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 15- inch 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.