In the wake of the launch of the RTX 50-series line of desktop graphics cards, and RTX 50-series laptops on the way, it's been harder and harder to get a genuinely appealing gaming laptop deal. Luckily, Lenovo has a solid offering for anyone looking to crank out a few games on the go. Surprisingly, it's not one of Amazon's Spring Prime Day PC gaming deals.
For just $900 at Walmart right now, you can pick the Lenovo LOQARP9, which comes loaded with an RTX 4070 and a Ryzen 7 7435HS. The former is a strong mid-range GPU and the latter is a decently capable gaming CPU. With a boost clock of 4.5 GHz, eight cores and 16 threads, you get good performance out of this CPU, whether you're gaming or scrolling. It's a budget to mid-range processor that still serves laptops well, even two years after its launch.
Together, this CPU and GPU combo offers performance above the laptop's rather budget price tag. The 15.6 inch 1080p 144 Hz screen is pretty standard for a laptop of its calibre and should be able to handle whatever 1080p resolution games you want to throw at it.
At 300 nits it's not the brightest screen, and when we checked out the 2023 model it had an incredibly dim, dull panel. So, just temper your expectations if you were hoping for a zingy display.
This specific model's RTX 4070 has a TGP of 115 W, which affords it a reasonably powerful gaming performance and we've found mobile RTX 4070 cards strike a good balance between power, price, size, and thermals.
With a price this low for specs this good, something has to give and that is, unfortunately, its 512 GB SSD. With the size of modern games, this storage won't hold all that much once you've got all your software installed and start actually playing games. However, the laptop comes with a pair of M.2 SSD slots, which means there is one empty space in there for the easiest of storage upgrades.
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For $59 at Newegg, you can pick up a 1 TB SSD to throw in there and immediately triple the storage. Just point Steam at it and you've just expanded your library space in short order.
The 16 GB of RAM is just okay, but it is at least dual channel which means it is more efficient than single channel, with twice the bandwidth. The RAM is also SO-DIMM, not soldered, which means, like the SSD, this is upgradable.
The LOQARP9 was $20 cheaper than this over the holiday period but it's still currently the best way of getting your hands on an RTX 4070 lappy right now. Its chassis doesn't do anything too special (though it does look nice) but for its price point, this is exactly what I'd want. It's relatively understated when you consider what the gaming laptop market has out there, and under that hood holds some solid performance for a sub $1000 price point.
For its price, this laptop is competing with mobile RTX 4060 devices, and the mobile RTX 4070 will win in every relevant metric. You could opt to wait for the RTX 50-series laptops to fully arrive (and that's not a bad idea if you have a bigger budget) but my money would be going towards this li'l Lenovo lappy if I wanted to spend under $1000 right now.
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