Deal | Affordable Lenovo gaming laptop with RTX 5060 and 16 GB RAM sees $650 discount

Around two weeks or so ago, we covered a Labor Day deal which offered the affordable Lenovo LOQ Essential 15.6-inch gaming laptop with a sizeable $700 discount. As the Labor Day sale ended, the laptop's price went back up, but it seems that it's now back down to just under $1,200. 

Given just how pricey DRAM and NAND chips have gotten and continue to get, it is no surprise that price charts indicate that this is indeed one of the lowest-ever prices for the Lenovo LOQ gaming laptop in the past year or so. 

This specific variant comes equipped with a 14-core Core i7-13650HX Raptor Lake-HX CPU, an RTX 5060 Laptop GPU, 16 GB of DDR5 RAM, and 512 GB of storage. 

Intel Raptor Lake-HX still packs a decent punch in 2026

Our in-depth review of the laptop reveals that the Core i7 Raptor Lake HX CPU is quite the multi-threaded powerhouse, boasting multi-threaded performance that is roughly in the same league as an AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS found in many premium gaming mini PCs.

Compared to the newer Core Ultra 7 255H, the Core i7-equipped Lenovo LOQ Essential laptop should be roughly around 10% slower. In simpler terms, the gaming laptop features respectable multi-threaded performance that should be enough for almost any moderately intensive workload. 

We also found the laptop's sustained CPU performance to be more than adequate. 

Its GPU, however, does fall behind its peers in most synthetic benchmarks as well as gaming performance, even falling behind a last-gen RTX 4060-equipped laptop in Cyberpunk 2077. Even then, for casual 1080p gaming at modest to high settings, the laptop should be more than good enough.

The 55 W Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Laptop GPU also sports only 8 GB of GDDR7 VRAM, which might not be a great choice for future-proofing but is acceptable given the laptop's current price.

Once again, we found no issues with the laptop's sustained gaming performance.

Finally, the LOQ gaming laptop's 15.6-inch display features a 144 Hz refresh rate and 99.7% coverage of the sRGB color gamut. Brightness peaks at around 322 nits, and we also found the panel's color accuracy to be excellent once calibrated and perfectly acceptable right out of the box.

Folks who care about upgradability will be pleased to note that the laptop features an empty SODIMM slot, which can house another 16 GB DDR5 stick (Corsair Vengeance currently $230 on Amazon). The storage is also upgradable, as is the WLAN module. Other notable details include a healthy selection of ports, including dual USB-A 5 Gbps, HDMI 2.1, a single USB-C 10 Gbps, and a gigabit Ethernet.

As always, interested customers are advised to refer to our detailed review of the Lenovo LOQ Essential gaming laptop before making their final decision.

Disclaimer: Notebookcheck is not responsible for price changes carried out by retailers. The discounted price or deal mentioned in this item was available at the time of writing and may be subject to time restrictions and/or limited unit availability.