Lenovo V G4 IRU 14" Review

A surprisingly quick chip trapped in a body with a display that makes everything look like a rainy Monday. Only buy it if you plan to hook it up to a real monitor and you enjoy closing apps every 20 minutes to free up memory.

The Lenovo V14 G4 IRU is a no-frills business laptop that nails the basics, then turns around and slaps you with a screen that belongs in a museum. The 13th Gen Core i7-13620H is surprisingly potent for office work, and the chassis is light enough to carry all day. But that 14-inch TN display? It's a disaster. 250 nits of dim, washed-out color is straight out of 2010, and it ruins what could've been a decent budget machine. You could forgive the 8GB of RAM and tiny SSD if the screen were just passable, but it's not.

Honestly, the processor impressed us. The i7-13620H lands in the 71st percentile across our database, so it chews through spreadsheets, browser tabs, and video calls without much fuss. The real choke point is that 8GB of single-channel DDR4 memory, which sits in the bottom 14% of all configurations we've tested. Open more than a dozen Chrome tabs or a couple of Office apps and you'll feel the pinch immediately. The integrated graphics are fine for basic visuals but don't even think about photo editing or light gaming. For pure number-crunching, the CPU carries the team, but the lack of RAM is a constant hurdle.

The price is all over the place. Our data shows vendor listings from $448 to a jaw-dropping $9649, which might include bloated enterprise support packages. Ignore the crazy high end. The Newegg listing around $450 is the only scenario where this laptop even deserves a glance. At that price, you're getting a solid i7 for spreadsheet jockeys on a strict budget. But if you approach the $600 mark, you're much better off hunting for a refurbished business laptop with a better screen and 16GB of RAM. The value here exists only at the bottom of the price barrel.

If you can stretch your budget, the Apple MacBook Air M5 crushes this Lenovo in screen quality, battery life, and out-of-the-box RAM (16GB minimum). Even the Microsoft Surface Laptop Copilot+ PC offers a 3:2 display that makes document work a joy instead of a squinty chore. Both cost more, but you won't want to hurl them out a window after an hour of use. Among Windows business laptops, the ASUS ProArt PX13 with its OLED panel is another universe entirely. The Lenovo only makes sense if you plan to dock it to an external monitor 90% of the time, and at that point you might as well buy a mini PC.

If you care even a little about display quality, multitasking smoothness, or not carrying a charger everywhere, steer clear. Anyone who works with photos, videos, or just enjoys a bright screen should look at a used ThinkPad T14 or a MacBook Air. Honestly, a sub-$500 Chromebook often has a better panel than this. Don't punish yourself.

The V14 G4 IRU is a one-trick pony: it delivers strong CPU performance in a sub-$500 package, and that's it. If your work lives on an external display and you don't mind adding a second stick of RAM yourself, this could be a tolerable stopgap. For anyone who actually has to look at the built-in screen, don't do this to yourself. This laptop is a compromise too far, and you deserve better.