Lenovo Ideapad 110: An Inexpensive “Gaming” Laptop

There’s a general feeling out there among people who use consoles and handhelds for gaming that PC gaming is just too expensive. Most people think that if you want to play games on a laptop, you have to be willing to shell out about $1500-$2500. While this might be true if you want to play every single game that comes out for the next five years, this is definitely not true if you want to be able to play 95% of games available on Steam. For people who want to play games on their laptop but don’t even want to spend $400 doing so, there’s the Lenovo Ideapad 110.

Update (October 14th, 2019): At this point, two years later, the Lenovo Ideapad 110 will probably give you trouble on quite a lot of games. As an alternative, I recommend any of these three great gaming laptops under $500, or visit our sister site at Laptops On A Budget for even more ideas. If you’re sticking with a more underpowered laptop like the Ideapad 110, check out My Dpad’s Steam curator, Great Medium-Spec Games, for a list of great games your computer can handle!

Now, to be clear, this is far from a gaming laptop. That said, it is the laptop I personally use the most, and I do all sorts of gaming on it. This is part of my point, as you don’t need a gaming laptop to play games on your laptop. All you really need is a solid laptop with a nice big screen and a willingness to miss out on the most graphics-intensive games (at least on their highest graphical settings).

This is where the Lenovo Ideapad 110 comes in. While you can get it with a few different specs, I’m gonna focus on the model I have for this article. The Lenovo Ideapad 110-15ISK that we’re talking about here offers:

• 1 TB HDD
• 6GB RAM
• Intel Core i3-6100 CPU @ 2.30GHz
• Intel HD 520 Integrated Graphics
• 15.6-inch, 1366×768 resolution display
• USB 3.0 port, USB 2.0 port, HDMI port, Ethernet port, headphone jack
• Webcam and microphone (which you can easily cover up with duct tape if you so please)
• DVD burner
• 64-bit Windows 10

You get all of the above for less than $350 ($340 at the time of this writing), so you can see why I’m so excited about it. With the terabyte hard drive you can download all the games (and other media you want), while the RAM, processor, and (unfortunately) integrated graphics will let you play most games out there. For example, on my computer (which I am currently writing on and is exactly the same model as the one listed here) I can play Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Overwatch, Cities: Skylines, Grand Theft Auto V, NBA 2K17, Cemu games, and much more without a hitch.

The multiple USB ports allow you to plug in a mouse and a headset at the same time, while the DVD drive also allows you to play physical copies of games, if you still do that. The best part for my fellow online gamers is the Ethernet port which allows you to have that leg up on everyone else in your server. In other words, this sub-$400 (even sub-$350) laptop can handle just about anything you throw at it, assuming you don’t want to play the very newest games at the highest graphics settings.

While I very much enjoy this laptop and wholeheartedly recommend it, there are two major downsides I need to mention. The first is the weak battery life, which usually only lasts about 3-4 hours of heavy usage. If you want an all-day laptop, this is certainly not it, but if you’re gonna use it mostly as a desktop (as I do), this is not a big deal. The other big problem is the wifi card, which is the notoriously bad-for-Linux RTL8821ae chipset. For the life of me, I could not get the wifi card to consistently work on Arch Linux, though it did just fine with a standard Ubuntu installation and has no problems with Windows 10.

Aside from those two major issues (which won’t be huge issues for some people, depending on how you use your laptop), the Lenovo Ideapad 110 is an astoundingly-good value. Anyone who wants to do anything but the most serious PC gaming should find this fits all their needs just great, and you won’t even need to part with four bills to do so. If you’re lucky like I was, you can even find it at your local Best Buy on sale for less than $300. If you’re looking for a great budget gaming laptop, you have to check out the Lenovo Ideapad 110-15ISK.

Lenovo Ideapad 110