At just $850, this is the best budget RTX 4050 gaming laptop I've seen in a very long time
Lenovo LOQ 15AHP9 | RTX 4050 | Ryzen 5 8645HS | 15.6-inch | 1080p | 144 Hz | IPS | 16 GB DDR5-5600 | 512 GB SSD | $1,149.99$849.99 at Lenovo (save $300)
That Ryzen CPU and RTX 4050 GPU are the perfect combination for 1080p gaming. Together, they offer far more performance than the low price suggests it should have.
Price check: Amazon $899.99
This is a newer generation of the Lenovo LOQ 15APH8 we reviewed last November, a laptop that boasted some pretty decent gaming chops but was spoilt by only having 8 GB of RAM in a $1,000 laptop, amongst other things. But wait, what's this? A newer Ryzen processor, an RTX 4050 with a higher power limit, and 16 GB of DDR5-5600—all for less than $850? That's an absolute steal, no matter how you look at it.
Let's start with the AMD chip, the Ryzen 5 8645HS. It's an all-in-one APU, sporting six Zen 4 cores, 12 threads, and a boost clock of 5 GHz. Stuffed inside the die is 16 MB of L3 cache and a Radeon 760M integrated GPU with 512 RDNA 3 shaders.
The CPU side of things is fine for gaming, though less so for heavy content creation, and don't worry about the iGPU, as you'll be using the discrete RTX 4050 chip anyway. With a 105 W TGP limit, it'll run better than the 95 W version we tested in the 15APH8 model, and that gave lower-powered RTX 4060 chips a good run for the money—in fact, in most tests, it was faster.
Sure, you won't be able to engage ray tracing in every game or use maximum quality settings, but for normal 1080p gaming, this little RTX 4050 is an absolute trooper. Throw in some DLSS 3.5 AI-powered upscaling and frame generation, and you'll have all the performance you could possibly want in a laptop this cheap.
It wasn't that long ago when sub-$900 laptops only came with 8 GB of slow RAM, but here you're getting 16 GB worth of speedy DDR5-5600. However, there's still only one DIMM installed and Ryzen chips really need a dual-channel kit to properly shine. Fortunately, dual 8 GB kits are very cheap right now, so you'll be
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