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

I got this during a prime day sale. The price was too good to resist. I don't remember what I paid now as it's been over a year. But, after receiving it I did a few upgrades and made it go from great to stellar. I didn't believe that it really would only take a maximum of 1tb nvme drives, but it wasn't lying! I bought a 2tb and it wouldn't read it. Believe it when it says that! Otherwise, phenomenal machine with a great display.

**update: this laptop can at times, be powered on, but have a black screen. No matter how many times it's reset, it will not work. I had to take it apart and remove the ram and reinstall it then it would boot up.I believe I figured out the cause, using hibernation mode! So I changed hibernation mode to sleep mode and haven't had it happen again.That's the only problem I've had, it still works perfectly.****This laptop came perfect, new and not damaged. On its own it was a nice laptop but I upgraded the laptop ram with teamelite group ddr5 4800 2x16gb = 32 gbThen I upgraded the ssd to crucial p5 plus 500gb, used the cloning software to clone existing ssd then switched boot order and formatted the old drive. Everything is super fast and works great.One thing about the backlit keyboard, it does have it but it needs to be turned on in the lenovo software that comes installed.Also great feature if the ethernet port which would be great for gaming I imagine, tho I don't game with this laptop

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.

The media could not be loaded. Upside:- Appearance is nice and simple with a bit of flair add-on with the back exhaust.- CPU is quite snappy and GPU is a treat to throw at some AAA games that is recent (2023) and almost run flawless in AAA games that is a few years old (COD: Cold War Zombies).- I/O Ports are just enough for the average person to use.- 120hz display is quick and responsive!- Upgrading the Laptop limited hardware is a bit tricky but with a bit of time it's really easy to do so.Neutral:- Screen brightness/Keyboard/Speakers are just "Meh." It will get you by just enough to be acceptable. Small adjustments is needed right out of the box.- 256GB SSD/8GB RAM isn't suitable for modern games at all but it come with the cost of the laptop.- 720p Camera is just there to be used for a quick call video. And the Mic too.Downsides:- Battery life isn't great. Expect to get about 3-4 hours of basic use in "Balanced" mode and 4-5 hours in "Quite" mode if the screen brightness is 75%/Bluetooth is off and speakers is at 50% (Or headphones plugged in to bypass it). Expect the battery drain faster if you're playing a somewhat demanding game.- The fans can get LOUD when playing a demanding game!Overall:For $650, you can't go wrong with that deal (At that time). I wanted a laptop to kind of replaced my 8 year old desktop and my hand-me-down laptop that was 12 years old before I gave it to a friend of mine that really needed a PC for basic tasks. I had around a grand from my check and I just was looking to see if any deals at the time. And then this laptop came up and I said "Why not? It looks decent enough to have andto upgrade." And here we are. I even added 32GB DDR5/2TB Storage upgrade ASAP that cost me nearly $300 alone, putting the cost close to the entire check I have, and do I regret it? Nah. It's exactly what I wanted. There are some flaws with this laptop but at the price that I paid for it's outweigh the cons, but I do recommend getting the ideapad series on a sale because it's a hell of a deal if you are planning to keep the laptop for years on end like me. It's been about 3 months and so far I am loving my new laptop!But sadly the model I have currently (3050, R5-6600H) is getting replace by the newer and more expensive model that have a 4050, R7-7735HS which IS a better laptop via hardware but it's going to be a while for a good sale to happen for the 4050 version. Again, if you're really looking to get a decent modern gaming laptop look at this laptop at least before it's truly gone.