Lenovo LOQ 15APH8
A rare miss from one of the best laptop brands
THE GAMING LAPTOP space is complex. It’s full of different specs, price points, and brand names, so it can be tough to see where a new machine fits. But Lenovo’s LOQ family notionally offers a pretty clear proposition.
Where the company’s Legion machines are all solid chassis, high-level pricing, and spec sheets, the Lenovo LOQ range would be cheaper, less premium, and come with a lower level of hardware for a bargain price. But the Lenovo LOQ 15inch range, championed here by a system comprising an AMD CPU and Nvidia RTX 4050 GPU, doesn’t actually make a lot of sense at full retail rice—not in a world where you can often bag the Lenovo Legion Slim 5, with the same CPU and GPU combination, for around $100 more.
And yet they’re very different in terms of overall quality. The Legion Slim isn’t exactly slim, but it’s a really nice chassis, with a good screen, and efficient cooling. The LOQ, on the other hand, suffers from old-fashioned chonk. It’s not superbloaty, and actually looks and feels tolerably premium. There are affordable Gigabyte and MSI machines that really do seem way cheaper when you flip open the lids. But compared with its similarly priced sibling, the build quality of the LOQ is quite different—and quite plasticky. Still, it’s an effective chassis, able to keep the 95W RTX 4050 GPU running at peak power and therefore mighty close to the gaming performance of a 75W RTX 4060.
On the 1080p screen, that means relatively playable frame rates in the latest games. MetroExodusEnhanced delivers 60fps, while Hitman and Horizon ZeroDawn will net you 100fps and beyond. Cyberpunk2077 is the test that highlights where the actual hardware difference is between the RTX 4050 and RTX 4060, as machines equipped with the latter do outpace the LOQ.
Where this Lenovo shines, however, is in the CPU tests. Despite a lowly 8GB of RAM—legitimately not enough in today’s market, or for this amount of money—the AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS is an outstanding mobile chip, and that shows in the relative benchmarks. Compared with either an Intel Core i7 or Core i5 chip in competing machines, the AMD processor again shows that Team Red has got things sewn up in mobile.
But it’s not just the Zen 4 cores that make this chip a good laptop part. It’s also got the full Radeon 780M integrated graphics. That’s the same iGPU that powers the best gaming handhelds today, and can deliver genuine 1080p gaming frame rates, though not here. You’d hope to be able to disable the RTX 4050 and use the integrated Radeon core to provide a bump to the battery life, but the frame rates are down on the Framework AMD mainboard, which uses the same 780M GPU, and below the handheld gaming PCs. The problem is that paucity of memory, which blows the iGPU performance.
That’s a pity, because the battery life really could do with boosting. This machine keels over after just 45 minutes in the PCMark 10 gaming battery life test. The screen is another disappointment. Dim and dull, the colors are incredibly subdued, and it just doesn’t feel that clear reading text on the desktop, either. This really is where the budget feel of the LOQ range bites hard.
We’ve actually spotted this laptop on sale for $750, at which point it is admittedly a bit more compelling. And it does have Lenovo DNA, including an excellent keyboard, with full numpad and a really nice typing feel. Oh, and there are a couple of spare SSD slots inside, DDR5 RAM upgrades aren’t as expensive as they once where, and Lenovo has actually made it relatively easy to get inside the chassis with just a cross head screwdriver. But this remains a rare miss for a company that has been nailing its recent laptop releases. The LOQ isn’t getting our recommendation for now.