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

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 all held together by standard screws. 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 installation of 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-like mess when you open up the side panel.

Noise levels on the LOQ Tower were really impressive. Even when running really demanding tests like the Cinebench Multithreaded workload, which typically cause CPU coolers to spin up much louder than on their idle settings, it stayed 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 toward 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.

Lenovo does include 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 that really don’t feel like they need to be there. They might be worth uninstalling if 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 advertisements for my Dropbox subscription, which I don’t have, and for the McAfee license on the system, which was now out of date.

Even ignoring 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 Lenovo LOQ Tower desktop online.

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 the strong results we’d expect this CPU, which leverages 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 the CPU and GPU acquitted 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, which 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 2077 and Black Myth: Wukong 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 frames per second (fps) into the multiple hundreds for maximum responsiveness and competitive play.

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 aside — is right up your alley. 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, thanks to its general quiet operation and great multitasking performance, it’s perfect as 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.