This is the newer generation of the Lenovo LOQ 15APH8 we reviewed last November, a laptop that boasted pretty decent gaming performance, but was spoiled by, among other things, only 8GB of RAM on a $1000 laptop. But wait, what is this? A new Ryzen processor, a power-limited RTX 4050, and 16GB of DDR5-5600, all for under $850.

Let's start with AMD's chip, the Ryzen 5 8645HS. This is an all-in-one APU with six Zen 4 cores, 12 threads, and a boost clock of 5 GHz. Inside the die is a Radeon 760M integrated GPU with 16MB of L3 cache and 512 RDNA 3 shaders. [And don't worry about the iGPU, as it will be using a discrete RTX 4050 chip anyway; with the TGP limited to 105W, it performed better than the 95W version we tested on the 15APH8 model, giving the lower-powered RTX 4060 chip enough performance for the lower-powered RTX 4060 chip.

Sure, you won't be able to use ray tracing or the highest quality settings in every game, but for regular 1080p gaming, this little RTX 4050 is an absolute powerhouse. add in upscaling and frame generation with DLSS 3.5 AI, and you've got the You'll get all the performance you could ask for in a notebook as inexpensive as this.

It wasn't that long ago that laptops under $900 had only 8GB of slow RAM, but here we have the equivalent of 16GB of fast DDR5-5600. However, only one DIMM is still installed, and a dual-channel kit is needed to make the Ryzen chips shine properly. Fortunately, dual 8GB kits are now so inexpensive that single DIMMs can easily be replaced with two matched sticks.

Something else you may want to do sooner rather than later would be to add another SSD; a 512GB drive will be fine for your operating system, but will fill up quickly in games, and the Lenovo LOQ 15APH9 has two M. 2 2280 slots, but the one installed is a 2242 size. Add a fast 2TB gaming SSD and you get a lot of storage.

The main area Lenovo cut back on to keep the price down is the screen: a 15.6-inch 1080p IPS running at 144Hz sounds perfectly fine on paper, but would be lifeless and boring if it were anything like the 15APH8 we tested. There's an HDMI 2.1 port on the back of the laptop, so you can at least install a decent gaming monitor if you're unhappy with the cheap-looking panel.

The Lenovo LOQ 15APH9 is not a great choice at full price, but at just a cent under $850, it's a real bargain; the CPU and GPU combination is perfect for 1080p gaming, which is exactly what you want in a budget gaming laptop.