Digit Zero1 Awards and Best Buy Awards 2023: Best Performing Gaming Laptop (₹60K to ₹80K)

Gaming laptops are designed with hardware and features specifically aimed at enhancing your gaming experience, such as robust GPUs and processors, high-refresh-rate displays, sufficient RAM and storage, and more. However, these features come at a higher premium, so as your budget decreases, certain compromises become necessary. Over the years, the need for compromises has been gradually diminishing in the ₹60K to ₹80K price range.

Also read: Digit Zero1 Awards and Best Buy Awards 2023: Best Performing Mainstream Laptop (₹50K to ₹70K)

This year, the competition was less intense compared to last year, with many brands introducing pricier laptop offerings and lineups. Our Zero1 Award Winner actually belongs to one of these new lineups and secured a landslide victory over the competition. However, our runner-up provided better value-for-money, earning itself both the second spot and the Digit Best Buy Award.

Digit Zero1 Award Winner: LENOVO LOQ 15APH8 (Buy now)

Price: ₹79,990.00 

Lenovo are clearly doing something right in the budget segment as this marks the second time in a row they’re taking home the Digit Zero1 Award for this category. The new Lenovo LOQ lineup features more powerful hardware in the familiar IdeaPad Gaming 3 package. While it looks the same on the surface, there has definitely been an improvement in performance. This was one of the few laptops that were nominated to feature an AMD processor in the AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS and the processor was definitely carrying its weight, acing every single processor and productivity benchmark in the category. Of course, this translated to gaming performance as well.

Also read: Digit Zero1 Awards and Best Buy Awards 2023: Best Performing Gaming Laptop (₹81K to ₹150K)

Both the winner and runner-up featured RTX 3050 GPUs at the same TGP. The defining factor was the difference in processors and the higher RAM on the Lenovo LOQ. The LOQ had a clean sweep in both synthetic and real-world gaming benchmarks, with the highest scores across the board. The LOQ also featured the fastest RAM of the lot. All of these factors combined made for an easy win for the Lenovo LOQ, which is our deserved Zero1 Award Winner for the Best Performing Gaming Laptop (60K – 80K) category.

Digit Best Buy Award Winner: Acer Nitro 5 AN515-58 (Buy now)

Price: ₹64,999.00

The Nitro 5 series has been a long running line-up of budget gaming laptops from Acer and it’s still going strong. Like the LOQ, the Nitro 5 also featured an NVIDIA RTX 3050 GPU with a TGP of 95W. While it didn’t outperform the LOQ, the gaming numbers were still good, especially if you consider the price point at just `64,999. The laptop also only came with 8GB of RAM, which fortunately is expandable. Had the laptop come with 16GB of RAM, it might have been able to compete with the LOQ more convincingly. Other than that, the laptop came with a 12th gen Intel Core i5-12450H, which is a whole generation older than the processor on the LOQ and much weaker in comparison.

We don’t normally see current gen processors in the budget segment, so the LOQ really pulled a fast one over the competition here. Despite all of this, the Nitro 5 still gave us great FHD (1080p) scores across the board when it came to gaming and did especially well in the thermals and throttling department, something the LOQ struggled with. Considering all of the above and the extremely budget price point, the Acer Nitro 5 takes away the deserved Best Buy Award in this category.

For more information on Digit Zero1 Award winners across various categories of products, please visit: https://www.digit.in/zero1-awards

Follow Us

Manish Rajesh

Manish can usually be found fervently playing video games of all kinds or… no wait he’s pretty much always playing games View Full Profile