Lenovo LOQ 15IRH8 Core i7 review

Frame rates

1920×1080, High preset, upscaling off.

Measured on this machine. Source: Notebookcheck, 2023-10-14.

In use

The short version

The Lenovo LOQ 15IRH8 in this Core i7 configuration is the most interesting machine in its price bracket, and the reason has almost nothing to do with its graphics card. At £999 it pairs an RTX 4050 running at 95W with a Core i7-13620H, 16GB of memory and a 512GB SSD, behind a 15.6in 2560x1440 panel at 165Hz. On paper that is a budget gaming laptop with an ambitious screen. In the measured figures it is something rather more provocative: a machine that, across an entire category of games, produces results that hardware costing three times as much cannot improve on.

The single most striking feature of this record is not any individual number but the shape of the top of the list. F1 22 at 172fps, Strange Brigade at 172fps, Dota 2 at 171fps, GTA V at 169fps and The Witcher 3 at 168fps — five different games from five different engines, all landing within four frames of each other. That is not a coincidence and it is not a GPU result. Five unrelated titles converging that tightly is the signature of a ceiling somewhere else in the system, and on a machine with a Core i7-13620H and a 4050, that ceiling is the processor and the game engines rather than the graphics part. Whatever else this laptop is, in that category of game it is running as fast as the software allows.

The rest of the list falls away as the games get heavier: F1 23 at 158fps, Far Cry 5 at 128fps, X-Plane 11 at 110fps, and Final Fantasy XV at 84fps. That last figure is the honest measure of the graphics hardware, and it is where the 4050 shows its limits.

Buy it if you play competitive and older games and you want the most capable machine £999 will buy. Think hard before buying it if you intend to play the heaviest modern releases at the panel's native resolution, because a 4050 at 95W behind a 1440p display is the most stretched pairing in this comparison set. And note one thing that the comparison section makes unavoidable: at £999, this machine matches a £3,012 laptop across the three games they share.

Performance

All frame rates were measured by Notebookcheck on 14 October 2023, at 1920x1080, High preset, upscaling off. That last condition matters especially on a machine at this level, because DLSS is precisely the tool that makes a 4050 comfortable in demanding games, and the benchmark data deliberately excludes it so that laptops can be compared consistently. Everything at the bottom of this list is a floor rather than a limit.

What 95W means for a 4050

The GPU power limit is the specification that actually predicts behaviour, and it is the one most buyers never check. The same graphics part is configured across a wide band of sustained power by different manufacturers, and the gap between a conservative implementation and an aggressive one is large enough to swallow a tier — a well-fed part from a lower tier will beat a starved part from a higher one, which is exactly what several comparisons on this site demonstrate.

95W is a strong configuration for this GPU. Lenovo has not put the cheapest possible graphics part into a chassis and then clamped it to keep the fans quiet; it has given it a substantial sustained power budget. The practical effect shows up in the GPU-limited games at the bottom of the list rather than the CPU-limited ones at the top, because those are the only places where extra graphics power has anything to do. Final Fantasy XV at 84fps is the clearest example — an effects-dense engine that leans on the graphics part, landing well clear of anything you would call marginal.

What 95W cannot do is change results that are not GPU-limited in the first place, and that is most of this list. Which brings us to the most informative thing in the entire record.

The flat top: five games, four frames apart

F1 22 at 172fps. Strange Brigade at 172fps. Dota 2 at 171fps. GTA V at 169fps. The Witcher 3 at 168fps.

Five titles built on five different engines, with wildly different rendering workloads, all within four frames per second of one another. Games do not behave like that when the graphics card is the constraint — a GPU-limited set spreads out, because different engines ask for different things and a GPU responds differently to each. When results converge this tightly, something outside the graphics part is setting the pace.

On this machine, that something is the combination of the Core i7-13620H and the games themselves. At 1920x1080 on High, all five of these titles are limited by processor throughput, by draw-call submission, or by internal engine limits — none of them is asking the 4050 for everything it has. The result is a hard ceiling that every one of them runs into at roughly the same place.

This is genuinely good news for a buyer, and it should be read as such. It means that in a very large category of games — competitive titles, racing games, well-optimised older releases, and the enormous back catalogue that most people's libraries are actually made of — this £999 machine is running at the limit of what the software will deliver. There is no faster result available in those games, at any price, without a faster processor. The comparison section demonstrates this in the most direct way possible.

The descent: where the GPU starts to matter

Below the flat band, the list behaves normally. F1 23 at 158fps is a useful data point sitting next to F1 22 at 172fps: two iterations of the same franchise on an evolving engine, with the newer one costing measurably more to run. The hardware did not change between those two measurements; the game did, and that is a compact illustration of how workloads get heavier over time even within a single series.

Far Cry 5 at 128fps is an older open-world title that is not trivial to run and is comfortably handled here. X-Plane 11 at 110fps is the third scoring-suite entry and a different kind of test again — flight simulators of that generation are bound by draw-call throughput and single-thread processor performance rather than raw graphics power, which is precisely why it belongs in a suite. It stops the average from being a pure GPU measurement, and it is the lowest of the three suite games here by a clear margin.

Final Fantasy XV at 84fps is the lowest untagged result and the most honest single indicator of what the 4050 at 95W is worth. It is an effects-heavy engine, it is unambiguously GPU-limited, and 84fps at native 1080p with no upscaling is a solid, comfortable result. It is not a number with vast headroom, but nobody would describe it as a problem.

The Cyberpunk 2077 entry, and why it does not count

Our record holds 73fps for this machine in Cyberpunk 2077 1.6 — a specific older build of that game. That is not the same workload as the untagged Cyberpunk 2077 in our scoring suite. The game changed materially across versions in ways that alter how much work it demands, and treating a figure from one build as though it came from another would corrupt every comparison that touched it.

So this figure does not count towards the suite, it is not merged with anything, and it is not used to fill the gap left by the missing untagged entry. It is worth citing purely as context: it indicates that this hardware handled that build of that game in the low seventies at 1080p, which is a reasonable outcome for a 4050. Read it as background and nothing more.

We spell this out because slotting the number into the empty suite position would be very easy and would produce a complete-looking, authoritative and wrong result. The distinction between a tagged and an untagged benchmark entry is not pedantry; it is the difference between a database that can be trusted and one that cannot.

Why there is no ranking for this machine

Every laptop we score is averaged over the same five games so that the comparison is like for like. Our record here holds three — Dota 2, GTA V and X-Plane 11, averaging 150fps — and lacks Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur's Gate 3.

The three we hold are, as the section above establishes at length, the CPU-limited ones. The two we lack are the heavy modern titles where the graphics hardware would genuinely be the thing under measurement, and where a 4050 would be expected to fall furthest behind more powerful machines. Averaging over the three we have would therefore flatter this machine relative to laptops averaged across all five, because it would be scoring it entirely on the games where its GPU is not being asked to do anything.

That is why there is no rank printed here, and why the 150fps three-game average above should be read as a description of three specific games rather than a score in disguise. Publishing it as a ranking would produce the most misleading possible impression of a budget machine.

The screen

15.6in, 2560x1440, 165Hz, IPS. This is an unusually ambitious panel for a machine at this price, and it is the specification that most deserves scrutiny.

The resolution the benchmarks were not run at

Every figure in this review was measured at 1920x1080. The panel is 2560x1440, which is a considerably larger number of pixels for the GPU to draw, and our record contains no native-resolution measurements for this machine.

We will not estimate what those would be. A scaling guess printed alongside measured results is how benchmark data loses its value. But the mechanism is worth understanding because it lets you reason about the list yourself, and on this machine the reasoning matters more than on any other in this set.

The flat band at the top — F1 22, Strange Brigade, Dota 2, GTA V, The Witcher 3 — is limited by the processor and the engines, not by the GPU. Raising the pixel count does not immediately hurt results like that, because the graphics part has spare capacity to absorb the extra work before it becomes the constraint. Those five titles should hold up comparatively well.

The bottom of the list is the opposite case. Final Fantasy XV at 84fps is already GPU-limited at 1080p, which means there is no spare capacity to absorb anything, and the extra pixels come straight out of the frame rate. That is the number to interrogate if you intend to play demanding games at the panel's native resolution.

Is a 4050 enough for a 1440p panel?

This is the most stretched GPU-and-panel pairing in this comparison set, and it deserves a direct answer rather than a hedge. For the large category of games in that flat top band, yes — comfortably, with the ceiling set elsewhere. For older and lighter titles generally, yes. For the heaviest current releases at native resolution with no upscaling, this is asking a lot of a 4050, and the honest expectation is that you will be using DLSS, lowering settings, or both.

That is not a scandal and it is not unique to this machine — it is the standard operating condition of budget gaming hardware paired with high-resolution displays, and DLSS at a sensible quality level is a good solution rather than a workaround. But you should buy this laptop understanding that the panel is ahead of the graphics part in demanding games, and that Lenovo has specified it on the assumption that you will use the software features that close the gap.

There is a positive reading, and it is not merely a consolation. A display is a long-lived component that cannot be upgraded; a GPU in a laptop is fixed but its output can be managed with settings and upscaling. Putting a good panel in front of modest graphics hardware at this price is a defensible allocation of a limited budget, particularly for a machine that will also be used for work, where the extra resolution pays off every day rather than only in games.

Refresh rate and panel type

165Hz is well matched to what this machine actually produces. Five of the measured titles sit in the high 160s and low 170s at 1080p — F1 22 at 172fps, Strange Brigade at 172fps, Dota 2 at 171fps, GTA V at 169fps and The Witcher 3 at 168fps — which is to say that the flat top band lands essentially right on the panel's refresh ceiling. That is an unusually neat alignment. It means the display is well chosen for the hardware: fast enough to show everything the machine produces in its strongest category, and not so fast that most of the specification is theoretical.

In the rest of the list the panel is ahead of the hardware, which is the correct relationship. A display should not be the bottleneck, and high refresh brings benefits beyond hitting the number — smoother handling of frame rates that vary, better desktop feel, and, with variable refresh, a wider band in which frame-time variation is absorbed rather than seen.

IPS is the sensible choice at this price: consistent viewing angles, no exposure to the burn-in questions that follow OLED panels displaying static game interfaces for hundreds of hours, and no unusual behaviour to plan around. The cost against OLED is contrast — black reads as dark grey in a dim room and high-dynamic-range material lacks impact. Our record holds no brightness, contrast, gamut or response-time measurements, so we are not going to characterise this panel's quality; IPS spans an enormous range in practice, and at this price the panel is a place manufacturers commonly economise.

Build, size and storage

2.4kg, 15.6in, with a 60Wh battery and a 512GB SSD.

Weight

2.4kg for a 15.6in gaming laptop is ordinary — neither light nor heavy for the class. It is the weight at which a machine is genuinely transportable but never unnoticed: fine between home and an office or between term-time accommodation and home, tiring as a daily carry on top of everything else in a bag.

The power supply is the usual qualifier. Feeding a 95W GPU alongside a Core i7-13620H requires a real adapter, and it travels with the laptop because gaming performance on battery is not realistic here or anywhere else in the category. The practical total in the bag is meaningfully above the headline figure.

What the weight buys is cooling. Sustaining a 95W GPU configuration requires a thermal solution with somewhere to put the heat, and a thinner machine with the same GPU would very likely carry a lower power limit — with frame rates following the power. The mass is doing work rather than sitting there as a design failure.

The 512GB SSD is the specification to plan around

This is the one part of the configuration that will cause practical irritation, and it is worth being blunt about it. 512GB is not a lot of storage for a gaming machine in the current era. A Windows installation, the usual applications and a handful of large modern games will fill it, and several of the titles in this very benchmark list are individually enormous. Anyone buying this laptop should expect to be managing what is installed, or to add storage.

This is not a criticism of the value proposition so much as an observation about where the £999 went. The memory, the processor, the GPU power limit and the panel are all better than the price suggests. The storage is where the budget was found. On most machines of this type that is an addressable problem, but our record does not include the internal layout or the number of drive bays, so we cannot tell you how easily it is addressed on this specific model — that is worth confirming before buying if storage matters to you.

Battery

60Wh is a modest cell, noticeably smaller than the batteries in the larger machines this site covers. Our record does not include a measured battery life and we will not estimate one, because runtime depends on the display, the platform's power management and the workload far more than on capacity alone — and a 2560x1440 165Hz panel is not a frugal component to drive.

The structural point holds regardless: no laptop runs a 95W GPU from its battery, performance drops substantially when unplugged, and the cell exists to make non-gaming work away from a socket possible. With a modest capacity in front of a high-resolution high-refresh display, this is not a machine to buy on the strength of its unplugged endurance.

What our record does not cover

No surface temperatures, no fan noise measurements, no keyboard or port assessment, no build-quality observations, no upgrade paths. At this price, build quality and acoustics are exactly where manufacturers make savings, and a 95W GPU in a 2.4kg chassis is a configuration where cooling behaviour is worth establishing before buying. Our record covers performance and specification, not what the machine is like to sit in front of.

How it compares

Each comparison uses only the games both machines hold in our record, preferring the scoring suite. That is the honest method, and it carries a systematic consequence that this machine illustrates better than any other: the titles laptops most commonly share are GTA V, Dota 2 and X-Plane 11 — and on this laptop, two of those three sit inside the flat, processor-limited band described above. A comparison built on that trio is measuring the ceiling, not the graphics hardware.

That does not make the comparisons useless. It makes them comparisons about a specific and very common category of game, and on that basis they are extremely informative — particularly the second one, which is the only comparison in this entire batch of reviews where both machines have a confirmed UK price.

MSI Thin GF63 (RTX 4050) — this machine averages 62fps ahead across three shared games

The widest win in the set, and the most instructive place to start, because it is a comparison between two machines carrying the same GPU.

Both are 4050 laptops. Across three shared games, this one is 62fps clear. That gap cannot be explained by the graphics tier, because there is no difference in graphics tier — it comes from the rest of the configuration: the processor, the power the GPU is allowed to draw, and the chassis it is asked to work in. We hold no power limit for the GF63, so we will not speculate about the specific mechanism, but the size of the margin between two machines with identical GPU names is the clearest possible refutation of shopping by tier alone.

It also tells you something about the trio of shared games. They compress differences, but they are not blind: when two machines genuinely differ at the system level, the trio finds it, and here it finds 62fps.

MSI Stealth 16 Studio (RTX 4070 at 105W, £3,012) — level on average across three shared games

This is the comparison that defines this machine, and it is the only one in this batch of reviews where both sides carry a confirmed price. A £999 laptop and a £3,012 laptop, three shared games, and no average difference between them.

The first thing to say is what this does not mean. It does not mean these are equivalent machines. The Stealth 16 Studio has a 4070 at 105W against this machine's 4050 at 95W, and in any genuinely GPU-limited workload that difference is real and substantial. The three shared games are not that workload. They are the flat-band titles — the ones where this machine hits a processor and engine ceiling and simply stops, because there is nothing further for the software to give. A more powerful GPU cannot exceed a limit that is not being set by the GPU.

The second thing to say is that this is nevertheless a genuinely important result, and buyers should take it seriously rather than dismissing it as a benchmarking artefact. An enormous proportion of what people actually play falls into exactly that category: competitive shooters, racing games, long-lived multiplayer titles, and an entire back catalogue of older games. In every one of those, on this evidence, a £999 machine delivers what a £3,012 machine delivers. That is not a technicality — the gap between £999 and £3,012 costs you nothing at all in that category of game.

The third thing is the boundary of that claim, and it should be stated as plainly as the claim itself. The moment you load a game where the GPU is the constraint — the sort of workload Final Fantasy XV at 84fps represents on this machine — the two laptops separate, and the more expensive one pulls ahead. The shared trio cannot show that separation, and we hold no shared GPU-limited title between these two machines to demonstrate it. So the honest summary is: identical where the processor decides, and untested here where the graphics card decides.

MSI Titan 18 HX (RTX 4090) — level on average across three shared games

The same phenomenon, taken to its logical extreme. An RTX 4090 machine, three shared games, no average difference against a £999 laptop with a 4050 in it.

Nobody should read that as a statement about the relative capability of these two machines, and we are not going to leave the number sitting there implying it. It is the ceiling effect again, and this comparison is the proof of the mechanism rather than a surprising result: if a set of games stops at a processor-imposed limit, then every machine with a fast enough processor stops in the same place, and the size of the graphics card becomes irrelevant. A 4090 has nothing to contribute to Dota 2 at 1080p.

The internal evidence in this very section confirms the reading. There are two RTX 4090 machines here. Against one, this laptop is level. Against the other, as the next comparison shows, it is 49fps behind. If a £999 4050 machine were genuinely equal to 4090 hardware, that second result could not exist. What differs between them is the composition of each shared set, not the capability of the graphics hardware.

Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 (RTX 4090) — this machine averages 49fps behind across three shared games

The machine that beats this one by the widest margin, and the result that keeps the whole section honest.

Three shared games — the same narrow basis that reported no measurable difference twice — and here it produces a 49fps gap. That is unambiguous, and it demonstrates that the method has real resolution. When this comparison reports nothing, it is because there is nothing to find in those specific titles; it is not because the instrument cannot see.

Taken together with the Titan 18 HX result, this is the most useful pairing on the page. Two machines with the same class of graphics hardware, one level with this laptop and one 49fps ahead of it. That variation is a property of which games were shared and how each machine performs in them, not of the GPU tier, and it is the single best argument for reading the composition of a benchmark comparison rather than just its headline number.

We hold no confirmed UK price for the Strix Scar 17 and no GPU power limit for it, so we will not characterise its configuration or its value — only its measured position relative to this machine.

Reading all four together

62fps ahead of another 4050 machine. Level with a £3,012 4070 machine. Level with a 4090 machine. 49fps behind a different 4090 machine. All across three shared games.

The spread from 62fps ahead to 49fps behind is the evidence that the measurement has range. The two results at zero are what happens when the shared games run into a ceiling that every machine involved can reach. And the 62fps margin over a machine with the identical GPU is the evidence that what matters in this class is the whole configuration, not the sticker on the box.

For a buyer with £999 to spend, the practical conclusion is unusually clear. In the games where the processor sets the pace, this machine is at the ceiling and no amount of extra money buys a higher frame rate. In the games where the GPU sets the pace, it is a 4050 and it performs like a good one. Knowing which of those describes your library is what should decide the purchase.

Who it's for

Buy it if

You play competitive, racing or older games and have about £999 to spend. This is the core case and the measured figures support it emphatically. A flat band of five games at 168 to 172fps, sitting right on a 165Hz panel's ceiling, is exactly what this kind of player wants — and the comparison section shows that spending three times as much would not raise those numbers.

You want a good panel on a budget. A 2560x1440 165Hz IPS display at this price is genuinely ambitious, and it is the component you cannot upgrade later. If the machine will also be used for work, the resolution pays off every day.

You are willing to use upscaling in demanding games. With DLSS available and a 95W GPU configuration behind it, the heavy titles are manageable. The benchmark data excludes upscaling for good methodological reasons; you should not exclude it in real use.

You want a well-configured budget machine rather than a badly configured expensive one. The 62fps margin over another 4050 laptop is the argument. Lenovo has spent the budget on the processor, the GPU power limit and the screen, and the results show it.

Buy something else if

The newest, heaviest games at native resolution are the point. Final Fantasy XV at 84fps is a 1080p figure and this panel has substantially more pixels than that. A 4050 at 95W is a good implementation of an entry-level part, not a substitute for a bigger one, and the Strix Scar 17 comparison quantifies the distance even in a measurement that compresses it.

You need storage. 512GB is the weak point of this configuration and it will be felt within a few installations. Budget for an upgrade, or buy a machine with more.

You need long unplugged runtime. A 60Wh cell in front of a 2560x1440 165Hz panel is not a combination to buy for endurance, and our record has no measured runtime to reassure you with.

You are comparing it against a much more expensive machine on the strength of the level results above. Read that comparison carefully rather than as a headline. Level across three processor-limited games is a real and valuable finding, but it is a finding about those games. It is not a claim that a £999 laptop is the equal of a £3,012 one, and anyone using it that way is misreading the data in exactly the way this section is written to prevent.

What we do not know

Plainly stated: we have no untagged Cyberpunk 2077 figure and no Baldur's Gate 3 figure, so no complete scoring set and no ranking against the rest of our database. The Cyberpunk 2077 1.6 result we do hold comes from a different build of that game, is cited as context only, and is not merged with or substituted for the missing entry. We have no native-resolution measurements at the panel's own 2560x1440, no measured battery life, no thermal or acoustic data, no upgrade or internal-layout information, and no panel measurements beyond resolution, refresh and type. Everything above is derived from the specification in our record and from Notebookcheck's measurements of 14 October 2023 at 1920x1080 on High with upscaling off.

Within those limits, this is the most quietly impressive machine in this group of reviews. Lenovo has assembled a £999 laptop whose processor is fast enough to reach the ceiling in a very large category of games, whose GPU is given a genuinely strong power configuration for its tier, and whose panel is better than the price implies — and it has paid for all of that with a small SSD and a modest battery. The measured evidence says that in the games most people play most of the time, this is as fast as the software allows. In the games where the graphics card decides, it is exactly what its specification says it is.