IdeaPad Gaming 3 2022 review

Just as its affordable IdeaPad consumer notebooks fill a niche below its business ThinkPads, Lenovo's IdeaPad Gaming budget gaming laptops are for buyers who can't afford one of the company's premium gaming rigs, like the Editors' Choice award-winning Legion 7 Gen 7. The IdeaPad Gaming 3 is certainly affordable—A$1,759 on Lenovo's website—and an AMD Ryzen 6000 series processor (CPU) and Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics processor (GPU) give it passable 1080p performance. Unfortunately, its scant storage, dim display, and flimsy keyboard scream "economy model," landing the Gaming 3 below PCMag budget favorites, like the Acer Nitro 5 and MSI Katana GF66, both of which are available for a couple of hundred dollars cheaper in Australia.

Short on Memory and Storage

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-by-1,080-pixel) screens with a 120Hz refresh rate.

Our test unit, formally known as IdeaPad Gaming 3 15ARH7 (model 82SB0001US), combines a six-core, 3.3GHz (4.5GHz boosted) Ryzen 5 6600H processor with a skimpy 8GB of memory, a skimpier 256GB NVMe solid-state drive (SSD), and an entry-level GeForce RTX 3050 GPU, putting it at a disadvantage to RTX 3050 Ti and RTX 3060 machines.

Clad in Onyx Gray plastic and polycarbonate, the Lenovo measures 0.86 by 14.2 by 12.5 inches. That's notably deeper than the Nitro 5 (1.06 by 14.1 by 10.7 inches) because of a Legion-like protruding rear block with several ports and blue-accented cooling vents. That said, the IdeaPad is lighter (5.1 versus 5.5 pounds). There's considerable flex if you grasp the screen corners, though not much if you press the keyboard deck.

Like many low-cost gamers, the IdeaPad Gaming 3 has neither a fingerprint reader nor a face recognition webcam, so you'll be stuck typing passwords instead of using Windows Hello. The camera is the usual low-rent 720p number, though it has a sliding privacy shutter. The side screen bezels are slim, but the top and bottom bezels are thick. Luckily, the display tilts far back, so finding the optimum viewing angle should be no problem.

As for ports, you'll find one USB 3.2 Type-A port on either side, as well as an audio jack on the left. Around the back are an HDMI video out, an Ethernet jack, and a USB 3.2 Type-C port, plus the AC adapter socket. This being an AMD rather than Intel system, there's no Thunderbolt 4 port, though we don't penalize under-$1,500 laptops for lacking one. Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth take care of wireless connections. An SD or microSD card slot would have been nice, however.

Not Up to Lenovo's Usual Standard

The keyboard is brightly backlit (just in white—don't look for an RGB rainbow) and has an attractive layout including a numeric keypad and dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys on the top row. Unfortunately, the latter don't work if you toggle Fn Lock to access top-row brightness and volume controls without holding the Fn key.

We're generally big fans of Lenovo keyboards but the IdeaPad's typing feel is more like a tablet's keyboard cover than an actual laptop. A good-sized, buttonless touchpad glides and taps smoothly but has a chintzy click.

The bottom-mounted speakers produce sound that isn't very loud but isn't too bad: it's somewhat tinny and short on bass, but you can make out overlapping tracks. Nahimic software offers music, movie, gaming, and communication presets and an equalizer, as well as faux surround sound. The 720p webcam captures slightly dim, blurry images.

Besides Windows 11 Home and a McAfee antivirus trial, there isn't much preloaded software. Lenovo Vantage lets you choose cooling or fan noise modes, optimize networking traffic for games, and enhance Wi-Fi security.

The 1080p non-touch screen boasts a 120Hz refresh rate and AMD FreeSync support to fight screen tearing during gameplay. Its rated brightness is a rather dim 250 nits, below the 300 we consider a minimum and 400 we prefer from IPS panels.

Our Datacolor sensor measured it a little higher than that, but it's still dimly lit and murky—more common in a low-cost Chromebook than a gaming laptop. Contrast and viewing angles are fair but white backgrounds are dingy, and colors are bland and washed out, making fine details unclear.

Testing the IdeaPad Gaming 3: Back of the Budget Pack

For our benchmark charts, we compared the IdeaPad Gaming 3 to four other affordable 15.6-inch gaming laptops. The Acer Nitro 5 (12th Gen Intel Core) and HP Victus 15 come in under $1,000, while the MSI Katana GF66 and Acer Predator Helios 300 are two or three hundred bucks above it. You can see their basic specs below. Note that only the IdeaPad foists you off with a 256GB SSD with room for just two or three games.

Productivity Tests

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks, such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and video conferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage.

Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

All five laptops soared past the 4,000 points in PCMark 10, which means ample productivity for the likes of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The Lenovo didn't shine but held its own in the CPU tests, though it was at the rear of the field in Photoshop—its subpar screen and missing flash-card slot make it an even poorer choice for image editing.

Graphics and Gaming Tests

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).

We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

Our next two tests involve real games—specifically, the built-in 1080p benchmarks from a AAA title (Assassin's Creed Valhalla) and a sports racing sim (F1 2021). We run each benchmark twice, using different image quality presets for Valhalla and trying F1 with and without Nvidia's DLSS anti-aliasing technology.

The HP's three-and-a-half-year-old GeForce GTX 1650 GPU can't keep up with the RTX 3000 series, so the Lenovo was only second slowest in most of our graphics benchmarks. It's not likely to make the most of its 120Hz screen refresh rate or even hit the 60fps mark that gamers expect nowadays. Most PC games are playable on the IdeaPad, though it's far from claiming any bragging rights.

Battery and Display Tests

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

The IdeaPad proved to be the battery-life champion of the group with almost 10 hours of unplugged stamina, though its screen economy-class brightness and color fidelity certainly helped with that. The two Acers are considerably easier on the eyes.

Verdict: Walmart Shoppers Can Do Better

You're not going to get a spectacular screen and a speedy GeForce RTX 3070 or 3080 GPU in an under-$1,800 gaming laptop. However, you can reasonably hope for a decent display and an RTX 3050 Ti, if not an RTX 3060.

Even without those things, the IdeaPad Gaming 3 might fill a niche for bargain hunters if it had a 512GB SSD instead of just 256GB, but, as is, there's just not much to recommend it. Unless it gets an upgrade or a price cut, we'll pass.

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