Lenovo LOQ 15IAX9I review: A budget Intel Arc gaming laptop

Cheap gaming laptops – by which I mean anything costing less than £1,000 – tend to be awful. Once you’ve paid for a decent graphics chip, a half-decent CPU, and enough storage and RAM to claim gaming competency, there’s not much money left for things like a quality display or keyboard.

Lenovo has made a good effort to buck that trend with the Lenovo LOQ 15IAX9I, which is being pitched as a true gaming machine. That’s thanks in the main to its Intel Arc A530M GPU, which is a good deal cheaper than the more common Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050.

Lenovo LOQ 15IAX9I review: What you need to know

The LOQ 15IA9I ticks all the important boxes for a gaming laptop. It has a discrete GPU with a MUX switch, a 144Hz display, options to increase both the storage and RAM post-purchase and dedicated software to manage your game library and hardware.

The new LOQ also has a high-standard Lenovo keyboard and a wide range of I/O ports. However, the battery is only rated at 60Wh, so you should probably stay close to a power socket, especially if you are gaming.

It looks and feels more upmarket than the price suggests, something typical of Lenovo, which always seems to be conscious that it has the ThinkPad brand to protect. The Lenovo LOQ Gen 9 15in looks more like a business laptop than a gamer, so it’s a bit of a wolf in sheep’s clothing, which is refreshing when some budget gaming laptops are the exact opposite.

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Lenovo LOQ 15IAX9I review: Price and competition

Configuration tested: Intel Core i5-12450HX CPU, Intel Arc A530M GPU, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 15.6in, 144Hz, 1,920 x 1,080 IPS display. Price when reviewed: £666 inc VAT

As with all of Lenovo’s gaming laptops, the LOQ Gen 9 15in is available in several different configurations, but the one with Intel Arc graphics I’m reviewing here looks to be the best value.

You can upgrade the RAM and storage at the point of purchase but it’s also prudent to upgrade to a better webcam and an RGB keyboard for a mere £10 each. I’ve tested the model with an Intel Core i5-12450HX CPU, Intel Arc A530M GPU, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, which is currently priced at a very reasonable £666. 

The AMD Ryzen 5 7235HS-powered model with an Nvidia RTX 3050 and the same amount of memory and storage will set you back £820. You can find a full list of the configurable options here.

Alternatives worth pondering include the Acer Aspire 7, a good all-rounder with decent battery life, a quick SSD, a good keyboard, a Thunderbolt 4 port and upgradable RAM and storage. The screen is rather drab, and the 35W TGP Nvidia RTX 2050 GPU isn’t very quick. It’s decent value at just £799, though.

Our favourite affordable gaming laptop is the Asus TUF Gaming A16 Advantage Edition, which is a bargain at £849. It’s a superbly balanced machine with a potent AMD RX 7600S GPU, a high-quality 165Hz display, and strong battery life, plus it’s easy to upgrade.

Finally, you might want to consider the HP Victus. At a new price of £769, it’s more attractive than when we first reviewed it. It’s a well-made and stylish machine with decent battery life and an Nvidia RTX GeForce 4050, albeit with the TGP set to 75W.

Lenovo LOQ 15IAX9I review: Design and build quality

Available in one colourway called Luna Grey, the ninth-gen LOQ isn’t all that thrilling to look at. The only vaguely declamatory part of the design is the large central power button below the screen, which has a surrounding LED that changes colour with the power mode: white for auto, blue for silent and red for performance.

It’s made largely from plastic, but that feels strong and sturdy and it meets the US Army’s MIL-STD-810H durability standards. There is some flex in the lid, but nothing to worry about and, usefully, it folds flat through 180 degrees. It’s reasonably svelte for a gaming laptop, too, measuring a mere 24mm thick and weighing 2.38kg.

Oddly, the LOQ Gen 9 does not have ports on the left side. You’ll find 5Gbits/sec USB-A and 10Gbits/sec USB-C ports, a 3.5mm audio jack, and a camera shutter on the right, while on the rear are two 5Gbits/sec USB-A ports, one HDMI 2.1 output, Gigabit Ethernet, and a rectangular power jack for the bundled 170W adapter. The USB-C port supports DP Alt Mode video; it supports 140W USB PD charging as well, but I couldn’t get it to work with my lower-powered 65W PD charger.

Like many Lenovo gaming laptops, the LOQ Gen 9 has a label for each rear-mounted port printed on the ledge that extends behind the hinge. This makes plugging cables in much easier when you can’t see the port you’re aiming for.

The base panel comes away without drama once you’ve removed the Philips screws, and once inside, you’ll find a populated 2242 PCIe 4 SSD slot, an empty 2280 slot and two SODIMM slots, each of which houses a stick of 8GB DDR5-4800 memory. Also easily accessible is the Realtek RTL8852BE wireless card, which supports Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2, and the 60Wh battery.

Lenovo LOQ 15IAX9I review: Keyboard, touchpad and webcam

This being a Lenovo, the keyboard is excellent. It looks a lot like a ThinkPad keyboard, just one shorn of the TrackPoint and extra mouse buttons. The layout is good, and I particularly like the full-sized arrow keys and the ability to cycle through the power settings using Fn+Q and the refresh rates using Fn+R.

The keys have a dished profile, 1.5mm of travel and a precise, well-damped end stop. The keyboard deck is more solid than most, with little flex in evidence, even if you press down hard in the middle.

Some LOQ models come with RGB backlights, but my review sample had a simple but effective two-stage white light. This means there’s no way to distinguish the WASD keys, which is slightly irritating on a keyboard with gaming aspirations. The 75 x 120mm buttonless Mylar-covered touchpad works perfectly, though, and has a crisp, if rather noisy, click action.

There’s not much to say about the 720p webcam. It performs well enough in good light, but as the light fades so does the image quality. There’s no support for Windows Hello facial recognition, which means there’s no biometric security, nor do you get Windows’ latest Studio Effect special effects. At least there is a privacy shutter.

Lenovo LOQ 15IAX9I review: Display and audio

• 15in, 1080p display with 144Hz refresh rate
• Stereo 2W speakers

Cheap gaming laptops are not the best places to look for a decent-quality display, but the LOQ Gen 9 bucks that trend with a rather good one. It has a 15.6in screen with an aspect ratio of 16:9, a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080, and a 144Hz refresh rate.

Maximum brightness is only par for the affordable laptop course at 302cd/m2. Still, it covers 101.4% of the sRGB gamut and, thanks to a black luminance of just 0.21cd/m2, has a high contrast ratio of 1,448:1. The DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB gamut volumes are rather smaller at 71.8% and 69.9% but are still considerably better than the 41.2% and 40% recorded by the Acer Aspire 7.

The LOQ Gen 9 makes games and videos look colourful and well-saturated, which is a good result for the price. However, there is no support for HDR10 content.

Other reasons to give the display a thumbs up are the respectable 1.68 Delta E colour variance against the sRGB colour profile and the option to set the refresh rate at either 144Hz, 72Hz, or 60Hz or to switch dynamically between the higher two to save power.

Motion handling is good for the money. Some ghosting was visible in the Blur Busters UFO test, but it was nothing excessive and hard to discern during actual gameplay.

The 2 x 2W speaker isn’t the loudest I’ve encountered, pumping out just 72dB(A) from a pink noise source at a 1m distance and maximum volume, but the sound is warm and detailed with more than a hint of bass. There’s no distortion to be heard, even at maximum volume, making it a perfectly acceptable system for listening to music and gaming.

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Lenovo LOQ 15IAX9I review: Performance and battery life

The LOQ may run on a 12th-gen Intel Core i5-12450HX CPU, but it’s still a competitive processor with 8 cores (4 performance, 4 efficiency), 12 threads, and a maximum boost clock of 4.4Ghz.  

The LOQ 15IAX9I also features Lenovo’s LA AI chip. This is a dedicated AI chip that deploys a “software machine learning” algorithm to optimise system performance, but I couldn’t detect any difference it was making. I asked Lenovo to spill the beans on what type of processor the LA A1 is, but they told me they “do not disclose computational capabilities on those chips”.

The LOQ 15IAX9I scored 267 points in the Expert Reviews 4K multimedia benchmark and 10,101 in the Cinebench R23 multi-core CPU test, both solid results and, in the case of the former, well ahead of the Acer Aspire 7 (182) and the Medion E40 (240). It has performance headroom to spare for productivity tasks but stumbles a little in gaming.

The Arc A530M uses Intel’s Xe Super Sampling or XeSS upscaling system, and you can find a list of the supported games here. It’s a considerably shorter list than the games supported by Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution. On a positive note, Intel has just announced XeSS v1.3, which reportedly provides a noticeable performance boost.

Intel quotes the Arc A530M as having a TGP of between 75 and 95W, but the highest I managed to record from the LOQ 15IAX9I was 72W, which may be part of the reason it struggles with AAA games at anything other than the lowest detail settings and no ray tracing. 

Comparing directly with the RTX 2050-powered Acer Aspire 7 and the RTX 4050-powered Medion E40, the LOQ 15IAX9I ran the Hitman 2 benchmark at 22.8fs while the Acer managed 28.7 and the Medion 49.3. 

Here are more examples: running Cyberpunk 2077, the LOQ 15IAX9I managed 31fs at medium detail, 58fs at the same settings with XeSS upscaling and 33fs in the Ray Tracing Low setting with XeSS upscaling. Moving to Returnal, the LOQ 15IAX9I managed 23fs on the lowest settings without XeSS, 30fs with XeSS and 38fs with XeSS at 1280 x 720.

The Wolfenstein: Youngblood benchmark ran at 29fs at the highest Mein Leben! setting and 95fs at the High (the third lowest of six) detail setting. Because this game uses an Nvidia API for ray tracing and does not support XeSS upscaling, these are the only results I can post.

The takeaway is that if you’re happy running games at lower detail settings and without ray tracing, the LOQ 15IAX9I does a decent job. If the game in question supports XeSS upscaling, so much the better. On a subjective level, I spent several hours playing Wolfenstein: Youngblood and came away perfectly happy with the look and the performance.

The SPECviewperf 3dsmax modelling test scored 30, which again is not stellar compared to the Acer Aspire 7’s 32, let alone the Medion E40’s 68.

The Solidigm quad-level cell (QLC) SSD in my test machine was nothing exciting. It recorded mediocre bordering on pedestrian sequential read and write speeds of 2,940MB/s and 1,350MB/s, respectively. I’d suggest buying a decent 1TB TLC 2280 SSD, cloning that as the system’s primary drive and using the Solidigm drive for bulk storage.

The lack of gaming performance would be more acceptable if battery life were good, but the LOQ 15IAX9I only has 60Wh, which is small for the breed in terms of capacity and physical size; there’s enough space inside for a battery at least 30% larger. In our standard video rundown test, the new Lenovo only lasted a little over five hours, which is poor compared to all the competition, bar the Medion E40, which recorded an appallingly low runtime of 3hrs 58mins.

Lenovo LOQ 15IAX9I review: Verdict

Given its asking price, there’s much to like about the Lenovo LOQ 15IAX9I. The keyboard is excellent, the display and sound system better than most gaming laptops costing less than £1,000, and there’s space for a second SSD, which is becoming a rare feature at this price point.

In the negative column, the battery life is poor, and gaming performance is lacklustre compared to the Medion Erazer Crawler E40. However, I should clarify that at the time of writing, that costs almost £140 more. 

For the money, the Lenovo LOQ 15IAX9I is a great all-around performer with some gaming capability rather than a thoroughbred gamer. If you’re after that, it will do very nicely and represents excellent value.