Lenovo’s New Mid-Range Gaming Laptops! LOQ 15 & 16 Review
Lenovo’s new LOQ gaming laptops are an evolution of their budget friendly IdeaPad Gaming 3 series, so what’s changed? I’ve tested the LOQ 15 and LOQ 16 to show you the difference, and help you decide which size is right for you. The LOQ has a storm grey plastic finish on both the lid and interior. Build quality feels decent, last year’s IdeaPad Gaming 3 had a lot of screen wobble, but that’s not a problem here. There is some flex to the keyboard and lid when pushing hard, but it felt sturdy during normal use. The front of the
lid sticks out a little, making one finger opening easy, and the lid goes back quite far, about 155 degrees. The hinge feels solid, even when ripping the lid open fast. The larger 16 inch model is only slightly thicker and deeper to fit in the taller screen, but it’s got the same width as the smaller 15 inch model. The 16 inch model weighs about 200g or almost half a pound more than the smaller 15 inch, and both use the same sized 230 watt charger. Both of my laptops have an Intel Core i7-13700H processor, Nvidia RTX 4060
graphics, and 16 gigs of DDR5 memory. The main differences in the specs are that the bigger LOQ 16 has a bigger screen and a bigger battery, but there
RGB backlighting, and all keys and secondary functions get lit up. You can change between three profiles with function and space bar and there are 2 brightness levels, but there aren’t any keyboard shortcuts to change key brightness, it’s managed through the Spectrum section in the Vantage software. This gives you some basic customization and you can change the speed of some effects. They both have the same keyboards. Typing felt fine and was a little clicky with 1.5mm of key travel. The touchpads are the same size and feel almost the same, but I found the one on the
15 inch to feel a bit nicer, but maybe that’s the touchpad lottery. The 15 and 16 inch models have the same ports, with USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C and 3.5mm audio combo jack on the left, and the camera disconnect switch and USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port on the right. The rest is on the back, from left to right we’ve got two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, gigabit ethernet, HDMI 2.1 output, and the power input on the right. The Ethernet port isn’t facing the preferred way, but it’s high enough that you can still remove
it without lifting the laptop. According to the spec sheet, the left Type-C port can be used to charge both laptops with up to 140 watts, but for whatever reason our usual 100 watt eGPU was not able to charge either laptop. Both the Type-C and HDMI ports connect directly to the Nvidia graphics, bypassing the integrated graphics whether optimus is on or off. And we confirmed the HDMI port can support a 4K screen at 120Hz 10 bit with G-Sync, but if you want 12 bit it’s limited to 60Hz. You’ve got to follow this process when getting inside,
so be careful. First take out all 10 phillips head screws, the 4 down the front are shorter, so keep track of them. Once those are out, you can slide the back piece of plastic off after prying it apart. Once this is off, there are three more screws hiding in here that need to be removed before you can take the bottom panel off. The job was made much easier with some pry tools, I’ll leave a link to the ones I use below. The internal layout is the same in both laptops. They’ve got the battery down the
front, two memory slots just above that, their installed SSD on the right, and a spare M.2 slot and Wi-Fi 6 card on the left. We’ll come back to the battery size difference in a moment. The 16 has a little extra room down the front to accommodate its taller screen, but otherwise the motherboards and coolers look the same. The speeds from the installed 1TB Gen 4 SSD were great. It’s a smaller 2242 sized drive, but I found the bit of metal you use to screw that in prevented installing an SSD with chips on both sides. A
longer drive with no chips underneath only just fits, and actually flexes a little if you screw it in all the way – not great. The spare M.2 slot can safely fit a double sided drive though. It doesn’t look like this standoff can be removed either, based on Lenovo’s documentation it’s connected to a larger piece of metal, but I suppose you could cut it off if you really wanted. Wi-Fi speed wasn’t anything special, and inline with other laptops that had RealTek wifi, but it should be possible to upgrade to an Intel card for like $20. Upgradeability
score was fairly average. I took off half a point for the extra steps required to open it up, and half a point off for one slot not fitting double sided drives. The speakers are found down the front on the left and right sides. The smaller LOQ 15 definitely sounded better, there’s more bass, while the bigger 16 sounded tinny, probably because the speakers were actually a little larger in the 15. The Latencymon results were pretty bad on the 15 inch model. My LOQ 15 is powered by a 60Wh battery, while my LOQ 16 is powered by
an 80Wh battery. The 16 is also available with the lower 60Wh option, but given the bigger 80Wh battery is only $10 more, it’s absolutely worth getting. Unfortunately there’s not enough space in the 15 to fit a bigger 80Wh battery, despite both laptops having the same width, and that’s because of the 15’s larger speakers. Weird trade off, but ok. The vantage software also has adaptive refresh rate enabled by default, which lowers the screen’s refresh rate down to 60Hz when you unplug the charger to save power. The screen flashes black as the refresh rate changes, and it
automatically goes back up when you plug back in. Lenovo only just added this for 2023 models, and it mostly worked ok, but a few times it either didn’t work or the change was delayed by a few minutes. The LOQ 16 lasted 25% longer in the video playback test, but 53% longer with a game running, a big difference considering the 80Wh battery is 33% larger than the 60Wh, but I double checked the results. It’s also got this message from our sponsor, Pulseway! Managing IT systems can be tough, trust me, I used to be a system administrator.
But Pulseway’s remote monitoring and management software makes it easy. Pulseway gives you a real time view across your entire network, lets you automate repetitive tasks, alerts you to issues and allows you to fix problems. All from your phone or tablet, anywhere! You can even run commands with your voice. Make your life easier and start your free trial with the link below. Back to the laptop. Let’s check out thermals next. Both laptops have two fans with three heatpipes shared between the CPU and GPU. The bottom panels have plenty of air intake holes directly over the fans,
and air gets exhausted out of both the left and right sides, as well as out of the corners on the back. Lenovo’s Vantage software allows us to change between different performance modes, which from lowest to highest are quiet, balance, performance and custom. Custom mode is new for 2023 models, and lets us set the fans to full speed or customize them, and we’ve also got the option to tweak CPU and GPU power and temperature limits. Lenovo only started adding this extra customization this year, and I’m happy to see that we still get it in the cheaper
LOQ options. Any time we’ve tested custom mode, everything was maxed out for best results. We’ve also left the default GPU overclock option on for all testing. I figure when it’s a simple one click like this people will use it, it requires no tuning, and it works in all modes except the lowest quiet mode. You can also hold the function key and press the letter Q to cycle between all modes except custom, and the power button changes color to reflect this so you can quickly see what mode you’re on at any time. Let’s start with the
smaller LOQ 15. The internal temperatures were cool when just sitting there idle. The rest of the results are from combined CPU and GPU stress tests which aim to represent a worst case full load scenario. Maxing the fans out in custom mode was only a little cooler than performance mode, but the cooling pad I test with, linked below the video, was able to lower temps a bit more. Interestingly, closing the lid was a little cooler than running with it open, and that’s despite the same clock speeds being reached on both the CPU and GPU in this
test. Custom mode was able to boost the CPU clock speed compared to performance mode, and it didn’t get hotter as the max fans offset the higher CPU TDP. The GPU technically maxes out at 115 watts according to Nvidia control panel, but Nvidia’s voltage limit prevents this workload from going above 100 watts. I’ve also tested the bigger LOQ 16, but without the cooling pad or lid closed. The results were much the same as the smaller 15, except for some reason performance mode was giving more power to the CPU and less to the GPU. Things weren’t too
different in custom mode though. Here’s how the different performance modes affect game performance. There wasn’t a difference between custom and performance modes on the LOQ 15, and balance with the AI option enabled wasn’t far behind. The LOQ 16 results aren’t directly comparable as we test with the screen’s native resolution, and the 16 has more pixels. Don’t worry, we will fairly compare games soon! The bigger gap between custom and performance mode matches what we saw in the stress tests, where the 16 seems to get less GPU power in performance compared to the 15. The CPU can
use more power and hit thermal throttling when the GPU is idle, like in Cinebench. We only tested the smaller 15 here, as this takes a lot of time, but again like the game, there’s no major difference between performance and custom mode. The 16 ended up scoring 5% higher than the 15 in multicore score, which to some degree could be silicon lottery. As we saw earlier, both laptops have the same width and coolers despite the 16 being larger. Anyway the scores are fine but not super impressive, given last year’s 12th gen chips that can reach higher
power limits can do better. The single core score was much lower on the 16, I’ll talk about that in a moment. Performance lowers if we unplug the charger and instead run purely off of battery power, and we’re limited to balance mode without the charger. These two 13th gen i7s were now generally ahead of the 12th gen options that were ahead previously, which I think makes sense, as 13th gen should be more efficient. By default, single core scores were actually higher on the 15 in performance mode than custom. This is because the custom profile in vantage
uses the Windows default balanced power plan, while performance mode uses Lenovo’s Legion Performance power plan. The expectation from Lenovo is that someone using custom mode in Vantage will also tweak the power plan to suit their needs. Personally I would have preferred custom to give best performance by default, but that’s me. Now that said, on the 16 we found that the performance mode power plan was Legion Balance mode, rather than Legion Performance like on the 15, as that didn’t exist. This may explain why the 16 was behind in single core score, and right now I can’t
boost it, but this and could absolutely change with software updates. The units I’m testing with are a little early. Most laptops I test are in the low 30 degrees Celsius range on the keyboard at idle, and the smaller 15 inch model was right in line with this. It’s warmer with the stress tests running, the WASD area was a little warm and the middle didn’t feel great, but not hot. It’s a little cooler in balance mode, but the space bar hot spot isn’t too comfortable. Performance mode is cooler to the touch, as the fans are faster,
and then custom mode with the fans maxed out was cooler too, but the fans are louder now, let’s have a listen. For some reason the fans on the 15 kept turning on and off constantly when idling, at least during this recording session, I didn’t actually find this to happen any other time, but thought I should report it anyway. Otherwise the fans get louder in the higher modes as you’d expect, with custom being quite loud. Honestly considering the temps under stress test, you can easily get away with running the fans quieter no problem. Again, it’s great
that we now have fan control. So the LOQ 15 has a more standard 16:9 15.6” screen, while the LOQ 16 has a taller 16:10 16 inch screen, so it has more pixels vertically. This results in less of a bottom chin and more viewable screen space. It’s only a subtle difference, but the 16 does look nicer in that regard in my opinion. Now both of my laptops came to me with 1440p screens, which are higher quality compared to the 1080p versions that are also available for less money. Based on the fact that the LOQ 16’s panel
is listed at 45% NTSC, I would expect worse results with the 1080p screens compared to what I’m about to show. Color gamut was decent on both panels, though the larger 16 inch was a little better. The smaller 15 inch was able to get a little brighter though, but it’s not that big of a difference, and the gap between them was smaller at lower brightness levels. Lenovo’s Vantage software has Over Drive enabled by default, which lowers response time at the expense of overshoot and undershoot. There wasn’t too much difference between the 15 and 16 inch panels
here, the change is well within the margin of error range, and both are below the 6.06ms needed for transitions to occur within the refresh window. It’s an excellent result considering these are meant to be Lenovo’s more budget friendlier options, but at the same time don’t forget these are the 1440p panels, I would definitely expect slower results with the 1080p screens. Even still, these ones are trading blows with higher end models. The total system latency is the amount of time between a mouse click and when a gunshot fire appears on the screen in CS:GO. Again the
results are decent, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we see closer to last year’s IdeaPad with the lower quality 1080p screen. Both laptops have a MUX switch, so you can disable optimus by setting dGPU mode and rebooting, but they both also have advanced optimus, so you can change without rebooting too. But that’s done through NVIDIA control panel. Surprisingly they both have G-Sync too, which is generally a more premium feature, and even the lower end screen on the 16 offers this too, but not the 15. Both screens had some backlight bleed, with the 15 being more
patchy, but it wasn’t noticeable during normal use, and this will vary between laptops anyway. Now let’s find out how well the LOQ 15 and 16 actually perform in games. The 16 is of course larger, so you might assume that it has better cooling and might perform better. But that was not the case! Cyberpunk 2077 was tested the same on all laptops, and I’ve got both the LOQ 15 and 16 shown by the red highlights. They’re performing about the same at 1080p, and the average FPS is very close to MSI’s GP77, the only other 4060 laptop
we’ve reviewed so far, though that had fewer dips in performance, as shown by its higher 1% low result. Interestingly both LOQs were now ahead of the GP77 at the higher 1440p resolution, with the 4060 almost giving us 60 FPS at high settings without features like DLSS or FSR. The more expensive 4070 laptops honestly weren’t much better. Red Dead Redemption 2 was tested with the game’s benchmark, and the GP77 with 4060 was 13% faster despite having the same CPU and GPU. Technically MSI’s 4060 has a higher maximum power limit, but in most games that won’t get
hit due to a voltage limit. At 1440p both LOQs weren’t really much faster compared to 3060 laptops from last gen, which are much cheaper. Control is a GPU heavy game, even at 1080p, and this time both LOQs were a little ahead of the GP77. This time there’s a bigger gap between the 4060 and 4070 laptops, though those aren’t too different compared to last year’s 3070 Ti. At 1440p the LOQ 15 was still slightly ahead compared to the larger LOQ 16, which is probably more down to silicon lottery luck than due to the size difference, but
may also be the weird lower single core performance of the 16s power plan. Still though, it’s not bad at all that these more budget friendly designs can beat a premium 3070 Ti laptop from last year. Here are the 3DMark results for those that find them useful, now for some content creator tests. Adobe Premiere was tested with the Puget Systems benchmark tool, and the LOQ did quite well here, basically matching last year’s higher tier Legion 5i Pro with a more powerful GPU. Adobe Photoshop generally likes single threaded performance, and although that looked alright in Cinebench earlier,
the score was close to the lower specced IdeaPad from last generation. These same specs were scoring 21% higher with MSI’s GP77. The gap wasn’t as big in DaVinci Resolve. This test depends more on GPU power, and this time the GP77 was 10% ahead, though it does also have more GPU power if the voltage limit isn’t being hit. Blender is also GPU dependent, and the LOQ was a little ahead of the 4060 in the GP77 this time, and close to other 4070 laptops. We’ve also tested SPECviewperf which tests out various professional 3D workloads. Lenovo’s BIOS has
a lot of extra options that most other laptops like ASUS, Razer and Acer simply do not have. It’s only really beaten by MSI’s advanced BIOS, which has an insane amount of customization available. Linux support was tested with an Ubuntu 23.04 live CD. By default the keyboard, touchpad, camera, speakers, ethernet and Wi-Fi all worked fine. All keyboard shortcuts for adjusting screen brightness, keyboard lighting profile, volume control, and performance modes worked too, an excellent result. Pricing and availability will change over time, so check the link below the video for updates and current sales. And if either of
these laptops do go on sale, we’ll be sure to add them to the gaminglaptop.deals website. We update that every day to include all of the latest sales, so check that out to get the best deal on your next gaming laptop! At the time of recording, the LOQ 15 with Intel CPU starts from $750 USD, though that’s with RTX 3050 graphics, and the AMD version costs $10 extra for some reason. The LOQ 16 with AMD CPU is coming soon, and the Intel version of the 16 inch has a higher starting price because it starts with RTX
4050 graphics. I’ve got a whole video comparing the 3050 and 4050. The LOQ 15 with similar specs to what I’ve tested here goes for $1458 USD, while the slightly larger LOQ 16 with same key specs is just $27 extra. You can also increase the battery size on the 16 by 33% for just $10, which I absolutely recommend, that’s totally worth it. Anyway as far as 4060 laptops go, this is a bit expensive, considering for similar money you could get an ASUS G16, which I believe is a higher quality chassis. Lenovo are known to frequently run
sales though, so this may change. The main differences between the LOQ 15 and LOQ 16 are of course that the 16 is a little bigger and heavier, but this gives you the slightly bigger screen with more viewable screen space and the option of upgrading to a bigger battery for more run time. Apart from those things, for the most part, there wasn’t really that big of a difference between these two laptops. Honestly, I’m surprised that they both have features like advanced optimus and G-Sync. Even MSI’s top of the line gaming laptops that cost 3 or 4
times more money are missing those features. My main problem is that the RTX 4060 graphics in both of these just doesn’t perform that much better than a last gen RTX 3060 which also costs far less money. Just look at all these current sales that we’ve got on the deals site for 3060 laptops. Again there’s a link below the video to these. Older laptops are just more likely to have better sales. Now that said, it is worth keeping in mind that the 4060 does have 8 gigs of VRAM, while the last gen 3060 is limited to
6 gigs. But even still, for this sort of money, you can get a 3070 Ti laptop from last year that still has 8 gigs but a faster memory bus. The 4060 can offer smoother gameplay with frame generation in supported games, so don’t make the mistake when buying your next laptop! Check this video next to find out if it’s worth saving money on an older RTX 3060, or if the 4060 is worth it. I’ve compared both GPUs in 25 games at 1080p and 1440p resolutions with features like frame generation, ray tracing and DLSS, so I’ll see
you in that one next.
