playing a ton of games and tackling a bunch of everyday tasks without any major issues whatsoever. I believe it's a great laptop overall for anybody who's looking to buy a reliable machine for both casual gaming and office work. Yes, its battery life isn't as good as one for the HP Victus 16, and the display isn't as bright or vibrant as some other laptops on the market, but they're not deal-breakers that take away from everything else that's good about it.

The Lenovo LOQ 15 is easily one of the best-looking laptops in this price range, as it looks and feels closer to the more premium Legion laptops. It also has a comfortable keyboard to type on, and there's also a good touchpad, a 1080p webcam with a physical shutter button, and more. The entry-level models are particularly more appealing as they're priced at around $800, albeit with a previous-gen RTX 3050 laptop GPU.

Don't forget to look at the HP Victus 16 (2023) and the Omen 16 (2023), both of which I believe are the closest competitors that edge out the LOQ 15 in performance, display, and a couple of other factors. There's still plenty of value to be found in the Lenovo LOQ 15 gaming laptop, and you can't go wrong with it if you are a casual gamer who is strapped for cash and is looking for a reliable laptop for work and play.