IdeaPad Gaming 3 15 Laptop, 15.6" FHD Display, AMD Ryzen 5 5600H, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650, 8GB RAM, 256GB Storage, Windows 10H

When I first had my Nitro 5, there was a lot I loved about. It could reach 120fps and was decent for most of my games. I loved it. But when I had to upgrade, I genuinely didn't want to spend too much as a working student. I did a lot of research and yes, the top brands of ACER , ASUS, HP, ALIEN they had great laptops obviously. But finding this one was a god sent. I can clock out at 240fps on most of my games. The upgrades to 16gb RAM and to add my HYBRID drive was flawlessly easy. The design is very sleek, mint fresh and effortlessly classy and simple. In fact, it stays well hidden as a gaming laptop. It's lightweight and easily portable for travel as a student compared to the 7lbs most gaming pcs start with.The cons I had with this were it was a bit smaller than the average 15.6 laptop. A bit. Measured, it's a direct 15.6 but still pales by a slight inch to normal laptops. The other issue is that the fans are beneath and there is no air flow towards the back of the laptop. So, I would advise investing in a cooling pad for playing demanding games in order to protect your laptop. Furthermore, it only has two USB ports. Not a massive deal as I can easily buy an external USB device to add more ports but it was a let down. Apart from that, those are all the cons I would say, which pale in comparison to the pros.In conclusion, this is a beast of a laptop. To find an affordable laptop which upgrades easily and has amazing fps and runs smoothly while providing easy portability is rare. The cons are things which can be easily overlooked due to the vast amount of pros this offers. If you're looking for a budget gaming laptop as a student, this is definitely your buy.

This is an all-plastic laptop, but has a fairly rigid build, not like metal, but far less flex on the screen than my 5 year old Acer Aspire which needed many replacements due to flexing including a cracked screen, hinges, and back cover. This has 8 GB memory. This has and older GTX 1650. This has a 120hz display (unheard of at this price point) This has 256SSD m.2. It has a backlit Keyboard. It has an amazing processor: AMD Ryzen 5.Here's the deal. You can get similarly priced laptops that have more storage and RAM, touchscreen, etc... but you will trade down the pieces that future-proof this machine. I can walk into Walmart and get a similarly priced Pentium, i3 or a similarly priced i5 with more RAM or storage or maybe a touchscreen (if that’s important to you), but no dedicated graphics, no backlit keyboard, or expansion slots for ram or SSD. However, I can always buy more RAM or hard drive later when the price will actually be lower. I can NOT come back later and upgrade the CPU, add slots to increase the RAM, and all of a sudden make my keyboard visible in the dark when I want to work late at night sometime. I can't later upgrade the screen to 120hz as this one has. And, the GPU at this price range is perfectly adequate (Although not as future-proof). The Battery has a LOT to be desired and could be a deal breaker. I can get 5 to 6 hours if optimized back (all but battery-saver mode). My old Acer had 12 hour battery, but the screen was a significant tradeoff.Some people are saying only 6 GB RAM. That is because of the new way Ryzen processors use dedicated RAM instead of shared RAM. There is 8, it is just that old processors shared the RAM with the system. Now the new processors are dedicating part of the RAM to the processor permanently. It isn't too much different than before, but does change the way the RAM is handled and displays for availability for Windows.My system is gaming fine right now with the existing setup, but I'm not a power user. I'll wait until I can't live with the performance and then I'll go buy more RAM and SSD when it comes down lower in price, because I can. Beware of machines that downgrade built in pieces to give you more memory and hard-drive, but will be outdated in 4-7 years instead of 7-10+ years depending on what you plan to do with the machine. Those are not good tradeoffs. Lenovo seems to have hit a sweet spot in this price range with its optimal upgradeability and good built in features for for the price you pay.If you need a power machine, this is not it. This is a good midrange machine that will allow you to do a diverse amount of tasks without lagging out or crashing, and should last a long time with the specs it has.