Lenovo IdeaPad L340 Gaming laptop review: Stiff ClickPad impacts gaming fun

The case of the Lenovo IdeaPad L340 Gaming is made of plastic that has been finished with a smooth surface and simulates the look of brushed material. The workmanship is good, and the edges are smooth and even. The weight of the base allows the lid to be opened with one hand. Furthermore, the screen's opening angle is 180°, and the display is surrounded by narrow bezels. The only shortcoming is the great susceptibility to fingerprints, which is especially found on the top side of the lid.

With a weight of 2.1 kg (~4.6 lb), the IdeaPad L340-15IRH Gaming is one of the lightest devices in our test field. But the measurements correspond rather to a medium size, whereby the Lenovo laptop finds its place between the HP Omen 15 and the Asus ROG Zephyrus G GA502DU.

The IdeaPad L340-15IRH Gaming only provides the most necessary ports, which are located exclusively on the left side of the laptop. Lenovo also does without a memory card reader and a Thunderbolt port; there is a USB Type-C port with the 3.0 standard in return. However, it cannot be used to charge the laptop.

The Lenovo IdeaPad L340-15IRH Gaming has a Gigabit Ethernet port and a Wi-Fi module that supports the 802.11 a, b, g, n and ac standards. However, due to the lack of 2x2 MIMO antenna technology, the transfer speeds are not as high as on devices such as the HP Omen 15. Apart from the already mentioned antenna technology, the transfer rates of the L340 are still only moderate at 290 Mb/s for receiving data and 309 Mb/s for sending data.

Out of the box, the IdeaPad L340-15IRH only comes with the gaming laptop itself and the corresponding power adapter. Further accessories such as USB Type-C docking stations, carrying bags, external input devices and more, can be purchased from the manufacturer's website.

Lenovo honors buyers of the IdeaPad L340 Gaming with a warranty period of 24 months. Everything worth knowing in this regard can be found in our Guarantees, Return Policies and Warranties FAQ.

Lenovo presents the IdeaPad L340 Gaming as a powerful laptop for gamers. However, the configuration belongs rather to the entry-level category and is enough to run modern games smoothly. Users have to do without very high graphics settings here and should not want to play at 4K resolution either. While the graphics card is limited to the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650, there are different configurations available for RAM as well as storage. Different processors are offered for the CPU, and these go up to Intel's Core i7-9750H.

In our review device, an Intel Core i5-9300H makes for a smooth operating system. The clock speeds for the four processor cores lie between 2.4 and 4.1 GHz, whereby the maximum turbo speed can only be maintained by up to two simultaneous cores. How long this performance can be kept up also depends to a large extent on the cooling system.

The L340 only showed light fluctuations in our Cinebench R15 stress test, even over a prolonged period of time. Therefore, performance can be considered to be very stable. Compared to the other laptops in our test field, the individual results in the multi- and single-core disciplines also confirm a very good utilization of the performance of the Core i5-9300H. Only the AMD Ryzen 7 3750H of the Asus ROG Zephyrus G has better results in multi-core performance. On battery power, the multi-core value of the L340 is also about 53% lower than when plugged in.

System performance tests paint a completely different picture. In the PCMark 8 and 10 benchmarks, the Lenovo IdeaPad L340-15IRH Gaming only manages to occupy one of the lower places in our test field. The PCMark 10 "Digital Content Creation" single value shows a small outlier. The L340 reaches the second place here. 

The performance reached by other systems in our reviews can be found in our CPU Benchmarks List.

Lenovo uses a 512 GB SSD in our review model of the IdeaPad L340-15IRH. According to our storage benchmarks, this provides average values. Users will definitely benefit from higher speeds compared to conventional HDDs, but much faster models are installed in our chosen comparison devices. According to the datasheet, Lenovo's low-cost gaming laptop is also available with an SSD up to 1 TB and an HDD up to 2 TB.

In our HDD/SSD Benchmarks article, you can read about the performance reached by other storage devices in our tests.

Lenovo installs two versions of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1650 in the IdeaPad L340 Gaming, so buyers can choose between three and four gigabytes of video memory. The latter is used in our review model and shows results in the lower midfield in the 3DMark benchmarks. Compared to our tests with other laptops with this GPU, however, the Lenovo laptop performs slightly above average. On battery power, users have to expect a decrease in performance of about 14%.

The performance provided by Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1650 compared to other graphics card can be found in our GPU Benchmarks list.

Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1650 can run modern games at Full HD resolution smoothly. Users will have to do with slightly lower graphics settings at times, which is also reflected in our tests of current games. Even older titles with high graphics performance requirements, such as "The Witcher 3", barely exceed the 30 FPS mark at the highest graphics level.

Our "The Witcher 3" endurance test shows that the Lenovo IdeaPad L340 can maintain its performance, even in games, over a longer period of time. There were no drops in frame rates during our test. Therefore, users should not expect restrictions due to performance drops after longer playing times.

The Lenovo IdeaPad L340-15IRH is very quiet during day-to-day use and under little load. However, the fans become audible under increasing load and reach a noise level of up to 40.2 dB(A). The fan noise is a constant noise, which can be easily blended out. Other laptops show a similarly quiet operation in this performance class.

If you are not using any demanding applications, the L340-15IRH Gaming is also suitable for quiet environments.

During our approximately one-hour continuous stress test, the core temperatures of the CPU rise up to 82 °C (~178 °F). Initially, the power consumption of the L340 was 124 watts, indicating the use of the CPU's maximum TDP of 45 watts. This value drops quite quickly to 100 watts (25 watts for the CPU) and then settles at 90 watts (15 watts for the CPU). Since a load that resembles our stress test is almost impossible in practice, users should not expect restrictions due to the temperatures being too high.

The speakers in the Lenovo Legion L340-15IRH Gaming offer low volume and a fairly balanced sound, but without bass. In very quiet environments, occasional audio playback is possible, but external speakers or headphones are recommended. These can be connected to the low-cost gaming laptop via a 3.5 mm audio jack. This holds corresponding connectors firmly and does not affect sound quality in a negative way.

Our measurements show that the IdeaPad L340-15IRH Gaming has a power consumption of at least 3.8 watts when idle and up to 124 watts under load. On average, it is therefore more economical than the other laptops in our test field and exhibits the lowest energy requirement, especially under maximum load.

The included power adapter provides an output of 135 watts and therefore has enough capacity to be able to supply the Lenovo IdeaPad L340-15IRH Gaming reliably with energy.

The IdeaPad L340 Gaming reaches a runtime of 6:49 hours in our practical Wi-Fi test. With this it occupies the second to last place under our chosen comparison devices. Only the Asus ROG Zephyrus G GA502DU shows an even shorter runtime.

With the included charger, it takes about 2 hours and 20 minutes for the 45 Wh battery to be fully charged again.