Gaming laptops

There’s no shortage of gaming laptops , and many of them come from Lenovo. The company has now revealed a lot of new models that are all endlessly configurable — there might actually be too many laptops, honestly.

First up is the LOQ series (pictured above), which Lenovo says is pronounced as “lock,” with performance as the main priority over design. There are two 15-inch models, powered by either “up to” an AMD Ryzen 7 7840S processor, or “up to” a 13th Gen Intel Core i7-13700H. Both versions will be configurable with up to 16 GB RAM, up to a 115W NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card, up to a 1080p webcam, and up to a 60Whr battery. That’s a lot of “up to,” and those hardware options are likely much more expensive than the starting prices provided by Lenovo.

No matter which model and options you go with, you get a 15-inch 2560×1440 IPS screen, with a variable refresh rate of 165Hz with proper NVIDIA G-Sync support. There’s also a keyboard with optional 4-zone RGB lighting and key travel of 1.5mm, one USB Type-C port with 140W Power Delivery and DisplayPort, two USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) connectors, a USB 2.0 Type-A port, RJ45 Ethernet, and HDMI 2.1. Another Type-C port would have been handy, but that’s still more connectivity than you get on most ultrabooks.

There are also two 16-inch models: the LOQ 16 with up to an AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS, or the LOQ 16i with up to a 13th Gen Intel Core i7-13700H. Besides the larger physical size and screen, they’re almost identical to the 15-inch laptops. The most interesting difference might be the top CPU option for the Intel laptop, which is a desktop-class Core i7, not a mobile H chip.

Lenovo is also showing off the 8th Gen Legion Slim series, which tries to jam as much gaming performance as possible into a (somewhat) slim design. There’s the Legion Slim 7i and 7 (16″, 8), Legion Slim 5i and 5 (16″, 8), and Legion Slim 5 (14″, 8). That’s a lot of laptops, and there’s not a lot in common between them, besides the same design language and some of the same configuration options.

The Legion Slim 5 is the cheaper and less-powerful option, with your choice of either an Intel (up to a Core i9-13900H) or AMD (up to a Ryzen 9 7940HS) processor. It has a “thin version” with an RTX 4060 or 4070 GPU, and a “thinner version” with an RTX 3050 or 3050. The Slim 7 also has the same CPU options, but is large (and expensive) enough to pack in an RTX 4070 graphics card. Lenovo will also offer a 99.99 Whr battery option, which is just barely under the 100 Whr limit for electronics on most commercial flights.

Lenovo doesn’t have product pages available for any of these laptops yet, but the pricing and release dates are all over the place. Below is all the information provided by Lenovo, which isn’t all that helpful — we have no idea how much the above-described models with the best specs will cost.

Lenovo breidt zijn reeks gaming laptops vandaag uit met een nieuwe serie om de budgetgerichte gamers aan te spreken.  De Lenovo LOQ (uitgesproken als “lock”) gaming laptops voegen zich bij Lenovo’s gaming line-up, die voornamelijk duurdere opties bevat, om tegemoet te komen aan budgetgerichte gamers die casual willen gamen en geen gloednieuwe Nvidia RTX 4090 nodig hebben.

De LOQ gaming laptops zullen beschikbaar zijn in zowel 16-inch als 15-inch schermformaten en worden aangedreven door 13e generatie Intel Core of AMD Ryzen 7000 chips en Nvidia RTX 4060 graphics. Configuraties voor beide formaten worden geleverd met maximaal 16GB 5.600MHz DDR5 RAM en bieden ondersteuning voor maximaal een 1TB PCIe SSD.

De adviesprijzen zitten alsnog boven de 1000 euro, maar dit zijn laptops die vaak kortingen krijgen, waardoor ze na enkele maanden onder de kaap van 1000 euro kunnen zakken. De basisconfiguraties voor de Intel-modellen van de Lenovo LOQ 15 beginnen bij 1149 euro, terwijl het AMD-model begint bij 1099 euro. Wie de 16-inch versies wil, betaalt daarvoor minstens 1199 euro (Intel) of 1149 euro (AMD). Alleen de Lenovo LOQ 15 met Intel-processor is al vanaf mei beschikbaar, de overige versies zullen vanaf juni beschikbaar zijn.

Goedkoop, maar niet slecht

De Lenovo LOQ gaming laptops zijn misschien wat toegankelijker, maar dat betekent niet dat ze weinig kracht hebben.

De 15-inch versie bevat tot een WQHD 165Hz VRR scherm en een 60Whr-batterij met maximaal 6 uur gebruikstijd. De 16-inch versie wordt geleverd met een WQXGA 165Hz VRR-scherm en een 80Whr-batterij voor maximaal 7 uur gebruik.

Beide zijn voorzien van een MUX-schakelaar, die de latentie bij het gamen moet helpen verminderen en de batterijduur moet optimaliseren, Nvidia G-sync ondersteuning, de Lenovo LA AI Chip die het wattage en de thermische prestaties dynamisch afstemt en Lenovo’s volledige gaming toetsenbord met een toetsafstand van 1,5 mm en optionele RGB-achtergrondverlichting.

Meer geld? Ook geen probleem!

Als je op zoek bent naar iets meer fysiek lichter, maar spreekwoordelijk zwaarder voor je portemonnee, heeft Lenovo een nieuwe serie Legion Slim gaming laptops. De Lenovo Slim 5 en Slim 7 beloven draagbaarheid te bieden met zeer weinig compromis op vlak van prestaties. Ook hier maakt Lenovo onderscheid tussen Intel-versies (Slim 5i en Slim 7i) en AMD-versies (Slim 5 en Slim 7, zonder i achteraan).

Deze duurdere opties hebben veel van de functies van de Lenovo LOQ en voegen daar extra’s aan toe zoals een sneller scherm met hogere resolutie, Lenovo Legion’s ColdFront 5.0 geavanceerd thermisch systeem en het nieuwe Legion TrueStrike full-sized toetsenbord met Legion Spectrum RGB verlichting.

Ze worden uitgerust met krachtigere Intel of AMD internals tot een 13e generatie Intel Core i7 (of i9 in de Slim 7) of AMD Ryzen 9 chips en tot Nvidia RTX 4070 graphics.

Deze Lenovo Legion Slim laptops zullen in de loop van 2023 te koop zijn. De Lenovo Slim 7, Slim 7i en Slim 5i zijn vanaf mei beschikbaar, de Slim 5 (16 inch) vanaf juni en de Slim 5 (14 inch) vanaf september. Prijzen van de Lenovo Slim 5 beginnen bij 1349 euro (AMD) en 1399 euro (Intel), terwijl die van de Slim 7 beginnen bij 1899 euro (AMD) en 1999 euro (Intel).

In July 2022, our hardware big boss Dave James checked out the modular, user-upgradeable Framework laptop, and declared (opens in new tab) “Framework shows what notebooks should be like, and now I desperately want it to make a gaming laptop.” After attending a Framework event in San Francisco today, I’ve got some very good news for Dave—the moment has arrived.

Framework announced the Framework 16 on Thursday, bringing its modular design to a larger system built to house dedicated GPUs. It’s a 16-inch body, with an “expansion bay” system that’ll allow for you to extend out the back of the laptop past the display to house larger graphics boards. Imagine a laptop that’s 12 or so inches deep, from touchpad to rear exhaust, if you had an RTX 4060 on board, while a bigger, hotter RTX 4080 would be both thicker and extend an inch further in depth.

Those GPU models are purely my hypotheticals at this point: Framework isn’t talking about what exact CPUs or modular graphics cards will be available for the Framework 16, which is going to start shipping in “late 2023.” But we may know a bit more before long, with pre-orders set to open up sometime this spring.

As with Framework’s existing laptops, you’ll be able to swap out modules for the types of I/O you want: USB-C and HDMI ports, microSD slots, etc. New for the Framework 16 are keyboard options for a bigger laptop body, with an optional numpad. Framework had some cute options on display for people who don’t care about the numpad, including some LED dot matrix displays playing Pong. You’ll also be able to just slap in some flat panels if you want a standard centered keyboard, but the Raspberry Pi microcontrollers used for those optional features will be user-programmable if you want to get fancy.

Like much of Framework’s tech, the code is open source: the company just dropped its QMK keyboard firmware on Github (opens in new tab) .

The one thing we know about the Framework 16’s graphics chops is that the laptop will use a PCie Gen 4×8 interface, offering a max of 16GB/s in bandwidth. Tests have shown that’s ample bandwidth for even an RTX 4090 (opens in new tab) on desktop, so I think it’s fair to guess that any GPU you could cram into a Framework laptop now, or even three years from now, will be constrained by heat dissipation or potential wattage long before running into any bandwidth limitations.

But will we ever actually get a chance to slot a new GPU into the Framework 16 a few years down the line? We’ve seen versions of this promise so many times over the years, from desktop-replacement laptops with swappable parts (opens in new tab) to Alienware’s supposedly GPU-upgradeable Area 51m (opens in new tab) to the MXM modules of the early 2010s (opens in new tab) . None of these designs have stuck. And external GPU enclosures, despite being around for a decade, have never taken off, either, even when big names like Razer have taken a stab at it (opens in new tab) .

It seems like someone comes along every few years to say they’ve cracked it, but the trade-offs or costs have never made these options more appealing than a custom-built desktop or an ultralight laptop. Framework, at least, has played it smart up to this point: rather than jumping right into the more complex gaming laptop design, it started with the more portable Framework 13.

And Framework’s open sourcing of many of its designs is at least a more enthusiastic commitment to true customization than we’ve ever seen from other hardware companies tackling this idea. Maybe we’ve finally reached the point where dedicated GPUs and other laptop components are compact enough to remain swappable across multiple hardware generations. We’ll see later this year if Dave’s dream is genuinely coming true.