This affordable Lenovo gaming PC is the one I recommend to most people. Here's why

Lenovo’s Legion series is positioned as the company’s flagship gaming laptop line. However, in recent years, the company has expanded into mid-range hardware with the LOQ series. Most entries are laptops; however, there is a desktop representative: the LOQ Tower 17IRR9. Desktops may seem passé, given how strong mobile computing is nowadays. In response to this, I say you should reconsider that notion because rigs like the Tower 17IRR9 offer a level of utility laptops can’t match.

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The LOQ Tower 17 is small for a desktop, measuring 14.8 x 12 x 7 inches and weighing about 20 pounds. Finding a spot for this demure machine should be pretty easy, even in a cluttered office. Setting up is equally as simple since the package only comes with a power cable, keyboard, and mouse.

At a glance, the device looks similar to a Lenovo IdeaCentre desktop. I would recommend the LOQ Tower 17 for traditional office environments if it wasn’t for a potential problem: a long LED light going down the middle. Granted, it’s not as distracting as the RGB lights on a gaming PC, but it is still quite bright. 

Also on the front are a headphone jack, a USB-C input, and two USB-A ports — pretty standard fare. Around the back are an additional 12 ports, including four extra USB-A ports, an ethernet port, and an HDMI 1.4b input. The array allows you to enjoy multimonitor setups alongside several supportive accessories. However, you are still limited in what you can do.

I wish it had additional USB-C and HDMI ports since it only possesses one of each. I would’ve liked it if Lenovo had not installed a VGA port. There’s nothing wrong with the VGA standard per se, but I don’t see the average person utilizing it going into 2025. People are more familiar with HDMI. Lenovo’s desktop should’ve offered better support for other standards over VGA. Hopefully, future models rectify this issue.

It’s important to mention that Lenovo’s device supports both Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.1, enabling speedy wireless connection without the need for an external antenna. All the components you need for an over-the-air connection are inside the hardware. It’s a design flourish that gives the LOQ Tower 17 an edge over contemporaries like the Dell XPS 8960.

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Inside my LOQ Tower review unit was an Intel Core i5-14400F processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card, and 16GB of RAM. A configuration like this is fairly lightweight. It performs well across a wide range of workloads. It didn’t slow down or buckle in the face of 50 browser tabs, multiple web pages with videos playing, and several first-party apps running simultaneously. For general use, the computer is solid, but once you begin to push the hardware, you’ll begin to see its faults.

I plugged an ethernet cable directly into the computer during testing to ensure a stable connection. That way, any faults couldn’t be chalked up to problems with the Wi-Fi.

The benchmark tests revealed a lot. On PCMark 10, Lenovo’s LOQ Tower 17 earned a slightly above-average score of 7,658. I then ran 3DMark Steel Nomad, where the machine underperformed as well. It hovered below 2,800, which is lower than the overall average for the hardware pairing. These numbers tell me the computer may struggle with tough workloads and high-resolution gaming. My suspicions were later proven correct.

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Because the Lenovo LOQ Tower 17 is one of the company’s budget gaming options, I played several video games on it as another part of my tests. I was pleasantly surprised with how well it did as a mid-tier machine. Action titles like Marvel Rivals ran great. I didn’t run into any performance issues during my stress tests — so long as I kept the graphical settings low.

Issues arose when I began pushing the hardware to output 4K resolution gameplay. The frame rate plummeted, and it was difficult to see what was happening on screen. What’s more, there was a noticeable screen tearing across the display.

ZDNET’s buying advice

The specific build of the Lenovo LOQ Tower 17IRR9 that I reviewed has very limited availability. In fact, it’s completely sold out at the time of this writing. Don’t worry, as there are other configurations on sale that I would recommend.

Lenovo is currently selling the LOQ Tower 17 with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 graphics card for $900 on its online store. Walmart has a model housing an Intel Core i7-13700 CPU, an RTX 4060 GPU, and 64GB of RAM for $1,819.