I tried a budget Lenovo laptop that beat Apple’s M4 Air in tests

Laptops can be darned expensive things. In order to save money, it can be tempting to get one that doesn’t have a dedicated GPU, instead relying on the integrated graphics processing cores in the CPU. This can work, but as Creative Bloq’s reviews of such laptops have shown, the drop in performance is noticeable.

There's another option, which is to get a laptop like the Lenovo LOQ 15IAX9 here - it uses a GPU and CPU from older generations, and while it misses out on some performance and features compared to the latest and greatest laptops for graphic design, the drop in price is probably a greater reduction. A budget gaming laptop like the one we’re looking at here still has plenty of horsepower for throwing around 2D graphics and even 4K movies, even if its gaming abilities are a bit limited these days.

Key specifications

Design, build and display

• Solid plastic construction
• Bit thick and heavy

Lenovo’s laptop is pretty cheap, but it doesn’t always feel like it. It’s thicker and heavier than you’d find in a range-topping ultrabook, and is quite clearly made of plastic rather than metal (on the outside, at least), but manages to pull it off with a low-key grey finish that looks more premium than it is. A shiny silver LOQ logo adds a point of interest, but this isn’t a flashy laptop and won’t stand out among a studio’s other computers.

The charging port and some of the USB ports are at the back rather than on the side, which is a useful place to put them if you’re intending to use the PC on a desk rather than actually on your lap, and there are labels on the back of the laptop behind the screen that tell you exactly what the ports are. A word, too, for Lenovo’s useful charging port, which can be put in either way up and stays in place nicely, allowing the single USB-C port to remain free for other uses. It does mean you’re limited to using Lenovo’s charger, though.

The keyboard is up to the prolific laptop manufacturer’s usual standards - it’s fine, with enough travel to let you know you’ve pressed the key and a full-size set of arrows next to a shrunken numpad. It’s only got a white backlight, and the only concession to the gamer aesthetic are the three lights around the power button, which glow red under some settings.

Design score: 3/5

Features

• No Thunderbolt
• Only one USB-C

The Lenovo LOQ 15IAX9 is a bit of a basic laptop, and as such doesn’t have much that stands out from the crowd. There's no Thunderbolt, no MicroSD card slot, no Wi-Fi 7 or really anything beyond plain old USB 3.2. Even then, you only get one 10Gbps Type-C port - at least there's a full-size HDMI port so you won’t be wanting to use it for video - and while a suite of three 5Gbps Type-A ports is nice to have, in these times when we want to run external SSDs as quickly as possible rather than just suck a few files from a USB flash drive, they don’t really stand up.

There's a webcam, but it can’t be used for Windows Hello face recognition, and there's the screen. It’s an IPS display with a nice high refresh rate but colour saturation and brightness that are merely average. 300 nits is good enough, but beaten by all kinds of OLEDs and many other IPS panels, while being able to display 81% of Adobe RGB and 82% of P3 is better than some, but worse than a lot of others. It’s fine, though, and about what you’d expect for a budget machine. The same is true of the resolution, which at just 1080p is starting to feel on the low side. You’ll want to hook that HDMI port up to one of the best external screens if you’re using it as a desktop replacement.

Feature score: 2/5

Benchmark scores

We test every one of our laptops using the same benchmarking software suite to give you a thorough overview of its suitability for creatives of all disciplines and levels. This includes:

• Geekbench: Tests the CPU for single-core and multi-core power, and the GPU for the system's potential for gaming, image processing, or video editing. Geekbench AI tests the CPU and GPU on a variety of AI-powered and AI-boosted tasks.
• Cinebench: Tests the CPU and GPU's ability to run Cinema 4D and Redshift.
• UL Procyon: Uses UL Solutions' Procyon software suite to test the system's ability for AI image generation in Stable Diffusion, its Microsoft Office performance and its battery life in a looping video test.
• Topaz Video AI: We use Topaz Video AI to test the system's ability to upscale video and convert video to slow-motion.
• PugetBench for Creators: We use the PugetBench for Creators benchmarking suite to test the system's ability to run several key tasks in Photoshop and Adobe Premiere Pro, as well as its performance when encoding/transcoding video.
• ON1 Resize AI: Tests the system's ability to resize 5 photos to 200% in a batch process. We take the total time taken to resize the images and divide by 5.

Performance

• Performs better than you'd expect
• Very useful for 2D tasks

There's no way that a laptop specced with last-gen's low-end chips could possibly keep up with something sporting the hottest new silicon Intel and Nvidia have to offer, but just how far behind is it? It can be easy to think of computer parts as things that suddenly stop working as soon as their successors are announced, as users of M1 Macs know very well.

What the test results do show, however, is how much of a benefit a dedicated GPU chip gives to a laptop, even if it is one from the bottom end of the last generation. Even the CPU scores from the 12th-generation i5 processor in the Lenovo - while certainly in the bottom half of any graph you care to make from the assembled results - aren’t at rock bottom. For a low-price laptop, it’s a courageous showing, perhaps helped by the 24GB dollop of RAM.

This is certainly true in the Pugetbench Photoshop benchmark. The Lenovo LOQ beats the Microsoft Surface Pro 12 (Snapdragon), the first-gen Core Ultra processor in the Cyborg 15 AI A1V, and even its stablemate the Thinkpad X9 Aura Edition, which is another Core Ultra 7 laptop using integrated graphics. What it can’t do is beat something with a more powerful graphics chip, such as the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 AI, but then that particular machine costs at least twice as much.

It’s surprisingly useful in Premiere Pro as well, posting a better score than machines such as the HP Elitebook X G1i and Dell 16 Plus 2-in-1. Its office productivity score is strong, though it’s beaten by the Surface Pro 12 there, and in AI tasks such as Topaz Video AI it loses out again to the bigger GPUs.

Battery life is a bit of a problem for the LOQ, which shut down after just over three hours of video playback. This isn’t going to trouble the Apple Silicon or Intel Lunar Lake chips that ride high in the endurance rankings, but it’s actually better than some other gaming devices. Still, it’ll be wise to stay close to a power socket when you’re using it.

Performance score: 4/5

Price

The price is the main thing that’s going to draw you to the Lenovo LOQ. It’s £849, and has been spotted with £100 off that, even when it’s not Prime Day or Black Friday. That’s cheaper than a 15-inch MacBook Air, and in our Geekbench GPU test the little Nvidia chip posted a score more than twice that of the Apple M4. So, while it may not be a sleek and slender piece of design, it gets the job done.

Value score: 4/5

Who is it for?

• Students and freelancers

The design industry is full of people who would appreciate a low-price laptop that has a bit of graphics grunt, so there's bound to be a market for a machine like this. Being keenly priced, it’s going to attract the student crowd, for whom the ability to play a relaxing game or two will come in useful in downtime between projects, as well as the overworked and underappreciated freelancers who make up the backbone of the arts world.

Buy it if...

• You have 2D graphics work to do
• You're looking for a bargain
• You want to play games too

Don't buy it if...

• 3D rendering is what you love
• A thin and light build is important
• You want a Mac

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