An excellent gaming laptop deal has surfaced: theLenovo LOQ ARP9retailing for $879.99. Even with Black Friday deals applied, every other RTX 4070 laptop is priced very close to or sometimes hundreds above $1,000; based on that alone, this is a pretty stellar bang for your buck, but the rest of the laptop is no slouch, either.
TheLenovo LOQ ARP9costs $879.99 and is equipped with a mobile Nvidia RTX 4070, 16 GB of RAM, and a Ryzen 7 7535HS. The mobile RTX 4070 is roughly ~30% slower than the desktop 4070, but that should still be good for targeting 100+ FPS at 1080p, with or without resolution scaling, depending on the games you’re playing. As a general rule of thumb, the smaller the screen, the less noticeable resolution scaling techniques—especially DLSS and FSR 3 or newer— become.
An RTX 4070-powered model of the Lenovo LOQ ARP9, with a backlit keyboard and a full 1080p, 144 Hz, 15.6-inch FreeSync IPS display rated for 100% sRGB gamut coverage. The onboard CPU, the Ryzen 7 7435HS, is an 8-core chip with 16 threads and Zen 3+ architecture running at up to 4.5 GHz.
The overall package looks pretty compelling for laptop gamers hoping to have a good experience for less than $1,000, but there is one curiously lacking part of this laptop. It’s shipping with just 512 GB NVMe storage instead of a more standard 1 TB or 2 TB drive. There is an extra, empty NVMe Gen 4 slot for storage expansion.
External storageis also an option, though the fastest connector on the laptop is a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port for 10 Gigabits. For the best experience, we recommend only gaming off an internal SSD when playing modern AAA games. Most older games will load just fine off slower storage.
However— if you aren’t sure where to divide, it’s typically around 50+ GB game size where you start seeing a real benefit to SSD bandwidth or need to worry about weak external storage causing a bad experience. Games that are 10 GB or smaller are unlikely to have issues on even a slow HDD sans increased loading times.
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Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.
