Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 - Essential Gaming Laptop - 15.6" FHD - 120Hz - AMD Ryzen 5 6600H - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 - 8GB DDR5 RAM - 256GB NVMe Storage - Windows 11 Home

After 2 years review Cons. Low memory and storage. Upgraded for 120. Performance is excellent. Screen quality is good. Speed is excellent. Keyboard is basic.

This laptop was a god send, it’s still running strong Lenovo customer service is absolutely peak. Any problems they fix my laptop within the week. This purchase allowed me to save up for a desk top while I played games, schoolwork, and even editing music is a breeze in this thing. It’s also expandable in storage and memory. If you are on a budget but need something to preform. This is your best bet by far

The model I received comes with a Ryzen 5 6600U, RTX 3050 4GB, 8GB of DDR5-4800 (I added another 8 gigs before doing much else so bear that in mind for performance reviews), and a 256 gig internal storage drive (I use an external 1TB SSD for games).Not a bad laptop overall. Had some issues but some were caused by Windows, not the laptop itself.If you're upgrading the RAM or storage, be extra sure to make sure Windows doesn't have any updates waiting. Windows 11 made the great decision to no longer tell users if their shutting down of a PC would also be applying updates. So unplugging the battery and adding more RAM unknowingly mid-update despite having shut down the laptop bricked my operating system and I had to reinstall. Downside is that you need ethernet upon a reinstall so you can download wifi drivers. Upside is it gets rid of the bloatware Lenovo tries preinstalling with the laptop.The inside is pretty simple, RAM is covered by a small metal tray with thermal pads on it for heat dissipation. A free M.2 storage slot is right in the open, ready for you to add storage as needed (you will need it). Thermals seem pretty solid, fans ramp up in gaming (I barely hear them over my headset which I don't run very loud and is an open-back headset, meaning I can hear noises outside of the headset fairly well) but rarely get too extreme.For gaming, it's a mixed bag. Needless to say, ray tracing will not be something you'll use on this laptop for playable frame rates. I doubt even 30 fps is achievable without dropping to 720p or less. Rainbow Six Siege was able to handle 1080p 120 fps consistently with mixed graphics settings (90 fov, ultra LOD, Medium textures and Shadows, most else set to low) with or without DLSS enabled. Though I did experience a bug where the render scaling option said I was running at ~850p even with the render scaling set to 100... an oddity to be sure. Halo Reach struggled to achieve similar results on Forge World, with bad tearing when the fps cap was set to 120. I lowered it to 60 and all was well, though drops may not be out of the question in high-intensity situations like custom games or campaign. Minecraft Java ran mostly above 60 fps on a modded server without Optifine or any other performance enhancers. Even in a particularly-taxing area it was mostly fine when the render distance was turned down. I'm sure with the use of Optifine or Sodium it'd be a very solid gaming experience.Windows 11 is a bit of a chore. Upon first installing Steam, I realized that my default Documents folder pinned to my Quick Access in the File Explorer was labeled under OneDrive. I never gave OneDrive permission to backup anything on my PC, as the measley 5 GB it gives you isn't enough for anything I would use a computer for. But it forces a backup, and deleting from the OneDrive cloud deletes it from your PC as well for... some insane reason. So be wary if you use Windows 11, make sure you remove the tabs from the Quick Access bar in File Explorer and replace them with the actual local file locations (Documents, Pictures, Music, etc).The keyboard is... weird. I've used mechanical and membrane alike in plenty of scenarios, but this one just feels weird compared to either. It's not unusable by any means but it takes getting used to. The trackpad is fine, I prefer having mouse buttons with my trackpad but it's not unusable even without them.The speakers are tinny. For 2W speakers it's not bad but it's not going to have the amazing sound quality the description would lead you to believe. Would suggest using headphones.The I/O is alright. Type-C with full DisplayPort functionality is nice to have, HDMI 2.0 is plenty for what this laptop is capable of, and the back-facing Ethernet and charging ports are quite handy in most situations. I've always been a fan of Lenovo's chargers as well, for some reason the reversible square shape just feels right. My only complaint would be a lack of USB ports, and the lack of SD/MicroSD. I know the latter is getting up there in age which makes it more a personal preference, but the former can make it difficult to use with numerous external devices (keyboard, mouse, storage, controllers, etc) since you are limited to 3 max only if you have type-C connectivity, otherwise you get two ports for peripherals and nothing more. An extra USB 2 port would have been nice to have.Overall it's a solid deal. Boot times are fast, gaming feels alright, the wifi signal is solid (though I did notice some lag while using a bluetooth Xbox Series controller with wifi, need to test and see if the lag is still present while using ethernet) and the laptop is easy to modify for basics like RAM and storage for the most part. A solid system from Lenovo.*Update 2/11/2023 - Found out that this laptop actually does support VRR via AMD Freesync. However, this is not listed anywhere the laptop can be found. I had to install AMD's graphics software in order to enable it, despite the laptop having an Nvidia GPU inside. This helped immensely with stuttery FPS in various games, though issues with Nvidia control panel's FPS limits caused other issues unrelated with the laptop itself.

Just a horrible experience, I feel like I've gotten ripped off so bad with this machine. I'm never dealing with lenovo again. I had a reasonable negative review here but I came back to update because this whole deal is complete trash. Nothing but issues. It's a bad product, sloppy made, I sent it back, they didn't fix any of the issues, and returned it with my data wiped which was an awesome bonus, and just 2 months later it's a brick. I had the 1 year extended warranty which was horrible anyway, because they didn't fix anything, because they weren't sophisticated enough to understand the main issue this machine came with since birth. You know, when you're more tech savvy than the tech who's supposed to be fixing your device? It's becoming more common. Now out of the blue, it just quit. No screen or hdmi picture, just quit. For releasing such a trash product, I'm never dealing with lenovo again. I'm out 770 dollars, out of data I won't ever get back because they did an unnecessary reformat that didn't have anything to do with the actual issue, and now also out of the 70 it cost for the warranty in which they fixed nothing.3rd update: I am faced with the decision to keep spending 70 bucks a year or whatever for the extended warranty, or scrap this and shell out a thousand dollars for an actual good laptop. If you're thinking of going budget for a gaming laptop, do yourself a favor and just shell out a few more hundred. I wouldn't get one less than 900 bucks as far as the options I'm seeing out there currently, with reputable people reviewing and investigating their quality. This one, when I bought it, it had hundreds of reviews and was rated 4.5 stars. A year and a half later now it's 4.2 stars and declining. Which if you haven't learned, in 2024, anything 4.4 is not great and 4.3 or less has too high of a chance of being junk to be worth it. So 4.2, it's gonna be about a 50/50 chance you're getting junk.The reason for the swift decline in ratings is because all of those people who gave it 5 stars are trickling in now to give it lower ratings because it's a problem machine. They pushed the budget too far and it resulted in a bad product.I spent 650, then upgraded the hard drive and ram so about 800 then I had to buy the warranty because of the problems so that puts me at 870 into the machine. It's now a 870 dollar occupancy in my closet. It's like buying a car that's a lemon. Now you have to decide how high you want to rack the bill up before you cut your losses and buy another one. Don't know what your budget may be but this was an expensive mistake for me. And it's getting more expensive. And if I renew the warranty I'll have to wait one entire month using the backup gaming desktop I have thank God, until I can even get this one back in commission if they fix it. And then it's back to ticking time bomb status waiting to see if it breaks down again and needs a warranty renewal.Expensive mistake, don't go this route man the odds aren't in your favor. I give maybe a 50 percent chance that you'll make it last long enough to fit your needs. Research the reviews, this is too problematic of a machine and it has a high rate of failure.4th Update: It sat dead for like 8 months in my closet. Waiting Dormant. One day I plugged it in and it powered right up and started working again. When I troubleshooted, I did disconnect the battery and press, hold, tap, a million times the power button to try and get rid of any standing electricity in the unit. And none of that did anything. So while it sat 8 months, it must have mustered up the will to go on. So now I've been using it like 5 months again. Now, a new exciting issue. Wherever they have put the wifi adapter in the laptop, resting your hand in a certain spot in the laptop causes the wifi to drop out while gaming. It's not enough to do anything while browsing the internet or streaming, and I don't know the precise technical reason for it but it only happens when I am actively engaged with whatever protocol online games like to use. You know, a nice, fast, stable data transfer is what they want. So if it's blocked for a few seconds and their server sees nothing, you lag, and you lose connection. So I am shelling out another 20 bucks or so, but then I will lose one of my USB ports, having to add some sort of a dongle, which is further reducing the laptop experience. I came back to reiterate, despite the fact that I am still using this laptop, and more or less probably stuck with it, i reiterate that the entire purchase has been a nightmare. It's a total dud purchase, definitely don't buy this model and in this arena, I am betting there's a far better product for the price, if you go with a different brand than Lenovo. I'm not trying to rant like a madman I know companies make mistakes. But I am hoping that what I have learned can carry onto other people looking at gaming laptops. Buddy, be VERY careful with which one you go with because with this type of purchase, most of the time by the time you realize you made a mistake, it's too late and you have to eat the cost. So just in general, make sure of a few things.1 - The exact model you are buying is tried and true. Make sure it's had enough time on the market to be vetted. Otherwise the community of people who purchased that model machine will not get a full understanding of any complications until maybe many months later. This machine, with the reviews I saw, looked like The deal. Like, there were maybe 7 machines in between 600-800 dollars. The 4.5 star rating, and hundreds of good reviews made this one seem like the deal to beat. But the one thing I did not factor was how new the product was. I did not think about that. So please, think about that before you hit "Place order".2 - Youtube reviewers with affiliate links, completely skip them. I don't know if there's better logic to it, such as, if they're reviewing 10 products at once. If they are reviewing 1 product and they have an affiliate link, obviously they are going to tell you how awesome the product is. But if they have 10 competing products, and affiliate links to all 10, and then they tell you which one they thought was the best one? That to me seems a lot safer, because the sample size is no longer 1. When the sample is 1 laptop, their opinion will be a binary "Yes, buy this". With 5 or 10 items, they are just hoping you buy any one of them. So it makes no difference to them which, so you could count their opinion as potentially credible. Certainly a lot more credible than if they are reviewing a single item in the video. However, obviously the winning logic would be, try to find reviewers without affiliate links. But that can be hard to do, so if you do look for reviews make sure they have 5 or 10 different machines being reviewed in the video, then watch a bunch of other review videos and notice if there's a pattern of reviewers rating the same top products. Get a good, big sample size. That's my second tip.3 - Pay attention to what company it is, and research their service. Maybe check out if Linus has gotten his hands on their service people yet lol. Whether you like or dislike Linus, that's one of the more useful video series he has. He puts service departments to the test to see which ones actually do a good job, and not just once, consistently they need to provide good resolutions. I should've checked out Lenovo. Maybe my bad service experience was a 1-off but still for my 2 cents it was bad.So in short, definitely avoid this model. I mean the bios battery is still clanking around in the machine ffs lol. And now I am recently learning I can't online game on it without either an external keyboard, which fortunately I use 99% of the time, or, without bringing an additional wifi dongle into the picture. That is unacceptable. The fact that the spots you rest your hands on the laptop interefere with the electronics, that's a pretty sloppy design. At the point you're bringing other peripherals in to resolve design flaws, I consider this to be a pretty terribly executed "gaming" laptop. These mistakes are revealing unexperienced designers and/or bad quality control. These are issues that experienced designers will learn, and avoid in the future. It's a wonder how a company like Lenovo doesn't know how to design a bios battery that stays in place. Or a wifi adapter that doesn't get interfered with from your hand being in too close proximity to it. I mean these seem like such basic things that designers should learn about very, very quickly. As a veteran computer manufacturer that Lenovo is, I find the fact that these design flaws were made by them to be suspicious. Erego, here is what is more likely. Cheap trash made from obscure, cheap companies that fly under the radar, use cheap materials which are toxic, and then later re-branded as Lenovo. I bet that's more likely what we are looking at. Well, the market is a minefield in 2024. And this one blew up on me. I would move onto the next.