Lenovo LOQ Tower 17IRR9 review – A great family gaming PC

PC gaming is often positioned as some super expensive hobby — and it can be. But you don’t need a one of the world’s best PCs, with a 49-inch ultrawide gaming monitor and an RTX 4090 to get a great gaming PC. The Lenovo LOQ Tower 17IRR9 is a powerful little machine packing some of the latest hardware, at a very approachable price. And it’s great.

If you’re looking for a quiet and capable gaming PC for 1080p play, the Lenovo Loq Tower might be your best pick.

Specs and pricing

Leaning into its value-oriented design, and leaning away from the muted controversy surrounding Intel’s latest CPUs, the Lenovo Loq Tower 17IRR9 is built on the foundation of the last-generation Intel Core i5-14400 CPU. This is a slightly newer version of our favorite budget Intel CPU, the 13400 — so it’s well placed for an affordable gaming system.

Despite being a little older and budget-targeted, the 14400 punches well above its weight. It has 10 cores (6P+4E), making it fantastic for multi-threaded workloads and for powering some of the latest games. It’s much more efficient than the top chips in its generation, too, helping to keep this system running cool and quiet, even when it’s working hard.

It’s paired with 16GB of fast DDR4 memory, and backed up by the Nvidia RTX 4060. Together, they should be able to handle any game at 1080p and high-settings, making this a potentially solid system for Esports gamers, or AAA gamers playing on a 1080p monitor. It should also work well as a general home-office and homework machine that can handle some gaming when the kids have earned some screen time.

At $879, Lenovo has trimmed the fat and made a PC that maximizes performative components, even if the cooling and motherboard are uninspiring.

Build quality and design

The overall design of the Loq Tower is sturdy and understated. It’s not a flashy standout design, and it lacks some of the more-premium, but subtle styling options you see on more expensive desktops. The backing plate is just bare steel, and it’s only standard screws that hold it all together. This chassis wouldn’t look out of place in an office or school.

Equally, you won’t recognize the brand of bare-steel power supply in this system, and all the wires are standard and non-braided. A fancy-custom boutique PC this is not.

But the inside is well thought out, with plenty of room for tweaking your system or DIY installing any future upgrades. Its side panels are easy to remove, and there are plenty of front panel ports to take advantage of. Even with the RTX 4060 being a compact, miniaturized version of the standard card, there’s still a GPU bracket preventing any potential sagging, and the cables have been well routed and tidied so it’s not a spaghetti mess when you open up the side panel.

Thermals and cooling

Noise levels on the LOQ Tower were really impressive. Even when running really demanding tests like the Cinebench Multithreaded workload that typically cause CPU coolers to spin up much louder than their idle settings, saw this stay at much more manageable levels. It’s not silent, but the fan noise is never aggressive and you certainly wouldn’t hear it while wearing headphones.

That might suggest fan speeds are low, leaning more towards a comfortable listening experience than high-performance, but temperatures of the various components don’t get anywhere near their thermal limits, and thermal throttling isn’t anywhere in sight.

Since I like a quieter PC in general, I’d probably replace some of the fans with larger, quieter versions and play with the fan curves, and if you’re the same, that’s easily done with a modest investment.

Bloatware

Lenovo does install quite a number of additional applications with its default Windows install. There’s the usual care apps to make it easier to handle repairs and returns, but there are also some additional ones which really don’t feel like they need to be there. They might be worth uninstalling if and when you buy this system.

Arguably more frustrating are the third-party applications that come as part of the base install. As soon as I got the system online I was bombarded with notification adverts for my Dropbox subscription, which I don’t have, and for the McAfee license on the system, which was now out of date.

Even taking out the fact that McAfee is one of the most iconic “How do I uninstall X” searches on Google, the fact that I don’t even get to enjoy a free trial is a bit irksome. I would imagine in a non-reviewer system that won’t be the case, but expect pop-ups and notification spam when you first get your Lenov Loq Tower desktop online.

Performance

With the hardware inside this little tower, I wasn’t expecting it to blow the doors off our benchmarks and hit high-frame rates at 4K resolution, but the 14400 is a perfectly capable CPU, and the RTX 4060 a very capable graphics card for 1080p play, so I had high hopes for its performance.

In Cinebench and Geekbench we see strong results that mirror where we’d expect this CPU to be and perform at, leveraging its additional E cores to perform particularly well in multi-threaded workloads. Handbrake shows decent encoding times, highlighting the strength of the 14th-generation’s core configuration in these kinds of demanding workloads.

Both CPU and GPU composed themselves well in the 3Dmark benchmarks, delivering perfectly playable scores in all but the Steel Nomad benchmark. There, the volumetric lighting and ambient occlusion really caused the GPU to struggle, even with its modern architecture and shows that it’s not just ray tracing that can cause dips in performance in modern cards.

Switch to the Light version, though, and this system was off and running.

Flip over to some of the real-game benchmarks we ran, though, and the Loq Tower delivered fantastic results. With the RTX 4060 being a 1080p-focused graphics card, with some 1440p capability, that’s where we focused our testing efforts.

These results show that the RTX 4060 is more than well equipped to manage even these demanding games, although it does rely on DLSS to get the frame rates really up there when you throw on settings like ray tracing. Frame generation helps both the most-demanding Cyberpunk and Black Myth settings stay high and smooth, but it’s not a setting that everyone will enjoy, so try it with and without to see if it’s worth it to you.

In lighter esports games, this PC will have no trouble driving the FPS into the multiple hundreds for maximum responsiveness and competitive play.

Should you buy the Lenovo Loq Tower 17IRR9

If you’re in the market for a compact gaming PC but don’t want to spend over $1,000, then the Lenovo Loq Tower 17IRR9 — mouthful of a name besides — is right up your street. It has a small footprint, is quiet-in general day to day tasks, and has strong performance in more modest gaming settings. That makes this a great esports gaming PC or for playing more demanding games at 1080p and high settings. Equally, though, with its general quiet operation and great multi-tasking performance, it’s perfect for a family PC for homework, some light office work with heavy web browser usage, and some light gaming on the weekends.

This is the kind of PC that can be lots of things to lots of different people. It’s an excellent family machine.