Ryzen 7, RTX 4070 gaming laptop goes on sale for just $879

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The 144 Hz screen uses an IPS panel with 300 nits brightness and supports G-Sync.

Lenovo LOQ 15ARP9 official render
(Image credit: Lenovo)

An excellent gaming laptop deal has surfaced: the Lenovo LOQ ARP9 retailing 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.

The Lenovo LOQ ARP9 costs $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.

Lenovo LOQ ARP9
Lenovo LOQ ARP9: was $1,199.99 now $879.99 at Walmart

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.

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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 storage is 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
Christopher Harper
Contributing Writer

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.

9 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Quiver
    Check the CPU listed in the article. The 7435HS is the Ryzen 7, but some of the wording says the 7535HS is.
    But the 7535HS is a Ryzen 5.

    The actually linked laptop on Walmart does have the Ryzen 7 though for anyone looking to buy it!

    Lower number part = higher tier CPU - THANKS AMD! /s
    Reply
  • Notton
    Yeah, the article needs someone to double check the numbers
    R7 7435HS: 7735HS without the 660M igpu
    R5 7535HS: 7735HS minus 2 cores.

    The former you can find on a lot of budget gaming laptops where battery life isn't a huge concern.
    Reply
  • abufrejoval
    I got the variant with an RTX 4060 for €750 including taxes about a month or two ago and was happy enough to keep it.

    Yes, penny scraping is visible everywhere where parts can be swapped but everything essential and non-removable feels like a €1500 machine.

    It's nothing you'd want to carry along all day or use to write a novel at a sunny beach café, but a rather solid mobile gaming rig with a screen that pops great colors and scrolls very smoothly at those 144Hz.

    In games DLSS will get you somewhere above 60Hz most of the time at ultra settings, but rarely to those 144Hz. And at that point the Rembrand R CPU won't ever be the bottleneck, even if it's not the newest horse in the stable.

    With the 4060 the dual fans stay very reasonable as the GPU won't go past 100Watts. With the 4070 it depends very much on what they've put in as a power limit: It might get noisy or it might not go a lot faster.

    I'd love to know and compare and I might have sprung just another €100 for the extra GPU headroom, but it's currently more like €999 around here and the 4060 is doing its job well enough.

    I'd recommend staying away from the 4050, which they also sell in this chassis, as it's likely too weak to just play things at ultra or high and native screen resolution: while they might have been worth consideration for the price conscious at launch, rebate season has all three models selling very near the same prices and you need to be careful which one you click.

    The lack of an iGPU does cost battery life during 2D mobile work, but it does seem to make the CPU a penny part while still packing quite a lot of CPU power. It does have the benefit of making things easy with drivers also on Linux, because it just looks like a very normal traditional PC to software, nothing hybrid going on there.

    The next generation LOQ seem to maintain the great chassis, but boast Phoenix or Hawk Point APUs in combination with a 3k display and a few extra Hz or refresh potential, while currently still selling with the same 40xx GPUs. Again, I'd love to compare first hand, but my hunch would be that the extra resolution won't be very visible in terms of extra detail or realism but eat perhaps more than a GPU rank for the native resolution support and thus be less balanced as a games engine.

    Still, at the same price point, I'd snap them up :) , but they aren't there yet. But with those Strix Points and RTX 50xx pushing there could soon be some good deals if inventory didn't get managed properly.
    Reply
  • User of Computers
    A WARNING TO ALL CONSIDERING THIS: This laptop has a CPU without an iGPU, so you're forced to use the dGPU always. Prepare yourself for monumentally poor battery life (it do be cheap tho)
    Reply
  • User of Computers
    abufrejoval said:
    I got the variant with an RTX 4060 for €750 including taxes about a month or two ago and was happy enough to keep it.

    Yes, penny scraping is visible everywhere where parts can be swapped but everything essential and non-removable feels like a €1500 machine.

    It's nothing you'd want to carry along all day or use to write a novel at a sunny beach café, but a rather solid mobile gaming rig with a screen that pops great colors and scrolls very smoothly at those 144Hz.

    In games DLSS will get you somewhere above 60Hz most of the time at ultra settings, but rarely to those 144Hz. And at that point the Rembrand R CPU won't ever be the bottleneck, even if it's not the newest horse in the stable.

    With the 4060 the dual fans stay very reasonable as the GPU won't go past 100Watts. With the 4070 it depends very much on what they've put in as a power limit: It might get noisy or it might not go a lot faster.

    I'd love to know and compare and I might have sprung just another €100 for the extra GPU headroom, but it's currently more like €999 around here and the 4060 is doing its job well enough.

    I'd recommend staying away from the 4050, which they also sell in this chassis, as it's likely too weak to just play things at ultra or high and native screen resolution: while they might have been worth consideration for the price conscious at launch, rebate season has all three models selling very near the same prices and you need to be careful which one you click.

    The lack of an iGPU does cost battery life during 2D mobile work, but it does seem to make the CPU a penny part while still packing quite a lot of CPU power. It does have the benefit of making things easy with drivers also on Linux, because it just looks like a very normal traditional PC to software, nothing hybrid going on there.

    The next generation LOQ seem to maintain the great chassis, but boast Phoenix or Hawk Point APUs in combination with a 3k display and a few extra Hz or refresh potential, while currently still selling with the same 40xx GPUs. Again, I'd love to compare first hand, but my hunch would be that the extra resolution won't be very visible in terms of extra detail or realism but eat perhaps more than a GPU rank for the native resolution support and thus be less balanced as a games engine.

    Still, at the same price point, I'd snap them up :) , but they aren't there yet. But with those Strix Points and RTX 50xx pushing there could soon be some good deals if inventory didn't get managed properly.
    how horrendous is battery life?
    Reply
  • abufrejoval
    User of Computers said:
    how horrendous is battery life?
    Can't say that I ever tried to measure it properly...

    And then it obviously depends on your workload.

    The laptop can get to around 150 Watts max, 100 Watts for the GPU, 50 Watts for the CPU in your typical Furmark/Prime95 max power drain test.

    No battery would survive that, as a matter of fact some BIOS settings hint at actually allowing/disabling the battery being used to augment your external power supply for over-the-top performance... I made sure to disable that for longevity.

    On battery alone this machine will restrict max power consumption to both the GPU and the CPU, I haven't checked to see to which point, because mobile gaming really isn't a use case I can imagine myself doing. But I'm pretty sure it's below 50 Watts total for both GPU and CPU combined and at that level it can't last an hour given the battery's rating.

    And even if the battery looks to be replaceable easy enough, I'm not keen on killing it early, so I never tried .

    However, mobile "2D" desktop work is obviously a valid use case even for gaming laptop and there it's both a pleasure to use (because it has such a great keyboard and screen) and has predicted four hours of battery live, when I was doing surfing, reading, typing etc.

    I haven't actually checked if that's true, but a few hours should be quite ok, as long as you're not gaming.
    What I won't tire repeating is, that it's a true pleasure to work on, for the eyes, the fingers and the absense of noise.

    For lack of an iGPU the dGPU has to stay on for as long as the display shows something on screen. And while the GPU chip might support quite a bit of power management, I'm afraid that GDDR RAM isn't designed for low power modes. I'd have to check but I don't think that the 4060 dips much below 10 Watts on desktop idle, while the SoC may easly make do with half that. Add the bright display and there is just no way you'll get the whole working day you can get from a Strix Point or Lunar Lake.

    I like closing my laptop display during longer conferences and only open it when I'm taking notes and depending on how power saving is implemented and configured that might actually allow it to last a full conference day off the wall plug... but then in most places they have plenty of sockets.

    The modular chassis actually has quite a lot of space left for a bigger battery, but that won't change things by much.

    If you want both, potential for long mobile 2D operations on battery and good gaming from the wall plug, you'll need a hybrid system with two GPUs and those are more expensive, sometimes much more.

    Given an open choice, I'd have sprung for an APU with the iGPU included at up to €50 extra, however that wasn't an option here. I got this one mostly as a mobile console for visiting friends and family who want to game with us while the rest of the family is on their big rigs. For that we put it on the dinner table and add a power cable.

    But it also does rather well on that same dinner table for just a bit of surfing without that cable: never ran out of battery before the table chairs became uncomfortable...
    Reply
  • pixelpusher220
    Per a reddit thread, the M2 slots may only support 1TB each. Have seen similar limits on other laptops I think. Any idea why they cheap out like that?
    Reply
  • abufrejoval
    pixelpusher220 said:
    Per a reddit thread, the M2 slots may only support 1TB each. Have seen similar limits on other laptops I think. Any idea why they cheap out like that?
    That's bollocks, I've put 4TB WD 850X drives in there without issue.

    I can't even think of any way how they'd be able to limit that...

    Well, there have been whitelists and such, but I don't see them here.

    4TB WD drives and 64GB of DDR5-5600 working just fine. The only upgrade not working was putting a BX200 Wifi card there, which seems to be a general issue with everything AMD. AX200 works just fine.
    Reply
  • abufrejoval
    So I did a bit of measuring on my RTX 4060 variant, also with that same iGPU-less Rembrand-R APU with HWinfo:

    The dGPU will switch off e.g. on a closed lid. Otherwise on a desktop with a browser open and little else going on it eats around 3 Watts, while the APU reports around 4 Watts average.

    But HWinfo reports an average battery drain of 18 Watts, so clearly there is something else going on here and closing the display lid does less than I expected there (14 Watts and that includes the GPU powering down).

    Admittedly my system has 64GB of RAM and a 4TB WD Black SN850X NVMe now, but this isn't server RAM.

    My Lenovo Thinkpad X13G4 with a Phoenix APU, which is a generation newer and clearly designed for maximum battery life, makes do with around 7.5 Watts battery drain on an idle desktop and drops to 4 Watts on a closed lid (but active system).

    That has a slightly bigger 56 Wh battery (optional) 32GB of RAM and a 2TB Samsung 990 Pro and in combination it's going last much longer on 2D stuff.

    I guess there is no way to mesure consumption via HWinfo for suspend-to-RAM, but I believe the high cost of re-awakening the system after that is the main reason why Windows and x86 could never compete with mobile OS and SoCs, modern standby doesn't seem enough.

    I did a single gaming test with FS2024 at Ultra settings with DLSS. That gives me around 80FPS normally in both a balanced Windows power profile and with the normal TDP setting (white power knob, around 75 Watts max for the GPU, 55 Watts for the APU).

    On battery FS2024 dropped to 55 FPS, which took 55 Watts from the GPU and 25 Watts from the CPU to achieve, over all battery drain was around 83 Watts--less than one hour at best and very likely to stress the battery.

    Using the "max power" preset (red power button) allows the GPU to reach 120 Watt and the CPU will also reach that in Prime95, but with a 170 Watt limit on the power supply, both together will have to negotiate.

    Most games don't really improve much at all with that setting so in the interest of keeping the fan noise down, "balanced" (white power LED) really delivers what it promises.

    If somebody has those numbers for RTX 4070 variant to compare, I'd love to see them.
    Reply