No nonsense, pure performance, not perfect.
You know what my biggest bugbear is for budget laptops? It’s the screen. It is always the screen. For some reason, notebook manufacturers seem to have this almost obsession with pairing massively underwhelming graphics cards with panels that would put most 4K TVs to shame. It’s madness. Yes, they might be these phenomenally pixel-dense, OLED, 240 Hz, crystal-clear colour, uber mode displays, capable of projecting the most beautiful, stunning picture you’ve ever seen in your life directly into your retinas. But as soon as you load up a game and that mobile GPU kicks into life, fans whirring at a million miles a minute, you’ll inevitably be graced with the slow chug of growing disappointment, as the approximation of a AAA power-point presentation starts juddering its way across your shiny new device.
It’s driven me mad for years. That might sound ridiculous, I’ll admit that, but I’ve reviewed a lot of budget laptops in my time that do this, and it’s frustrating because it doesn’t need to be the case. You gain very little by doing that. Thank the dear and fluffy lord Gabe Newell then (he doesn’t have anything to do with this, I don’t think, I haven’t checked), that Lenovo’s LOQ 15 Gen10 ditches that seemingly age-old laptop manufacturer mantra in favor of a more practical GPU and screen pairing instead.
At its core, the Gen10 comes complete with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060, a Ryzen 7 250, and, more importantly than that, a simple, elegant, beautifully crisp and punchy 15.6-inch, 1920×1080 IPS display, running at around 144 Hz. And it does all of that with a sub $1400 price point.
Now, yes, I know what you’re thinking, technically, no, that graphics card isn’t really a « true » RTX 5060. I mean, it sort of is, so far as the name’s the same and the core RTX Blackwell architecture matches it as well, but it’s lost about 15% of its CUDA cores, and a not-so-subtle 12% of everything else, (ray tracing cores, ROPs, TMUs, Tensor cores, you know, all the good stuff that makes DLSS 4, kinda, work). Heck, I suppose we should be thankful it still touts that same 8 GB of GDDR7 VRAM.
The good news, though, is that on the whole, that mobile RTX 5060 does actually deliver when it comes to 1080p gaming. Most titles easily averaged well into the 60 fps mark and above, the only exception, of course, being Cyberpunk 2077 without any DLSS support (which still achieved a relatively respectable 36 fps). Chuck on DLSS Quality and the beautiful silky goodness that is MFG, and that too climbs well into the 100s.
It’s so refreshing to be able to just game at your native resolution on a laptop at this price point, without having to worry about dialling the graphics preset down, or swapping around resolutions and getting stretched pixels or worse.
