The Lenovo IdeaPad L340 is a great middle-ground laptop between a full-fledged gaming laptop and a long-lasting office laptop. Over the years, Gaming laptops have gathered a lot of bad reputation for being big and bulky, but none of those apply to the IdeaPad L340. That’s why it’s one of the best laptop with i7 processor and the best laptop inside on the market.
Why We Like It – Lenovo IdeaPad L340
Very few 17.3-inch laptops manage to garner attention in the mid-range laptop market like the way the Lenovo IdeaPad L340 does. Even though it uses a last-gen mobile processor from Intel, it still performs very well to this date.
- Built-in 512GB NVME SSD
- The keyboard is very well made
- The 45WHr battery performs incredibly well
- No SD card slot
- The trackpad is pretty bad
- WiFi speeds are downright terrible
Related: If you don’t like any of these features, check out the Lenovo Ideapad 720s review
Power & Performance
Unlike the Microsoft Surface Book 3 and many other recently launched laptops, the IdeaPad L340 doesn’t come with the latest 10th gen Intel mobile processors. But that doesn’t really matter. In fact, in our opinion, Lenovo made the right choice by going for a 9th gen processor, saving money in the process. And to be honest, even the Intel Core i5 processor found in the 15.6-inch model is enough to be paired with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 in order to drive most modern AAA games at low to medium settings on the Full HD 60Hz refresh rate panel.
Battery
The IdeaPad L340 sports a 3-cell 45WHr battery. And the battery life is excellent, to say the least, for a gaming laptop of this caliber. Even with intense workloads running, you’re gonna get at least 5 hours of battery life out of this thing, and that is with the CPU boosting at its max clock speed, which is 4.5GHz. It’s way better than the much costlier MSI P65 Creator.
Ports & Expandability
All the ports of the Lenovo IdeaPad L340 gaming laptop are on the left side. And they consist of a USB type C port (USB 3.1 Gen1), two USB Type A ports (USB 3.1), one HDMI port (HDMI 2.0, capable of 4k60Hz), a combo 3.5mm headphone jack, and the gigabit ethernet port. And no, the USB type C port isn’t a thunderbolt port. One notable omission here is the SD card slot. And that’s going to be a big problem for everyone traveling with this laptop and a DSLR. If you are a photographer, you should buy the HP Spectre x360 13t instead.
This model already comes with 16 gigs of 2400mhz RAM, a 1TB HDD, and a 512GB PCI-E SSD. So the expandability options are pretty limited out of the box, not that you really need to upgrade anything here. So, that’s not a bad thing at all. Still, getting into the laptop is pretty hard, to say the least.
Build Quality
This laptop is actually built very well. Especially the keyboard has no down flex at all, other than the left side (because of the ports). The brushed aluminum surface of the laptop also feels very premium in hand. But, the trackpad is very underwhelming and disappointing. It’s small, doesn’t work well, and overall a nightmare to use. So, if you are getting this laptop even for office work, we recommend getting a good mouse with it. The trackpad really is that bad.
Related: Find other innovative options in the Lenovo Ideapad S 150 FHD review
Value
The fact that you can get a compact laptop with a six-core CPU, desktop-grade GPU, 16GB of fast DDR4 RAM, 512GB NVME SSD, and a 1TB HDD on top of that at below $1500 is amazing to start off with. And it’s been over a year since this laptop launched, so you’re gonna find even better deals on used markets.
Lenovo IdeaPad L340 Wrap Up
Almost everything about the Lenovo IdeaPad L340 screams quality. Lenovo made the right cutbacks to provide an excellent laptop at a great price point.
