Lenovo LOQ Tower Gaming Desktop Review: Budget(-ish) Alternative to the Legion

Lenovo LOQ Tower 17IRR9 Desktop Review

Pros

• Decent 1080p performance
• Quick and snappy for everyday computing
• Compact, 20-liter design

Cons

• Very limited upgrade options
• Limited airflow
• Few ports

The Lenovo LOQ Tower 17IRR9 is an interesting gaming desktop proposition. On one hand, it's rather small, with just under a 20-liter volume. Inside, it has similar hardware to the larger Lenovo Legion Tower 5i Gen 8 26IRB8 I reviewed, and like that desktop, it has a respectable 1080p gaming performance. On the other hand, Lenovo doesn't provide a lot in the way of high-quality ports, there are limited upgrade pathways and there is an uncertain overall value. 

While the price can be decent, with my test configuration sometimes falling below $900, it can also swing as high as the price of the altogether superior and aforementioned Legion Tower 5i, which also occasionally has its own deep discounts. So unless you're really hurting for space, I'd skip the LOQ and grab the Legion Tower instead.

A lightweight... but respectable performance for the price

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The Lenovo LOQ Tower 17IRR9 has a starting price of $899, but Lenovo fairly constantly discounts its listed prices, so I've seen this tower starting as low as $599. That price is for a base configuration with an Intel Core i5-14400F CPU, 16GB of DDR5-4800 memory, 512GB PCIe SSD and a 6GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 graphics card. Beyond that, there's only one other listed configuration, which bumps the graphics card up to an 8GB RTX 4060. This upgraded configuration, tested here, has a list price of $1,149 but has seen discounts as low as $835 during my testing. It's also available at Walmart with a list price of $949.   

The Lenovo LOQ Tower 17IRR9 isn't geared for high-powered gaming or demanding content creation, but its modest internals do offer solid performance. Across all our gaming benchmarks, the little desktop cranked out framerates in excess of 100fps at 1080p. Of the desktops I tested last year, it was admittedly the slowest, but it was also by far the cheapest. 

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The little LOQ did nip at the heels of the Lenovo Legion Tower 5i Gen 8 26IRB8, which had a snazzier design and better I/O but was otherwise similarly configured. The small performance advantage of the Legion model could be attributed to its more substantial cooling. Given how modest the cooling components are in the LOQ Tower it's impressive it managed to keep up as well as it did. Its performance was stable, passing 3DMark's stress tests in Steel Nomad and Time Spy Extreme. It even remained fairly silent thanks to its closed design, reaching just a faint hum under full load. 

CPU performance is perhaps where the LOQ left the most on the table. It didn't fall too far behind in Cinebench R24, but in Geekbench 6, the Lenovo Legion Tower 5i Gen 8 pulled ahead by more than 20% despite using the same CPU and, by the looks of it, very possibly the same CPU cooler as well. 

A little too plain

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Lenovo's LOQ brand emphasizes budget, whereas its Legion sub-brand leans more toward performance. So I didn't expect too much from the Lenovo LOQ Tower 17IRR9. Even so, I was still surprised at how basic it is. The case is quite small, measuring just 6.7 inches wide, 14.8 inches tall and 12 inches deep for a 19.4-liter footprint. Popped open, it's very similar to the Lenovo Legion Tower 5i Gen 8 26IRB8, with a basic CPU cooler, a tiny, single-fan graphics card and very little customization. Then again, it doesn't need to be pretty inside since the case is entirely black. There's no clear side panel like many gaming PCs. It's also incredibly plain, save for a herringbone-looking vent along the front panel.

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While the interior looks can be ignored, there's still plenty to see that's disappointing. Just a single, tiny intake fan pulls fresh air into the lower half of the system, where the 500-watt power supply (which, impressively, is 80 Plus Platinum certified) and the graphics card will see most of it. The CPU gets a little fresh air. Another small exhaust fan sits beside the CPU and its heatsink/fan. There's not a single 120mm to be seen, nor is there any dust filtration, so hopefully the limited ventilation will limit how much dust gets in. 

The system also doesn't offer a lot of potential upgrade options. There's only one M.2 slot on the motherboard, and it comes filled. A 3.5-inch hard drive bay with a little sled sits at the bottom of the system and is wired for use, but that's it. Even if you had a spare drive to use the second free SATA port on the motherboard, there's no second SATA power cable coming from the power supply. The power supply also has just one 8-pin connector, though it probably wouldn't have the power headroom to juice up a more demanding graphics card anyway. 

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One upgrade Lenovo does permit has a flipside: memory. There's a free memory slot, which means you can easily upgrade to 32GB of RAM without having to ditch the original memory. This is possible, though, because Lenovo shipped the system with single-channel memory. 

And then there are the ports. It's not too bad from the front, with three 5Gbps connections: two USB-A and one USB-C. There's also a headphone/microphone combo jack there. While the graphics card offers the standard array of DisplayPort connectors and an HDMI port, the motherboard's I/O would have been disappointing a decade ago: just four USB 2.0 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet jack and a VGA connector. There's simply not a lot of connectivity. Even the Wi-Fi wasn't quite right, as Lenovo listed Intel Wi-Fi but included a Realtek Wi-Fi card. This worked fine, though.

Josh Goldman/CNET

So the reasons to skip the Lenovo LOQ Tower 17IRR9 stack up, especially given that the Lenovo Legion Tower 5i Gen 8 26IRB8 doesn't suffer so many of the same pitfalls. In spite of all that, though, the Lenovo LOQ Tower 17IRR9 is still a strong little budget machine. That is, as long as it stays at the more competitive price of $879. It's a good value for its performance and hardware at that price. But at $1,149 it lags behind the all-around better Lenovo Legion Tower 5i Gen 8 26IRB8.