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Lenovo’s most budget-friendly gaming desktop, the LOQ Tower provides just enough performance for 1080p and light 1440p play. The desktop is compact; it prioritizes USB Type-C and Wi-Fi 6E connectivity; and it runs reasonably quiet. However, Lenovo’s $899.99 asking price is too much for an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 graphics card while the Editors’ Choice award-holding NZXT Player: One presents superior quality and a longer warranty for less. Don’t count out a hot sale turning the tables in Lenovo’s favor, however.Configuration and Design: A Short-Order Mid-TowerThe Lenovo LOQ Tower is a quite compact mid-tower that borders on small-form-factor, at 14.8 by 6.7 by 12 inches (HWD). It’s far more compact than the NZXT Player: One (18.3 by 8.9 by 17.6 inches). Unless you plan on installing a larger graphics card (more on that in a minute), this tower’s small size is commendable.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The entry-level specifications of the LOQ Tower reviewed here, including an Intel Core i5-13400F CPU, the mentioned GeForce RTX 3050 graphics card, and 16GB of memory, won’t have you pushing 4K frame rates anytime soon, but you can do worse. I spotted many budget-oriented gaming desktops using lighter-weight CPUs, such as a Core i3 or an AMD Ryzen 5 5500, and often with a paltry 8GB of RAM. The GeForce RTX 3050 isn’t top of the heap, either, but again you could do worse with something like the AMD Radeon RX 6400. The weakest point of our sample is its 512GB solid-state drive, which will fill up quickly with today’s games.
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The LOQ Tower’s subdued appearance is broken only by the finned front panel and its blue LED light strip. It’s plastic while the rest of the tower is rolled steel. The bare metal on the back of the tower hints that it’s not high-end, and the whole unit feels rather hollow. The Player: One puts up superior quality, though (again) it’s significantly larger.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Front ports include three USB 3.2 Type-A connections (one 5Gbps and two 10Gbps), one 10Gbps USB 3.2 Type-C port, and a 3.5mm universal audio jack. The USB-C port is a modern touch that a surprising number of towers still leave out.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Rear connections include four USB 2.0, one 2.5Gbps Ethernet, and a 3.5mm audio out. It would have been helpful to have USB 3.2 ports back here. The motherboard has VGA and HDMI 1.4b video outputs as well, but they’re nonfunctional since the Core i5-13400F lacks integrated graphics. (That’s true of all F-suffix Intel CPUs.) The GeForce RTX 3050 has the expected one DisplayPort and three HDMI ports.The LOQ Tower also serves up modern wireless connectivity with an Intel AX211 network card supporting Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. The wireless antennas are built into the case instead of protruding externally.Using the Lenovo LOQ Tower: Serviceable and Reasonably ExpandableThe LOQ Tower’s side panel comes off after undoing two thumbscrews. The interior doesn’t look glamorous, but the layout makes ample use of the available space. Its storage expansion is respectable, with the slide-out metal caddy up top accommodating one 3.5-inch drive and the bay next to the power supply one more. SATA and power cables are unexpectedly run to both places in our review unit despite it not including any extra drives. The motherboard’s sole M.2 slot hangs off the bottom of the motherboard.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The bottom-mounted power supply isn’t modular (nor is it expected to be at this price) but is potent for a PSU in a budget desktop, supplying 500 watts (W) of power with an 80 Plus Platinum certification. Its single eight-pin PCI Express power connector won’t let you install a high-end graphics card, but you’ll probably be limited by the length of the card before electrical power, anyway; the approximately 8.4-inch-long GeForce RTX 3050 is about as long of a card that fits.Add-in cards are limited to a single PCI Express x1 slot. The Intel mATX B760 motherboard also has two DDR4-3200 DIMM slots. I was pleased to see our unit’s 16GB of RAM as two 8GB modules, not a single 16GB module, so it has the benefit of dual-channel performance.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Cooling comes from three 80mm fans, one each at the front and rear for case airflow, and another on the low-profile 65W CPU air cooler. This tower operates quietly for day-to-day tasks, becoming audible while gaming but never bothersome to my ears, even in my otherwise dead-silent office.The LOQ Tower comes with a one-year warranty, a basic USB keyboard and mouse (you’ll likely want to replace), and Windows 11 Home. You’ll find some probably unwanted software installed, namely a McAfee antivirus trial, but nothing that will take more than a few minutes to uninstall.Testing the Lenovo LOQ Tower: GeForce LiteTo recap, our Lenovo LOQ Tower features an Intel Core i5-13400F CPU (10 cores, up to 4.6GHz turbo boost), an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 graphics card, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. Its $899.99 MSRP is steep considering the NZXT Player: One features the same specifications for $799.99. I also saw Best Buy selling the flashier Lenovo Legion Tower 5i Gen 8 with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 for just $30 more ($929.99).
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Getting a tower with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060, the cheapest current-generation card, would require spending closer to (or just over) the four-figure mark. Lenovo unfortunately doesn’t sell that card in the LOQ Tower. Its site suggests it can come with a Core i7-13700F and a GeForce RTX 3060, but I didn’t find any for sale.In addition to the NZXT and Legion towers, we’ve included two more expensive Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti towers, the Cooler Master HAF 5 Pro (Core i5-12400F) and the Dell XPS Desktop (8950) (Core i5-12600K), in our performance comparison charts. The LOQ ought to at least keep pace with the NZXT in our gaming tests.
Productivity and Content Creation TestsWe run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL’s PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.Our other three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).Finally, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s famous image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
The LOQ Tower was competitive in PCMark’s main test but disappointed in the storage test with a last-place score. (Informally, it seemed plenty responsive for the tasks I was doing while testing throughout my review.)Meanwhile, the LOQ Tower performed well on the CPU front, predictably matching the same-CPU Legion. The Core i5-13400F was a better multitasker than the Core i5-12400F in the Cooler Master and NZXT towers, which lacks Efficient cores, so it wasn’t surprising to see the LOQ Tower outperform both in Geekbench. However, the numbers were closer than I expected in HandBrake and Cinebench. The Dell’s liquid-cooled K-class CPU led the way throughout, of course.Graphics and Gaming TestsFor gaming desktops, we run both synthetic and real-world gaming benchmarks. The former includes two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, the more modest Night Raid (suitable for systems with integrated graphics) and the more demanding Time Spy (suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). We then run two OpenGL exercises, rendered offscreen by the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which allows for different native display resolutions; more frames per second (fps) means higher performance.Our real gaming benchmarks are those built into F1 2021, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege, tested at higher resolutions and quality settings than on gaming laptops. These three represent simulation, open-world action-adventure, and competitive/esports shooter games respectively. We run Valhalla and Siege twice each at Ultra quality (at both 1080p and 4K), while F1 2021 is run at 4K only, with and without AMD’s and Nvidia’s performance-boosting FSR and DLSS features turned on.
We’ll focus on the LOQ Tower and the NZXT, the two using the GeForce RTX 3050. The LOQ only performed better in the CPU-bound 3DMark Night Raid, where the extra cores on its Core i5-13400F might have helped, but it was slightly off the pace in Time Spy, GFXBench, and the real-world games.The Legion’s performance from its GeForce RTX 3060 is simply on another level, and the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti in the Cooler Master and Dell is another level above that, which puts the GeForce RTX 3050 in perspective. All told the LOQ is fast enough for 1080p play, but 1440p gaming will probably be limited to older titles, which sounds like a tough sell for the price these days.Verdict: Cool, Compact, and Quiet—But Outpriced and OutperformedLenovo’s LOQ Tower entry-level gaming desktop is hampered only by its price. It’s impressively compact, houses lots of storage expansion, runs quietly, and has both Wi-Fi 6E and USB Type-C. A GeForce RTX 3050 is ultimately a hard sell at its asking price, though, when the NZXT Player: One delivers equivalent performance for $100 less. A hot sale could nonetheless make the LOQ Tower a frontrunner for budget gamers, especially considering its space-saving design.
Pros
Compact design
Reasonably quiet
USB Type-C and Wi-Fi 6E
The Bottom Line
Lenovo’s LOQ Tower is impressively compact and stays quiet under load, but it needs a price cut to compete with the leading budget gaming PCs.
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