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PC gaming is often positioned as some super expensive hobby — and it can be. But you don’t need one of the world’s best gaming 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 among the best budget desktop PCs you can buy.
Leaning into its value-oriented design, and 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 (six Performance and four Efficiency), 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.
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.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).
Two residents of Chicago have filed a lawsuit in the US over claims that robots run by Coco Robotics and Serve Robotics captured their facial and hand measurements without consent, bringing renewed attention to the food delivery robots. The cases raise a troubling question: If a robot delivers food to your door, can it also be gathering sensitive information about you?
According to a report by The Associated Press, the proposed class-action lawsuits were filed in Cook County on Oct. 9 and allege violations of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. The complaints claim that the robots’ cameras and LiDAR sensors captured information on customers’ faces and hands as they approached the machines to pick up their orders. Both have denied the allegations.