Lenovo LOQ Review

It would be rather silly of Lenovo to not use the already established design aesthetic of the Legion series and develop something new from the ground up. To nobody’s surprise, the new LOQ series takes major design cues from the Legion series of laptops. The chassis design incorporates the practical rear port access which we have come to love for its ease of use and practicality while bringing a splash of color and interest to the exterior as well. The rear heat vents are blue in colour with a few other design embellishments thrown in.

We aren’t going to lie. It does look pretty. The lid features a massive LOQ logo and the edges seem to have been trimmed for a more rounded look compared to the Legion series. For most, the LOQ series is visually indistinguishable from the Legion series, unless you’re a real nerd and for some reason are obsessed with Lenovo’s line of laptops. 

The build quality is top-notch and Lenovo hasn’t skimped on anything in this department. It feels properly premium and has that sense of heft you usually associate with a much more expensive unit. The lid is also solid and is easy to open with one hand and the hinges too don’t feel like they’re going to give out at any time.

The unit sent to us featured a WQHD (2560 x 1440) IPS display that comes with a 165Hz variable refresh rate. It’s nothing out of the ordinary and won’t make your eyes pop out but having that variable refresh rate allows for more flexibility in terms of work vs play. Lenovo also makes it easy to toggle with shortcuts so there’s no hunting around in the options menu to change it. It does have a minor impact on battery life and having it turned down when working adds to the overall hours you can use it. Of course the 165Hz panel while playing games is super-smooth and something that we’re used to now. It may wow you if you haven’t gamed on a panel of this caliber though.

Complementing the overall design aesthetic, the keyboard features full-size arrow keys and a full-size number pad with various backlighting options. It’s an RGB lover’s paradise and you can customize your own profile as well on it and make it your own. But what we really love and appreciate about Lenovo’s engineering is the fact that the LOQ 15IRH8 also adopts a keyboard intake ventilation feature that further improves airflow by allowing air to flow through the bottom of the keys. This means that when you play Arma 3 for a cool 12 hours straight, you don’t feel the heat on the keys as much as you would on a different gaming laptop of the same caliber. That is a big deal!

We won’t bore you with specs but the combination of the Raptor and the Lovelace is a match made in mid-range performance heaven. Throw anything at the LOQ and it will handle it with stupendous amounts of grace and speed. The Intel Core i7-13620H scores over 15,000 in the Cinebench multi-core benchmark and over 11,000 in the Geekbench multi-core benchmark for those who care about benchmarking. Now, the faster 13th gen processors offer better multi-core performance but they of course come at a cost. 

We ran Witcher 3 with the latest update and at Ultra 1080p we clocked an average of 70fps, on QHD it dropped down to a measly 52fps, still commendable. The Last of US averaged at just 35fps on QHD with everything set to max but returned a respectable 55fps on FHD. Resident Evil 4 didn’t drop below 65fps on QHD and stayed above 110 on FHD. God of War averaged at 55fps on QHD and Cyberpunk also hovered around the 50fps mark. All of these were run with the laptop in its default state with no overclocking done.

Lenovo offers a host of options to improve both performance and battery life. With the Lenovo Vantage software you can overclock the GPU and set the VRAM Clock offset. Doing this will cause more heat and power consumption, so battery life will take a hit and you will have to keep the unit plugged in. 

Another very handy option is the choice to select the GPU mode in which the laptop runs. There’s four options to choose from and you can select the dedicated GPU mode for max graphical output all the time or the Hybrid mode which dynamically runs both the integrated and the dedicated GPUs or use only the integrated unit or let the laptop decide what it wants to use when plugged in and on battery. 

The LOQ 15IRH8 is equipped with Lenovo’s LA1 AI chip that powers a software-based machine learning tool that monitors in-game frame rates and adjusts the system fans and power distribution to target the highest possible performance. Now, while in our testing phase, we didn’t really see much of a difference in fps with this turned on/off.

Lenovo might have just hit the sweet spot with the LOQ series and at least the review unit seeded to us with the NVIDIA RTX 4060 and the Intel Core i7-13620H paired with 16GBs of RAM appears to be value for money at its asking price. It can run AAA titles at respectable fps numbers and manages the thermals beautifully as well. Add to that the quick charge capabilities of juicing the unit upto 80% in just an hour and the deal sounds even sweeter. The Lenovo Vantage throws overclocking complications out of the window and makes life easier for the newbie enthusiast and for those concerned about longevity, Lenovo offers a cool 3 year optional warranty as well. You can head to lenovo.com and customize your LOQ or head to Flipkart and check out the range there.