The Lenovo LOQ 15AX9I appears to be a reasonable choice for users on a tight budget looking for a gaming laptop. However, potential buyers should be aware of the limitations, particularly the suboptimal gaming performance compared to similarly priced laptops with NVIDIA GPUs. The 8GB RAM may also pose a bottleneck in demanding games, so considering an upgrade to 16GB is advisable for a smoother gaming experience. If gaming performance is a top priority, users may want to explore alternatives with better GPU options within a similar price range.
Introduced last year, the LOQ series is a budget gaming laptop lineup offering from Lenovo which kind of replaced their existing IdeaPad Gaming 3 lineup. Earlier this year at CES, Lenovo revealed the new Lenovo LOQ variants, and we’re reviewing the Lenovo LOQ 15AX9I, which is the most budget variant of the lot. Featuring a 12th gen Intel Core i5-12450HX processor, 8GB of DDR5 RAM, and an Intel Arc A530M GPU, the laptop is priced at just Rs. 59,990. It’s also the first-ever gaming laptop we’re testing with an Intel Arc GPU so we were pretty keen to see how it fares.
Lenovo LOQ 15AX9I Specs at a glance
Processor: Intel Core i5-12450HX
GPU: Intel Arc A530M
VRAM: 4GB
TGP: 95W
RAM: 8GB DDR5-4800
Storage: 512GB M.2 NVMe SSD Storage
Price: INR 59,990
Lenovo LOQ 15AX9I Build and Design
With every iteration of the Lenovo LOQ, you can see more and more of the Legion lineup’s design language, which is Lenovo’s premium gaming lineup. Being the budget offering, the body is still all plastic, but it doesn’t mean that the laptop feels cheap in any way, especially for a laptop costing just under 60K. The hinges on the Lenovo LOQ feel very sturdy, with little to no flex or bounce. The lid doesn’t start at the back but is a little further ahead, leaving a bit of a protrusion at the back when the laptop is opened. This area houses the majority of the Laptop’s ports. Coming to the keyboard, it’s still pretty much the same; you get a full-sized backlit keyboard on the Lenovo LOQ. The travel distance on the keys is pretty low and there isn’t much feedback, but the overall typing experience is still decent thanks to good spacing. The touchpad is pretty large and off-centre towards the left, so it doesn’t get in the way of typing, but we use a mouse and lock the trackpad 9/10 times anyway.
I/O Ports
As we mentioned earlier, most of the ports are behind the laptop, where you have 2 USB-A 3.1 ports, an HDMI 2.1 port, an Ethernet port and the power supply. Other than that, you have a single USB-A 3.1 and a Type-C 3.2 port with PD on the right side of the laptop. The physical webcam shutter is also here. There are no ports on the left side.
Lenovo LOQ 15AX9I Display
The Lenovo LOQ has a surprisingly great display, especially considering the under 60K price point. The 15.6-inch FHD IPS display comes with a refresh rate of 144 Hz. We tested an average peak brightness of 295 nits, which is not bad at all for a laptop this cheap. What was more surprising however was that we tested an sRGB coverage of 98.8 percent, which is very impressive, especially at this price point. We also tested 73.1 percent DCI-P3 coverage, making this possibly the best display you can get on a gaming laptop at this price range. Thanks to the discrete GPU on board, I can see people considering this for creative workloads as well.
Thermals
Coming to the thermals, there are certain hotspots on the surface, such as the middle of the laptop near the IJKL cluster especially, which can get uncomfortably hot after intensive gaming or workloads. We recording temps as high as 45 degrees in that area. However, the rest of the laptops surface remains fairly cool, averaging between 27-30 degrees.
Lenovo LOQ 15AX9I Gaming Performance
We were pretty interested to see how the Intel Arc A530M GPU would compare seeing as this is the first gaming laptop we’ve tested with one. The Arc A530M competes directly with the NVIDIA RTX 3050, so for this review, we compared it to last year’s Acer Nitro 5 which features nearly identical specs, save the GPU of course. The LOQ comes with a 12th gen Intel Core i5-12450HX, paired with an Intel Arc A530M GPU with 4GB of VRAM and a TGP of 95W. The Acer Nitro 5 on the other hand, comes with an Intel Core i5-12450H, an NVIDIA RTX 3050 with 4GB of VRAM and a TGP of 95W. Both laptops also come with 8GB of RAM, with the LOQ actually having DDR5-4800 RAM as opposed to the DDR4-3200 RAM on the Acer Nitro 5. We were curious why Lenovo went with a 12th-generation processor on the LOQ, but this is the only laptop with a 12450HX in the market right now, which is somewhat interesting. But did that give it a leg up over the competition?
Not much it would seem, it’s up and down across all of our processor and productivity benchmarks so the processors are fairly even in this case.
Gaming Performance
Coming to gaming performance, things get interesting. We’re starting things off with synthetic benchmarks for which we use the 3DMark benchmark.
We use the Time Spy, Fire Strike, and Port Royal tests to test for DirectX 12, 11, and DXR performance respectively. As you can see, other than in DXR, the ARC A530M actually scores higher in every synthetic benchmark. This is significant because it’s a whole different story when we get to the real-world gaming performance.
When we come to real-world gaming performance, the RTX 3050 manages to outperform the ARC A530M in every single real-world gaming benchmark.
While the difference isn’t too large in most games at medium settings, it becomes increasingly larger at high settings.
One of the main reasons for this could be the lack of RAM, however, both laptops come with the same amount of RAM. The LOQ actually has better and faster RAM than the Nitro 5 in this particular case. Either way, 8GB of RAM is simply too low for a gaming laptop in today’s day and age and should be expanded to a minimum of 16GB ASAP. That said, it’s not like these numbers are bad, the games in question are still very much playable at a comfortable FPS. Even newer titles should run at low to medium settings without an issue, which is great for a laptop that costs under 60K.
Lenovo LOQ 15AX9I Verdict
The Lenovo LOQ 15AX9I appears to be a reasonable choice for users on a tight budget looking for a gaming laptop. It’s even a budget option for people looking for a laptop with a good, colour-accurate display. The presence of a dedicated GPU makes a solid laptop for creative workloads as well. However, potential buyers should be aware of the potential limitations of the Intel Arc GPU, particularly gaming performance when compared to similarly priced laptops with NVIDIA GPUs. 8GB of RAM also poses a bottleneck in demanding games, so considering an upgrade to 16GB is advisable for a smoother gaming experience. If gaming performance is a top priority, users may want to explore alternatives with better GPU options within a similar price range.
Lenovo LOQ Intel Core i5-12450HX (83FQ0009IN) Key Specs, Price and Launch Date
| Release Date: | |
| Market Status: | Launched |
Key Specifications
operating system (with
Windows 11 Home
-
display size (in inches)
15.6
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processor model name
Intel Core i5-12450HX
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Storage drive capacity
512 GB
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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
