Just as Lenovo’s IdeaPad consumer laptops fill a niche under the ThinkPad for business, Lenovo’s IdeaPad Gaming cheap gaming laptop, one of the company’s premium gaming rigs such as the editor’s award-winning Legion 7 Gen 7 For buyers who can’t afford it, the IdeaPad Gaming 3 is certainly affordable at $884 at Walmart, and its AMD Ryzen 6000 series processor (CPU) and Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics processor (GPU) deliver passable 1080p performance The price is certainly affordable at $884. Unfortunately, however, the small amount of storage, dim display, and flimsy keyboard make it an “economy model,” placing the Gaming 3 below PCMag budget favorites such as the sub-$1000 Acer Nitro 5 and the $1000-plus MSI Katana GF66 The IdeaPad Gaming 3 will be the first of its kind.
The IdeaPad Gaming 3 is the AMD-powered sibling of the Intel-based IdeaPad Gaming 3i, which we reviewed here in July 2020. Both are 15.6-inch systems with full HD (1,920 x 1,080 pixels) screens and 120 Hz refresh rates.
Here the rear I/O ports (HDMI 2.0, Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.2 Type-C, and a proprietary power port) are located between the left and right exhaust ports. Each exhaust port also has a stylish blue accent in the center, breaking up the monotonous “onyx” gray color.
The Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 review configuration features an Intel Core i5-12500H processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti GPU. Gaming laptops in this class come with 16GB of DDR4-3200 RAM, but our unit had only 8GB of RAM. Then again, this IdeaPad is priced much cheaper than most laptops we test. Let’s see how the limited (and single-channel) RAM affects performance in key areas.
Starting our gaming benchmarks with Shadow of the Tomb Raider (highest settings), the IdeaPad Gaming 3 (49 frames per second) comes in behind the Acer Nitro 5 and the MSI Sword 15, although it is only a few frames per second (fps) behind the Nitro 5. Sword 15 (70 fps) holds a commanding lead thanks to the RTX 3060 GPU, while the HP Victus GTX 1650 had absolutely no problems running this title with these presets.
Similar results were obtained in the Far Cry 6 (very high) benchmark, where the IdeaPad Gaming 3 recorded 21 fps, less than half the fps of the next closest competitor, the HP Victus 15. Since the performance should be close to Nitro 5 (45 fps), this is simply We do not know if this is an anomaly with our machine.
While transcoding 4K video to 1080p resolution in Handbrake, the IdeaPad Gaming 3 took 6 minutes 46 seconds, second only to the Nitro 5 at 5 minutes 58 seconds; the Sword 15 was relegated to third place (7 minutes 26 seconds), and the Victus 15 was again behind at 8 minutes 9 seconds.