Lenovo V14 14" V14 G4 IRU Black 2023

A beast of a CPU trapped in a budget laptop's body. Buy it cheap, upgrade the RAM immediately, and never look at the screen for too long.

That Core i7-13620H is the star of the show and it's weirdly overqualified for this job. In our database, it lands in the 73rd percentile for laptop CPUs, which means it's well above average. But the 8GB of single-channel DDR4 RAM is a massive bottleneck, sitting way down in the 14th percentile. You'll feel it the moment you open more than a dozen browser tabs. The 256GB SSD is also pretty cramped, falling into the bottom third of our rankings. It's a fast engine in a car with a tiny fuel tank and skinny tires.

Stacked against something like the Apple MacBook Air M5, the Lenovo looks like a fossil. The Air's screen, battery life, and build quality are in a different universe, though you'll pay a lot more for it. A more direct rival is the HP OmniBook X Flip 14, which offers a vastly superior display and convertible design. The Lenovo's only real win is raw CPU grunt in a cheap package. If your work is purely CPU-bound and you're on a tight budget, it makes a weird kind of sense. For everyone else, those competitors are worth the extra cash.

Pricing on this thing is all over the map, with listings ranging from a reasonable $450 to an absurd $9,649. At the low end, you're getting a lot of CPU for the money, but you have to accept major compromises. The best deal we're seeing is from Newegg. If you can snag it near that $450 mark and immediately factor in a RAM upgrade to 16GB, it becomes a much more interesting proposition. Paying anything over $600 for this exact configuration is a mistake.

The Lenovo V14 G4 IRU is a classic case of a laptop with an identity crisis. It stuffs a genuinely powerful 13th Gen Core i7 processor into a budget chassis, then hobbles it with 8GB of RAM and a screen that feels like it's from 2012. The result is a machine that's fast in short bursts but frustrating for anything beyond basic office work. If you're just running web apps and spreadsheets, the CPU will chew through them, but don't expect to multitask heavily or enjoy your Netflix lunch break on this display.

If you care even a little bit about screen quality or battery life, walk away. This isn't for you. Go grab a used business-class ThinkPad or a newer IdeaPad with an IPS display. You'll lose some CPU speed but gain a laptop that's actually pleasant to use all day.

The Lenovo V14 G4 IRU is a tough sell in its stock configuration. That i7 processor is a gem, but it's trapped in a body with a terrible screen, insufficient memory, and a battery that'll have you hunting for outlets by lunchtime. Only buy this if you find it for a steep discount and are comfortable cracking it open to add another stick of RAM. Otherwise, you're better off with a more balanced budget laptop that doesn't force you to suffer through a TN panel in 2024.