Lenovo Ideapad L340 Gaming Laptop Review
This review of the Lenovo Ideapad L340 Gaming Laptop will take a look at the hardware that is powering this machine and taking you on a spin through all it's features available. Lenovo are a big name in the laptop world and the L340 is one of the best reviewed laptops on the marketplace. It's has a great price point for it's power and offers most gamers with enough juice to get them playing their favourite games in high definition. Let's dive in and take a look at what this laptop has to offer.
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Review Of Lenovo Ideapad L340 Gaming Laptop
- Lenovo Ideapad L340 Screen
- Lenovo Ideapad L340 Design and Feel
- Lenovo Ideapad L340 Performance Review
- Every Day Use With The Lenovo Ideapad L340
- Conclusion
Lenovo Ideapad L340 Screen
Full HD screens are what we come to expect as a minimum requirement from our gaming laptops these days, and the Lenovo Ideapad L340 Screen provides exactly that. It has a 15.6 inch IPS full HD screen (1920x1080), providing you with a glorious display for playing games in all their HD glory. Because this screen is an IPS display, it means you'll get the best viewing angles and colors than you would from a regular LED screen. Whilst it doesn't support 4K, FHD is the next best thing; if you're after 4K display you're going to need to dig deeper into your pockets as the hardware to run 4K displays on a laptop is going to be very costly.
The refresh rate on this laptop is 60hz, which is pretty much the most basic level for screens so it would have been nice to see a 144hz refresh rate.
The bezel around this laptop isn't too thick, but it isn't an edge-to-edge screen either. Most gaming laptops are going to be larger than laptops designed for on-the-go work since they need to fit in bigger and more powerful components.
Lenovo Ideapad L340 Design And Feel
One of the best parts of this laptop is the keyboard design and the overall simplicity of it. It blends incredibly well with the rest of the laptop and of course, you can change the settings for the backlit keyboard using software on the laptop. In an age where gaming laptops are designed to look like spaceships, this laptop has a relatively subdue and sleek design about it. The laptop is made mostly from plastic, but it still feels and looks great. The trackpad isn't anything special to write home about, however we're happy it doesn't have those clunky extra mouse buttons added onto it (you simply tap onto it to click and it feels very responsive).
It weighs a comfortable 4.8 pounds, which is about the standard for gaming laptops of this range. It's 15.6inch size means it doesn't feel too clunky to carry around and move from room to room.
For those who get paranoid about people spying on them through laptop cameras, the Lenovas L340 comes with a camera shutter that completely blocks the camera from view (a bit of plastic!) so you don't have to worry about anyone peeping on you.
Lenovo Ideapad L340 Performance
The first item on our performance review for the L340 is the graphics card, which in this model is a Nvidia GTX 1650. The GTX 1650 was released in April 2019, so it's a relatively newer card on the market compared to most GTX cards. The 1650 sits between the 1050 and 1060 GTX cards and was designed as a cheap alternative for those types of cards. Whilst the GTX 1650 won't be turning too many heads, it does have the capability to run most games on highest settings, with Userbenchmark showing it can hit 90+ FPS on games like Fortnite and CS:GO.
Supporting the graphics card is Intel's i5-9300H processor, with four cores and up to 8 threads. The 9XXX series is the 9th generation CPU models from Intel and offer more powerful and performance that previous generations, with the i5-9300h clocking in at 2.4ghz-4.1ghz. An i5-9300h will be reliable when it comes to performance for FHD games; most of the processing load will go to your graphics card. Whilst video editing and heavy-performance processing will be slow, the i5 will be more than enough for multi-tasking, whether that's switching between gaming and viewing streams/discord all at once.
The 8GB of DDR4 RAM is great, though as we move into the next decade 16GB is becoming more and more of a staple for games. There is only one RAM slot in this laptop, so if you do want to upgrade to 16GB, you'll have to replace the 8GB stick fully (rather than add an extra 8GB).
The speedy 512 Nvme SSD will get you into games faster, including faster boot times and loading times. These days game downloads are taking up plenty of gigabytes of data, so having 512GB is a decent size. If you can get an external HDD for storage and run games on the 512 SSD, you'll be golden.
Battery life on this laptop will depend heavily on what you're using it for; the laptop comes with different performance modes that you can switch to that will help use less battery power (at the expense of computer power). Averages usage for this laptop is around 5 hours or so, which is probably what you can expect from most gaming laptops running on a full battery.
Audio on this laptop uses the Dolby Audio technology to give you an enhanced audio experience. It's decent for a laptop and does a decent job of playing clear sound without that horrible low-quality echoing audio you get from cheaper laptops.
Every Day Use With The Lenovo Ideapad L340
Starting off, the Lenovo L340 comes with Windows 10 home edition and surprisingly isn't full of useless software that you'll have to spend half an hour uninstalling. Windows 10 is the most popular operating system, and so you'll be set for the next decade or so with this installed on the machine.
In terms of ports, it offers 2 USB 3.0 ports, USB-C port, HDMI port and an ethernet port for that all important wired gaming connection. It also has a headphone jack and of course a port for the laptop charger.
You'll find you can run most games made before 2019 run on the top settings. Newer games will struggle to run on max/ultra settings just because these games are now targetting 4K-ready machines. For HD gaming, this laptop is great and whilst it wouldn't hurt to give it a bit more power with the graphics card, the GTX 1650 is a common card for this price range.
Overall Feelings
The Lenovo Ideapad L340 is definitely a good choice for a gaming laptop that sits in the medium-tier for powerful gaming machines. Across the board it has "decent" everything; CPU is good enough for HD gaming, Graphics card will power most FHD games and the 512 SSD will make getting into your games quicker. 8GB of RAM is enough for running most games, but 16GB would future-proof this laptop a lot more. The laptop design is very sleek and minimalistic and the IPS screen will give you a great presentation of most games.
If you've used the Lenovo Ideapad L340, let us know in the comments how you feel about it and what kinds of games you're running on it.
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