Today we are taking a look at Lenovo Ideapad L340 Gaming Laptop with Intel Core i5-9300H and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650. With this laptop Lenovo is targeting the budget gaming laptop market. For a gaming laptop, Ideapad L340 looks super sleek and polished. Its design language borrows more from thin and light laptop than traditional gaming laptops. There are no aggressive RGB lighting or weird logos. The body is all black with no major design flair. Lenovo probably expects that consumers interested in a gaming laptop at this price point will also use it as their daily driver.
The understated design of IdeaPad L340 will compliment your workplace and it won't look gaudy in public. The workmanship on this laptop is really good. It has a smooth and even edges with blue color theme extending from logo on the front lid to the keyboards and grills underneath. I especially appreciate the lack of a garish lid logos which plague other gaming machines. The body is made of plastic with brushed metal finish. With a weight of 4.6 pounds this is a fairly light and portable gaming laptop. Of course you can find lighter gaming laptops, but those are almost exclusively high-cost machines
The color reproduction is good with deep blacks and vibrant colors that look well separated from each other. This screen supports wide viewing angles. The text on screen can be clearly read from skewed angles. Pictures and videos remain bright and sharp showing little discoloration or distortion when viewed from skewed angles. The side bezels are minimal while top bezel is wide enough to house a 720p HD webcam with dual-array mic and a physical shutter. I love the shutter because it's a great privacy feature allowing you to completely shut off the camera when not in use. Lenovo also ships a custom software with this laptop, which allows one to reduce the blue light emission. This helps with eye strain and fatigue especially if you are indulging in extended gaming sessions.
As a result, Ideapad L340 can deliver snappy performance while remaining relatively cool. Here is a chart showing how this CPU overclocks itself under heavy load. For the first 10 seconds it ran close to its base frequency while the temperature hovered at around 52 degree Celsius. Then turbo boost mode kicked in between 15 and 30 seconds and the CPU overclocked itself by 55% to 3.72GHZ. This naturally raised the CPU temperature and it got as high as 87 degree Celsius. To counter the high temperature the turbo boost clock was reduced to 22% and CPU ran at 2.92GHz while the temperature remained at a comfortable 78 degrees Celsius.
This shows that IdeaPad L340 is able to deliver top performance while still preventing the laptop from overheating. In passmark CPU benchmark this CPU scored 9862 points. If we compare it with the top 10 common laptop CPUs, core-i5-9300H is sitting at 2nd spot right behind the more expensive core-i7 processor. For a budget gaming laptop, this is a good CPU choice. You will have no trouble running any modern game at optimal settings. It will also handle day to day tasks like surfing, running word-processing and other productivity software without any issues.
Here is a chart showing graphics performance of Ideapad L340 at full load. The GPU ran at 1691 MHz while maintaining a steady temperature of 74 degree Celsius. During longer gameplay lasting over half an hour, the GPU reduced its base clock frequency to 1620. It did this in order to maintain a cool operating temperature of 74 degrees. This shows that Lenovo has done a good job with thermal management ensuring that the laptop doesn't overheat under heavy workload
Gaming performance on this laptop was pretty good. At full HD resolution, GTA5 ran at 88 frames per second at normal settings and 61 frames per second at high settings. Far Cry 5 ran at respectable 45 and 41 frames per second under similar setup.
Rise of Tomb Raider ran smoothly at 82 and 58 frames per second while Ghost Recon ran at respectable 42 and 38 frames per second.
BTW, in addition to gaming, this laptop is also an excellent content creation workstation. The 4-core 8 thread core-i5 paired with this powerful GPU provides a perfect machine for running Photoshop and various video editing software like Adobe suite or Davinci Resolve. If you are looking for a powerful budget laptop to edit your YouTube videos, this should be on your short list. Also the GTX 1650 supports hardware acceleration on all popular codecs like h264, AVC and vp9. This means smooth 4K video playback on YouTube and Netflix with no dropped frames.
IdeaPad L340 comes with a 45 Watt hour battery and you can squeeze about 8 hours of battery life with wifi turned off and display set to minimum brightness. Expect around 6 hours of battery life doing typical web-surfing with WiFi turned on. Not bad for a gaming laptop. With the included charger, it takes about 2 hours and 20 minutes to fully charge the battery
Note that there is only one DIMM slot available for memory upgrade. This means that the RAM is installed in single channel configuration which is a bummer. I wish Lenovo had provided 2 DIMM slots for enabling dual channel configuration. You can install upto 16 GIG memory stick in this DIMM slot.
As far as upgrading the SSD is concerned, there is one m.2 slot available. This slot is already occupied by 512 GIG PCIe NVMe SSD. If you are interested in upgrading the storage, checkout the links at the end of the review for larger capacity SSDs which will fit in this m.2 slot. But If you are thinking of adding a 2nd SSD storage you are out of luck since there is no SATA3 slot available in this laptop.
Get 16GB RAM upgrade
Get 1TB SSD upgrade
Get 2TB SSD upgrade
Disclosure: Some links may be affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases
The understated design of IdeaPad L340 will compliment your workplace and it won't look gaudy in public. The workmanship on this laptop is really good. It has a smooth and even edges with blue color theme extending from logo on the front lid to the keyboards and grills underneath. I especially appreciate the lack of a garish lid logos which plague other gaming machines. The body is made of plastic with brushed metal finish. With a weight of 4.6 pounds this is a fairly light and portable gaming laptop. Of course you can find lighter gaming laptops, but those are almost exclusively high-cost machines
Display
The base of the laptop is heavy enough for the lid to be opened with one hand. When you open the lid you are greeted with a large 15.6 Inch full HD screen with a resolution of 1920 by 1080. Its an IPS panel with an anti-glare coating. The anti-glare coating does a good job of minimizing the reflections on the screen. The screen is really bright clocking 250 nits of brightness. It has a 45% color gamut and a very good contrast ratio of over 1500 by 1.
The color reproduction is good with deep blacks and vibrant colors that look well separated from each other. This screen supports wide viewing angles. The text on screen can be clearly read from skewed angles. Pictures and videos remain bright and sharp showing little discoloration or distortion when viewed from skewed angles. The side bezels are minimal while top bezel is wide enough to house a 720p HD webcam with dual-array mic and a physical shutter. I love the shutter because it's a great privacy feature allowing you to completely shut off the camera when not in use. Lenovo also ships a custom software with this laptop, which allows one to reduce the blue light emission. This helps with eye strain and fatigue especially if you are indulging in extended gaming sessions.CPU
OK, let's talk about hardware specs. Ideapad L340 comes with Core i5 processor. Specifically this is the 9th generation core-i5-9300H from Intel Coffee Lake family. This is a 4 core 8 thread processor with a base clock speed of 2.4 GHz and Max Turbo Frequency of 4.1 Ghz. This CPU has a TDP threshold of 45 Watts. It is able to automatically over-clock itself from 2.4 Ghz to 4.1 GHz while still maintaining the 45 Watt thermal envelope.
GPU
Ideapad L340 comes with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 GPU. This GPU has 4 GIG of onboard video RAM which should be plenty to play any modern game. GTX 1650 is based on Turing architecture and it ranks in the mid-tier in 3DMark benchmark. The CUDA cores in Turing architecture offer concurrent execution of both floating point and integer operations. So, in simple English this means improved performance not only in gaming but in other compute-heavy workloads like video editing.
Gaming performance on this laptop was pretty good. At full HD resolution, GTA5 ran at 88 frames per second at normal settings and 61 frames per second at high settings. Far Cry 5 ran at respectable 45 and 41 frames per second under similar setup.
Rise of Tomb Raider ran smoothly at 82 and 58 frames per second while Ghost Recon ran at respectable 42 and 38 frames per second.
BTW, in addition to gaming, this laptop is also an excellent content creation workstation. The 4-core 8 thread core-i5 paired with this powerful GPU provides a perfect machine for running Photoshop and various video editing software like Adobe suite or Davinci Resolve. If you are looking for a powerful budget laptop to edit your YouTube videos, this should be on your short list. Also the GTX 1650 supports hardware acceleration on all popular codecs like h264, AVC and vp9. This means smooth 4K video playback on YouTube and Netflix with no dropped frames.
Thermals & battery
The IdeaPad L340 has two distinct thermal modes. There is Quick mode for gaming and Quiet mode for non-gaming casual tasks. Quick mode basically cranks up the fans allowing better heat dissipation resulting in faster CPU and GPU performance. But battery life takes a hit. If you want to extend battery life, then run the laptop in quiet mode.IdeaPad L340 comes with a 45 Watt hour battery and you can squeeze about 8 hours of battery life with wifi turned off and display set to minimum brightness. Expect around 6 hours of battery life doing typical web-surfing with WiFi turned on. Not bad for a gaming laptop. With the included charger, it takes about 2 hours and 20 minutes to fully charge the battery
RAM & SSD
Ideapad L340 comes with 8GIG of DDR4 RAM and 512 GIG of PCIe NVMe SSD which should be good enough for most folks. But if you are interested in upgrading either the RAM or SSD, Lenovo makes it quite easy. Both RAM and SSD slots are accessible by removing the back cover after unscrewing about a dozen screws.Note that there is only one DIMM slot available for memory upgrade. This means that the RAM is installed in single channel configuration which is a bummer. I wish Lenovo had provided 2 DIMM slots for enabling dual channel configuration. You can install upto 16 GIG memory stick in this DIMM slot.
As far as upgrading the SSD is concerned, there is one m.2 slot available. This slot is already occupied by 512 GIG PCIe NVMe SSD. If you are interested in upgrading the storage, checkout the links at the end of the review for larger capacity SSDs which will fit in this m.2 slot. But If you are thinking of adding a 2nd SSD storage you are out of luck since there is no SATA3 slot available in this laptop.
Keyboard
Ideapad L340 comes with a full-sized keyboard with ambient backlighting. Lenovo makes some of the best laptop keyboards. My favorite is the Lenovo Thinkpad which has got the perfect keyboard known to mankind. Ideapad L340s keyboard isn't on par with the iconic ThinkPad, but it delivers a pleasant typing experience. The keyboard offers short key travel but good actuation force for a nice tactile feedback. It comes with full-fledged numerical keys for data entry. The backlighting is monochromatic blue with uniform illumination that can be adjusted in two stages.Ports
The IdeaPad L340 provides most necessary ports which are all located exclusively on the left side of the laptop. Unfortunately there is no SD card reader or Thunderbolt port. But you do get a USB 3.0 Type-C port along with usual suspects like Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, 2 USB 3.1 ports and a 3.5 mm audio jackAudio
Talking about audio, this laptop has Dolby Audio certification. The speakers offer fairly balanced sound but the bass is missing. In very quiet environments, they will suffice but for more intense gameplay I would recommend using a good set of headphonesConclusion: The bottom line
OK, So here are my final thoughts. If you are looking for a gaming laptop that won’t break your budget, the Ideapad L340 is a good choice. It has a sleek design for a gaming laptop and comes with a powerful CPU/GPU combo. I would recommend upgrading the RAM to 16 GIG if you also plan to use this laptop for content creation. Running photoshop or adobe suite on 8 GIG RAM will not be a good experience. Checkout the links below compatible RAM and SSD drive if you are interested in making these upgrades.Purchase links
Buy Lenovo Ideapad L340 Gaming LaptopGet 16GB RAM upgrade
Get 1TB SSD upgrade
Get 2TB SSD upgrade
Disclosure: Some links may be affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases