Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 (16IAH7) Review

Here’s my Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3i which is now out in the market and currently priced at around ₱88,999.00 from Lazada and Shopee!

 

I’m honestly a fan of gaming laptops more than PC rigs mainly because I’m the type of person that’s always on the go. This is an important factor I use and consider whenever I shop for one or do gaming laptop reviews for brands. If you’re the same type as me, who is always outside but at the same time needs a powerful piece of hardware that can also play games then this is definitely a good time to read up on this Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 (16IAH7) Review.

 

Display

The Overall Look

It honestly looks sexy with the colors and the texture. It doesn’t scream I’m almost a hundred thousand pesos so its got minimalism real good.

 

All sides of this affordable gaming laptop look great too with some clever design inputs here and there. If there’s one thing I frowned upon here, it has to be the serious shortage of USB ports. To be more specific, this laptop features two (2) USB 3.2 Gen 1, one (1) HDMI 2.0, 1x Ethernet (RJ-45), one (1) USB-C port and 1x Headphone / microphone combo jack (3.5mm),

 

Considering that you would need a number of accessories to really get into this immersive gaming state, this laptop doesn’t provide that.

It does make up for being really cool. Like literally cool. I’ve yet to see another gaming laptop with so much exhaust ports from the sides to the back.

The back design is also pretty neat, I’d give them that.

I found it a little hard to squeeze in my HDMI cable on this laptop especially since I place it on my work table lengthwise. But if you have a bigger workspace I’m sure that won’t be a problem. I also like the blue lining that they put into this laptop’s design. It’s giving the subtle hint that this isn’t just a regular laptop while at the same time carrying its own style.

Battery 

In terms of battery, I would clearly say this as one of its high points. I tried watching a couple of episodes on Netflix with this and it surprisingly stayed at around 50% battery. Tried running Genshin Impact with lowered settings and I got 35% for around an hour worth of gaming which in my opinion is really good.

Also want to post about the laptop’s charger which looks like this.

This might be a deciding factor for you when you buy your laptops. In fairness though, even if its a power brick style charger, it’s not that heavy but it could take some space inside your backpack or laptop bag.

 

Bezel size

The bezel size for the screen was just right. In fact there were moments that I completely forget that this was game and not my window.

 

 

Speakers and Sound Quality

I love the speaker quality. Super solid sound and bass and it works like magic either when your playing games or streaming YouTube videos and such. But surprisingly, I loved using this laptop when it comes to playing orchestral tracks or those epic tracks you add to Youtube videos. It just feels… right.

Keyboard

The keyboards were surprisingly light and soft to touch and I knew that this was a good keyboard for this specific market.

For the price point, it does feel like the Ideapad Gaming 3’s keyboard is a cut above the rest. It’s soft and tactile and it was spaced just right for me. You won’t get snagged on buttons or press the wrong one especially when you are playing games that require keywords like DOTA 2 or Valorant or Apex Legends.

 

Gaming 

So while it’s branded as a “gaming” laptop, does it really feel like a gaming laptop?

As mentioned above, the IdeaPad Gaming 3 is powered by an Intel Core i5-12500H paired with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 4GB GDDR6. Even before trying it out, we had high expectations for it, especially for esports titles. Though we were concerned with the laptop’s performance given this specific configuration only comes with 8GB of RAM.

So far though, no overheating issues whatsoever when playing with this gaming laptop. Most games that I tried it on ran perfectly even with max settings on. Expect a little drop in quality though when you run some of the more recent AAA games out in the market because this is still technically a “budget gaming laptop” but not really. But still thanks to the trusty RTX 3050 GPU strapped into the bad boy, you can expect hours and hours of fun and even streaming moments.

 

Other Uses

I found myself using this review unit to do several episodes of The FanboySEO Show and from the time I recorded episodes with my guests to editing and cleaning up the footage, everything worked fine.

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