Lenovo LOQ 15IAX9I review: A budget Intel Arc gaming laptop
The LOQ may run on a 12th-gen Intel Core i5-12450HX CPU, but it’s still a competitive processor with 8 cores (4 performance, 4 efficiency), 12 threads, and a maximum boost clock of 4.4Ghz.
The LOQ 15IAX9I also features Lenovo’s LA AI chip. This is a dedicated AI chip that deploys a “software machine learning” algorithm to optimise system performance, but I couldn’t detect any difference it was making. I asked Lenovo to spill the beans on what type of processor the LA A1 is, but they told me they “do not disclose computational capabilities on those chips”.
The LOQ 15IAX9I scored 267 points in the Expert Reviews 4K multimedia benchmark and 10,101 in the Cinebench R23 multi-core CPU test, both solid results and, in the case of the former, well ahead of the Acer Aspire 7 (182) and the Medion E40 (240). It has performance headroom to spare for productivity tasks but stumbles a little in gaming.
The Arc A530M uses Intel’s Xe Super Sampling or XeSS upscaling system, and you can find a list of the supported games here. It’s a considerably shorter list than the games supported by Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution. On a positive note, Intel has just announced XeSS v1.3, which reportedly provides a noticeable performance boost.
Intel quotes the Arc A530M as having a TGP of between 75 and 95W, but the highest I managed to record from the LOQ 15IAX9I was 72W, which may be part of the reason it struggles with AAA games at anything other than the lowest detail settings and no ray tracing.
Comparing directly with the RTX 2050-powered Acer Aspire 7 and the RTX 4050-powered Medion E40, the LOQ 15IAX9I ran the Hitman 2 benchmark at 22.8fs while the Acer managed 28.7 and the Medion 49.3.
Here are more examples: running Cyberpunk 2077, the LOQ 15IAX9I managed 31fs at medium detail, 58fs at the same settings with XeSS upscaling and 33fs in the Ray Tracing Low setting with XeSS upscaling. Moving to Returnal, the LOQ 15IAX9I managed 23fs on the lowest settings without XeSS, 30fs with XeSS and 38fs with XeSS at 1280 x 720.
The Wolfenstein: Youngblood benchmark ran at 29fs at the highest Mein Leben! setting and 95fs at the High (the third lowest of six) detail setting. Because this game uses an Nvidia API for ray tracing and does not support XeSS upscaling, these are the only results I can post.
The takeaway is that if you’re happy running games at lower detail settings and without ray tracing, the LOQ 15IAX9I does a decent job. If the game in question supports XeSS upscaling, so much the better. On a subjective level, I spent several hours playing Wolfenstein: Youngblood and came away perfectly happy with the look and the performance.
The SPECviewperf 3dsmax modelling test scored 30, which again is not stellar compared to the Acer Aspire 7’s 32, let alone the Medion E40’s 68.
The Solidigm quad-level cell (QLC) SSD in my test machine was nothing exciting. It recorded mediocre bordering on pedestrian sequential read and write speeds of 2,940MB/s and 1,350MB/s, respectively. I’d suggest buying a decent 1TB TLC 2280 SSD, cloning that as the system’s primary drive and using the Solidigm drive for bulk storage.
The lack of gaming performance would be more acceptable if battery life were good, but the LOQ 15IAX9I only has 60Wh, which is small for the breed in terms of capacity and physical size; there’s enough space inside for a battery at least 30% larger. In our standard video rundown test, the new Lenovo only lasted a little over five hours, which is poor compared to all the competition, bar the Medion E40, which recorded an appallingly low runtime of 3hrs 58mins.
