So when you buy a new gaming laptop there’s a lot to be excited about it’s fast it’s powerful and it’s portable but what happens when it gets a little old well this is my review of the Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 2 years later let’s talk about it.
To start on your screen right now are the raw stats of my laptop and coupled with the price at the time they were pretty good not necessarily bleeding edge technology but certainly passible. The Lenovo ideed Gaming 3 was and is considered to be more of a budget laptop sacrificing Speed and Performance for a lower price and honestly when I got it despite the lower price I was thoroughly impressed.
It’s a large laptop with many different ports a 120 HZ refresh rate screen and an awesome keyboard. There’s so many things I like about the laptop and that’s just on the outside. To me especially at the beginning I constantly kept asking myself what’s there not to love about it and frankly not much.
Performance Over Time
Let’s talk about the performance when I purchased the laptop as a first year grad student a few years back I needed something costeffective but also hyper performing and I definitely got that at the time. The laptop could run anything you could throw at it even the most intense games although sometimes the settings had to be lowered just a 10 but it still could run them and they were playable but simply for the price of this laptop it was great and still is.
My Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 2 years later is still no slouch it literally runs everything I throw at it from different intense games to even streaming now yes it does it all. Now it’s not perfect if you’ve seen my other reviews we’ve definitely experien some hiccups here and there I’ll talk about them momentarily but for the most part this laptop has been great. On your screen right now are the average performance numbers for this laptop playing popular games and as you can tell they’re still playable on a 2-year-old budget gaming laptop that’s awesome.
Hardware Upgrades and Maintenance
Now with that said this thing has had an upgrade or two I had to make. For starters that 8 GB of RAM my laptop came with was not enough but after popping the PC open and actually upgrading it yes upgrading it something that’s awesome about gaming PCs is that many of them you could just upgrade yourself I gained such a great performance boost it was wonderful.
Do note though that if you are going to do this don’t make the same mistake I did. After reading this comment and delving into my own research I realized it’s better to just get a matching Ram stick with what your laptop comes with or just replacing what’s already there with something new for the full increase in performance from having matching sticks and safety of if one fails you won’t be stuck with an uneven amount like what I have which if that ever happens for me you’ll hear about it but I digress.
Longevity Tips
There have been many times on the laptop is likely due to age a little slow upon boot up despite not having any programs to open but that resolves within 1 to 2 minutes really not long at all and afterward things run like new which is good because I tried to take care of this thing like it’s still new and just out of the box.
Little small things I do to maintain this laptop’s longevity such as using these 3D printed little Nubs to put under the device for increased air flow so it doesn’t get too hot and burn everything inside or still wrapping the laptop in its original WRA and putting it in a carrying sleeve. It’s those small things that really make this laptop perform as well as it did 2 years ago and doesn’t experience too much wear and tear but even then we have experienced a few bumps Bruises And even scratches unfortunately which now smoothly leads me to my criticism section.
Critical Observations
I’ve been praising this laptop a lot throughout this article but now let’s get to the things that I’ve not liked over the past 2 years.
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Brightness: The laptop screen is just not that bright it really can’t be used in a sunny day and that’s unfortunate but probably not too bad because for a lot of Gamers you want to have a darker room but even still I’m a college student and I’ll use this laptop occasionally in a well-lit environment which it’ll struggle in I will say it’s not the worst but compared to my other laptop it could be better.
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Battery Life: Again for gamers not much of a concern but I wish the battery lasted longer than 4 hours there really hasn’t been any degradation from what I can tell from my battery in these past 2 years which is great but it was much to write home about anyway because the battery didn’t last long to begin with especially when playing games this isn’t something you’d really expect to be great with gaming laptops in general unfortunately but as a student I would have liked to see maybe at least 6 hours if possible.
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Low Storage: Now this is something that you can upgrade internally and externally thankfully but having 512 GB for a gaming laptop is not enough unfortunately just downloading a few games already gets you to that Storage level which is ridiculous and St your ability to really enjoy this machine to its fullest.
My suggestion would be to either upgrade the laptop storage internally or just shop around for external ssds I have a few down in the description but those are my three main complaints for this laptop and as you’ll notice yeah these criticisms are pretty negligible they’re not about performance issues and they can be dealt with pretty easily and that’s probably why I’m So Satisfied with this device.
Final Verdict
Now let’s get on to my verdict so given everything would I recommend the Lenovo IdeaPad gaming 3 absolutely but for the same specs I have no. This laptop is great it’s wonderful it’s fantastic and it’s consistant amazing it does everything I need with very few hiccups but for you if you’re purchasing the new idead Gaming 3 make sure you get the most recent one that way you’ll get the incredible upgraded spec sheet with the Nvidia RTX gpus and upgraded CPUs and RAM so you’ll get what I have but better.
Be sure to check out the links down below to learn more about the laptop and purchase the newest versions and let me know what you think about this lovely device in the comment section down below. My name is cus it’s spelled like Cyrus but not to seeed Rooster just take out the thank you very much for reading and have a wonderful day.
