Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 15 Laptop, 15.6" FHD Display, AMD Ryzen 5 5600H, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650, 8GB RAM, 256GB Storage, Windows 10H

This is an all-plastic laptop, but has a fairly rigid build, not like metal, but far less flex on the screen than my 5 year old Acer Aspire which needed many replacements due to flexing including a cracked screen, hinges, and back cover. This has 8 GB memory. This has and older GTX 1650. This has a 120hz display (unheard of at this price point) This has 256SSD m.2. It has a backlit Keyboard. It has an amazing processor: AMD Ryzen 5. Here's the deal. You can get similarly priced laptops that have more storage and RAM, touchscreen, etc... but you will trade down the pieces that future-proof this machine. I can walk into Walmart and get a similarly priced Pentium, i3 or a similarly priced i5 with more RAM or storage or maybe a touchscreen (if that’s important to you), but no dedicated graphics, no backlit keyboard, or expansion slots for ram or SSD. However, I can always buy more RAM or hard drive later when the price will actually be lower. I can NOT come back later and upgrade the CPU, add slots to increase the RAM, and all of a sudden make my keyboard visible in the dark when I want to work late at night sometime. I can't later upgrade the screen to 120hz as this one has. And, the GPU at this price range is perfectly adequate (Although not as future-proof). The Battery has a LOT to be desired and could be a deal breaker. I can get 5 to 6 hours if optimized back (all but battery-saver mode). My old Acer had 12 hour battery, but the screen was a significant tradeoff. Some people are saying only 6 GB RAM. That is because of the new way Ryzen processors use dedicated RAM instead of shared RAM. There is 8, it is just that old processors shared the RAM with the system. Now the new processors are dedicating part of the RAM to the processor permanently. It isn't too much different than before, but does change the way the RAM is handled and displays for availability for Windows. My system is gaming fine right now with the existing setup, but I'm not a power user. I'll wait until I can't live with the performance and then I'll go buy more RAM and SSD when it comes down lower in price, because I can. Beware of machines that downgrade built in pieces to give you more memory and hard-drive, but will be outdated in 4-7 years instead of 7-10+ years depending on what you plan to do with the machine. Those are not good tradeoffs. Lenovo seems to have hit a sweet spot in this price range with its optimal upgradeability and good built in features for for the price you pay. If you need a power machine, this is not it. This is a good midrange machine that will allow you to do a diverse amount of tasks without lagging out or crashing, and should last a long time with the specs it has.

When I first had my Nitro 5, there was a lot I loved about. It could reach 120fps and was decent for most of my games. I loved it. But when I had to upgrade, I genuinely didn't want to spend too much as a working student. I did a lot of research and yes, the top brands of ACER , ASUS, HP, ALIEN they had great laptops obviously. But finding this one was a god sent. I can clock out at 240fps on most of my games. The upgrades to 16gb RAM and to add my HYBRID drive was flawlessly easy. The design is very sleek, mint fresh and effortlessly classy and simple. In fact, it stays well hidden as a gaming laptop. It's lightweight and easily portable for travel as a student compared to the 7lbs most gaming pcs start with. The cons I had with this were it was a bit smaller than the average 15.6 laptop. A bit. Measured, it's a direct 15.6 but still pales by a slight inch to normal laptops. The other issue is that the fans are beneath and there is no air flow towards the back of the laptop. So, I would advise investing in a cooling pad for playing demanding games in order to protect your laptop. Furthermore, it only has two USB ports. Not a massive deal as I can easily buy an external USB device to add more ports but it was a let down. Apart from that, those are all the cons I would say, which pale in comparison to the pros. In conclusion, this is a beast of a laptop. To find an affordable laptop which upgrades easily and has amazing fps and runs smoothly while providing easy portability is rare. The cons are things which can be easily overlooked due to the vast amount of pros this offers. If you're looking for a budget gaming laptop as a student, this is definitely your buy.

Ive had this for about a year now, great for any game I want to play. Amazing 120hz screen, its 1080p and has pretty good color matching. Performance is great, the Ryzen 5 5600h is amazing for any game and any task. The GTX 1650 is a little outdated but is good at gaming any game at mid to high settings and still get above 60fps. Great at rending, great at video and photo editing, and the coolers keep the cpu and gpu from over heating, have not had any thermal throttling at all. The port selections are good, having a type c hub is good if you have external accessories like me. Both USB type A ports are nice and fast, and the type c can do anything a usb c can do. Best buy for how much i got it for, which was $650. Good laptop if you're into moblie gaming but don't care about playing 4k at 200fps. Great for kids, cheap on price, but not performance. Only thing I did was upgrade the ram and storage and its been running perfect since. Out of all the other gaming laptops out there this one is best price for what you're getting.

I do not know computer building to well, what I do know is genuine surprise when people see the specs and hear the price I paid. From what I have been told this is a steal through and through. Pros: Price, I cannot reiterate this enough, I had to quickly buy a laptop to use for school and personal use and this came incredibly clutch. The cost for what your getting is very much worth it. Performance, runs great, can't get into the specifics but have not had any issues since purchasing arpund 10/2021 Portability, fits in my backpack on way to class and keyboard also has numpad which my last laptop didn't so that's great to have in an already compact laptop Cons, Battery, Playing video games battery dies less than an hour, not playing games and just working on stuff, can probably get to 4 max if you turn down the specs but that may be a specific issue for me Harddrive, not a lot of space overall, in fact my old dell laptop that I used before this had more space, but to also be candid one can very easily use a separate external drive if space is that important Overall, the only reason I did not give five stars is because five stars implies perfection and this is not quite there, I love the laptop and it's amazing in many regards but battery life and storage are valid reasons to not be perfect. Regardless, great laptop.

Ive had this laptop for 2 weeks now and if I consider the one I had before , this is a massive upgrade, as a software developer who does gaming as a hobby and a bit of content creation , I wanted a machine that could handle coding workload and android emulation (for mobile apps) and could also handle big gaming titles ,not just esports titles at a respectable framerates (atleast 60fps) . I'm telling you this laptop is a beast, powers through anything I did throw at it. Haven't tested the emulation part but it should handle that pretty well. I was having a hard time to pick between this and the HP Pavilion gaming laptop which has the same specifications, but what really made me pick this was the *upgradability* which allows one to add another nvme M.2 drive albeit you have to buy a standoff for it or a 2.5 inch Ssd/hard drive and 2 soddim slots (i highly recommend adding the RAM and storage). The only con I have with this laptop is the battery life, its pretty average but to be honest I didn't expect it to have a great battery life.

I spent a LONG time considering different laptops, WEARY of the fact that most machines are built to fail, because premature failure drives the market due to endless greed. I decided on this one due to low rate of failure and no apparent major modes of failure. After a few months, so far no issues. Will update this review if that changes. Long story short, this machine is FAST and CAPABLE, and most importantly UPGRADEABLE—the latter of which is what makes this model stand out, and why I chose it. Here are the upgrades I installed: -It comes with a quality M.2 NVMe SSD, which is VERY fast and serves best as a system drive where you install all of your programs and applications for maximum performance. There is also a 2.5" SATA SSD compartment, where you should install a quality 2.5" SSD from Samsung or Kingston, and use it for data storage. NOTE: All the hardware necessary for that comes with the laptop, which is very professional and deserves a word of recognition. -It comes with a quality Samsung 8GB or 3200MHz DDR4 RAM, which by itself is not on par with the rest of the specs, especially your two fast SSDs. Add another 8 or 16GB for best performance, but make sure you get 3200MHz to match the original stick. Crucial or Samsung is recommended, I installed Crucial in mine and works like magic. -I also bought an external optical drive by LG.

The delivery service is pretty good considering i don't live in America, and i got it in just 9 days, at first it didn't turn on and got stuck is the initial setup, but after i force rebooted it and disconnected from the wifi , if turned on just fine , it can support 32 gb of ram , and i recommend upgrading the ram to at least 16gb because the 8 gb stock ram is 67% full at the minimum , i wanted to add a second m.2 but the standoff is missing so i need to find a replacement, it comes with a sata connector though, the screen is clear and keyboard feels nice, there is a battery conservation mode so you can extend its lifespan, as for the battery itself, it's not enough, it get drained in less than 4 hours , the storage comes 47% full , gpu and cpu performance are excellent for the price , so if you want a laptop for work or light gaming with a excellent performance for the buck , this one is for you . Note : they didn't pay me for this .

For sure this is the more affordable, easily upgradeable gaming laptop in the market this year. Not only for the cost ($660) but for the improvements you can do. The keyboard is rock solid; the 120 Hz display is awesome, the heat dissipation is very good, despite that the laptop heats significantly when is working hard or gaming. But, in general, the build is much better than other brands in the same price range. In fact, right now is $100 or less than other laptops with the same hardware or worse. The first picture shows the interior of the laptop, exactly as it arrived. I recommend to do two important improvements in the laptop. The first one is to improve the RAM. Firstly, because with a single module works at single channel. But my recommendation is to replace the original ram module in the laptop. AMD processors are very sensitive to memory latency and rank. But the memory that came by default is a single side/dual rank (1Rx16) Samsung memory. If you look up for reviews in expert channels in Youtube (like Linus Tech Tips or Jarrod's Tech), the speed with a single rank/double side RAM improves up to 20%. I opt for these pair of T-Force modules, because right now is the cheapest and works so fine, exactly like other more expensive memories. The second important improvement I recommend is the hard drive. The laptop came with a WD 256gb PCIe 3.0 disc, relatively slow (1900-950 Mb/s), but tiny (2242). The motherboard supports up to PCIe 4.0, so you can buy a disc up to 7000 Mb/s. For the second 2280 slot I choose a 2TB Inland disc, considerably faster (3500-3000 Mb/s), but considerably cheaper than a PCIe 4.0 disc. The motherboard supports 2 NVMe discs and an additional SATA disc, and the laptop came with adapters and the enclosure for a standard 2.5 SATA disc (mechanical or SSD). But unfortunately, there is no way (o no clean way) to connect all the three discs at the same time. It can be done in a dirty way, if anyone figures it out. I tested the three discs at the same time with the laptop open and it worked, but there is no room for the three discs at the same time once you close the laptop. Additional recommendation: do not forget to migrate the SO to the faster disc.