Lenovo is looking at wooing gamers on a budget, with the Chinese manufacturer introducing a new lineup of gaming laptops and PCs called LOQ (pronounced as ‘lock’). While their Lenovo Legion lineup remains, LOQ will offer more budget-focused and entry level hardware, targeting new gamers in particular.
Similar to how their rivals such as Acer and Asus have two different sub-brands for the premium gaming crowd and the budget-oriented gamers (think Acer Predator vs Nitro, or Asus ROG vs TUF), Lenovo LOQ will supplement their mainstream Legion lineup with hardware offerings that Lenovo claims will be packed with features yet won’t break the bank. While they’ve shown off the first few Lenovo LOQ machines already, Lenovo has unfortunately not yet revealed just how much they’ll cost nor when they’ll be available in Malaysia, though they do state that more will be announced at a later date.
What we do know though is that there will be both a LOQ 15 and a LOQ 16 gaming laptop, with the numbers corresponding to the sizes of their displays. Starting with the smaller of the two, the LOQ 15 will come with up to a 15-inch, WQHD, IPS display pushing a 165Hz variable refresh rate with a 3ms response time. Lenovo will likely offer cheaper variations for the display, but this top end panel will also cover 100% of the sRGB colour gamut, have a peak brightness of 350nits and comes with NVIDIA G-Sync support too.
The LOQ 16 meanwhile will get a 16-inch, 16:10 display for that extra screen real estate. It’ll be available with an up to WQXGA resolution panel with a 165Hz variable refresh rate, a 3ms response time together with a 100% coverage of the sRGB colour gamut. Just like the LOQ 15, the LOQ 16 will offer NVIDIA G-Sync support too, as well as an additional hardware low blue light feature.
Under the hood, both the LOQ 15 and the LOQ 16 will come with your choice of AMD or Intel flavours. On the AMD side of things, the Lenovo LOQ laptops will offer up to an AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS processor while for the Intel-based systems you get your choice of up to 13th Gen Intel Core i7-13700H for the silicon. This gets mated to up to 16GB of dual channel 5600MHz DDR5 RAM, up to 1TB of SSD storage and up to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 laptop GPU rated at 115W of TGP. A MUX switch is also present that can prioritise between the iGPU and the discrete card depending on the task. The laptops will come with your choice of Windows 11 Home or Pro too.
Keeping the lights on on the LOQ 15 is a 60Whr battery, while the larger of the two laptops has an 80Whr battery. They’ll come with 170W charging bricks, unless you get the GeForce RTX 4060 option, which requires a beefier 230W charger. As for I/O, there’s a USB-C 3.1 port, a USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 port, a USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 port, an audio combo jack, an Ethernet port as well as a HDMI 2.1 port. You’ll also find two 2W stereo speakers onboard while for wireless connectivity they come with support for WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.1.
The two laptops however aren’t the only members of the new Lenovo LOQ range. If you’re looking for a pre-built gaming desktop instead of a laptop, there’s also the Lenovo LOQ Tower. Housed in a mid-tower sized 17L case, it’ll come with up to a 13th Gen Intel Core i7-13700 processor on an M-ATX Intel B760 motherboard, paired with up to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series graphics card, up to 32GB of 3200MHz DDR4 RAM and up to 1TB of NVMe storage.
The tower also comes with two USB-A ports, a USB-C port and an audio combo jack in front, while on the back there’s four USB-A 2.0 ports, a 2.5G Ethernet port, a VGA port, a HDMI 1.4b port and your audio out ports. If you prefer to use WiFi, the LOQ Tower also comes with Intel WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 connectivity.