Lenovo IdeaPad L340 81LK000EUS Review

The Lenovo IdeaPad L340 81LK000EUS is a gaming laptop that comes at an affordable price and offers a decent gaming experience. With the GPU in place, the laptop will run some of the popular titles but may not run all the latest and the greatest games.

The hardware on this laptop makes it suitable for not only gaming but also for everything else. If you are a heavy user of applications, then this laptop will meet your everyday demands without any problems. For the price, the laptop tries to be the best gaming laptop there is. But is it really worth your hard-earned money? Let’s find out.

Design

The Lenovo IdeaPad L340 81LK000EUS takes the design of Lenovo laptops to the next level. This model comes with an industrial design that makes it better looking than most of the Lenovo notebooks we’ve seen in the past.

The laptop comes in a dark shade of gray which is pretty neat. The metallic construction of the laptop gives it a premium feel and makes up for a durable machine. We’re a big fan of the clean finish on the lid with only the logo at the corner. You do get a brushed metal finish but it still aims for a minimalistic look.

The keyboard on the laptop is sweet. What surprises here is that you get a full-size keyboard with a dedicated number pad as well. The keys have good travel and offer a decent typing experience. The keyboard comes with ambient backlighting and is quite subtle than in most laptops. The touchpad is a precision one and does well on all accounts.

Though this is a gaming laptop, it only weighs around 4.84 pounds. When you compare this with most gaming laptops, this is a lot lighter and gives you the freedom to take it outside without adding an extra pound. Overall, the Lenovo IdeaPad L340 comes with an impressive design.

Lenovo IdeaPad L340 81LK000EUS Specs

Before we talk about the raw performance of this device, let’s take a look at its multimedia performance.

The laptop has a 15.6″ screen with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. Being an IPS panel, this is an excellent display when it comes to color reproduction and content display. You can see vibrant colors on this display making it more suitable for gaming and media consumption. Thanks to the IPS panel, you can enjoy brilliant viewing angles on this laptop.

The bezels around the screen are still a little too big for our liking. This is a time where you find laptops with a much better screen-to-body ratio and this is not that impressive. But being a budget laptop, we can forgive this minor quirk.

The audio output on the Lenovo IdeaPad L340 81LK000EUS is also neat. The laptop can get loud in a small or medium-sized room. But at volume, you will experience some distortion in the sound. If you’re keen about the quality of the sound, then you should invest in some high-quality gaming headphones.

Raw Performance

The Lenovo IdeaPad L340 81LK000EUS is a powerful laptop when it comes to everyday performance. The Intel Core i7 9750H chip is a hexa-core processor that comes with a base clock speed of 2.6GHz. With the help of turbo boost, the processor can go to a max clocking frequency of 4.5GHz.

This i7 chip is one of the most powerful processors for a laptop at this time. It does extremely well in terms of benchmarks getting a score of 13669 in CPUMark benchmark scores. The processor also does well in handling your everyday tasks as well. You can run even some processor-hungry applications on this laptop without losing any of its power juice.

There are eight gigs of DDR4 RAM in the memory department and they complement the processor nicely. If you’re someone who likes to do multiple stuff at the same time, then this RAM will come in handy. Though some might argue that this is not enough RAM for a gaming laptop, we can say that will do a pretty good job for most users.

The storage on the laptop is made up of two components. We have a 1TB hard drive disk and a 256GB NVMe solid-state drive. Thanks to the presence of both the elements, you get both space and also the speed you need in a modern-day gaming laptop. The operating system is installed on the SSD so it boots in a few seconds. With the SSD in place, you get much better performance and that’s worth paying the extra dough.

Gaming on the Lenovo IdeaPad L340 81LK000EUS

The Lenovo IdeaPad L340 81LK000EUS is powered by an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 graphics card. This is a graphics card that is based on the Pascal architecture and was released back in 2017. By then, it was a pretty good graphics card for mid-range and even high-end gaming laptops.

But now you can see that this may not run most of the recent games smoothly as one would expect. Today, the GTX1050 still qualifies as a mid-range graphics card and manages to run most games at high and medium settings. Ultra HD gaming on this machine might not be possible.

The following are some games and their frame rate when running with high settings.

• League of Legends – 135 FPS
• Far Cry New Dawn – 37 FPS
• Apex Legends – 37 FPS
• Just Cause 4 – 32 FPS
• Darksiders III – 40 FPS
• Battlefield V – 42 FPS
• Farming Simulator 2019 – 60 FPS
• Fallout 76 – 40 FPS
• FIFA 19 – 119 FPS

These frame rates should give you a good idea about the gaming capability of this laptop.

Battery Life and Connectivity

Battery life is excellent on the Lenovo IdeaPad L340 81LK000EUS. With light usage, you should get around 8 to 9 hours of battery life which is quite good. However, with gaming, you will get around 2 hours at best which is not great. Before you start a gaming marathon, make sure you have a power source near you.

The connectivity options on the L340 model is quite broad. There is a couple of USB 3.0 port, a USB type C port, an HDMI port, a headphone jack, and also an Ethernet port. The laptop supports both Bluetooth and WiFi so you can do a lot more without the need for more wires.

Bottomline

The Lenovo IdeaPad L340 81LK000EUS is a solid mid-range gaming laptop. It does well when it comes to mid-range games and runs them nicely with high settings. The laptop manages to run graphically intensive titles as well, but you’ll be forced to reduce the settings to medium. The laptop also has enough firepower to handle your non-gaming needs as well. If you’re looking for an allrounder of a laptop that can game really well, then this is a pretty smart pick.