A budget-to-midrange gaming desktop, the Lenovo LOQ Tower 26 does a lot of things right—but it also stumbles in spots. It’s a solid gaming rig, offering strong performance from its Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti and AMD Ryzen 7 8745HX. And the price is right, if you can find it on sale: It lists for a daunting $2,089, but we’ve seen it go for a much more reasonable $1,300 or less. So far, so good.

Here's the bad. The LOQ Tower 26 skimps on port selection, and its relatively tight design makes it tough to do much internal tinkering. The power supply, meanwhile, is decidedly low-wattage, which also limits upgrades, and both it and the motherboard are proprietary designs. If you’re looking for an affordable gaming PC, check out the CyberPowerPC Gamer Xtreme, our Editors' Choice for budget gaming desktops, which is cheaper and even looks more premium.

Configurations: Shifting Prices Can Skew This Deal

The Lenovo LOQ Tower 26 technically comes in limited configurations on Lenovo’s website, but you can find a few other configurations on Best Buy and Newegg. The model I tested comes with an AMD Ryzen 7 8745HX processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti (8GB) graphics card, 32GB of 5,200MT/s DDR5 memory, and a 1TB solid-state drive. Lenovo lists this model as a flatly unrealistic $2,089 "value," but I've seen it for $1,329 or, at times, less.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

If you’d rather buy directly from the source (Lenovo), I did see the same unit downgraded to 16GB of 5,600MT/s DDR5 RAM for $1,779.99—a lot more than the sale price, for a lot less memory. This is the type of gaming PC you're best off considering only if it's on a clear sale.

Design: A Trim-Enough Tower

I love a small(ish) gaming PC, and the Lenovo LOQ Tower 26 fits the bill perfectly at 15.9 by 8.1 by 17.2 inches (HWD). In fact, it was the smallest tower-style PC in the comparison group for our benchmark tests, coming up later in this article.

Its looks are also pretty low-key: The front of the machine is a gray slat curved like a tower shield, with honeycomb vents running up and down each side. The rest of the case is black, except for a glass pane on the left. Highlights are subtle: You can get a bit of RGB glow from the chassis fans, but there is no fancy light strip to illuminate the innards. (Note that you need to dip into the PC's BIOS to customize the RGB lighting—a cumbersome design choice.)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The top of the unit features a fixed filter for the cooling vents. You won’t need to balance a Wi-Fi antenna up there because the system lacks an antenna jack for its onboard Wi-Fi 6. That makes for a clean look, and the lack of a mast didn’t seem to have an effect on performance.

Connectivity and Upgrades: Short on Ports, Tough to Tinker

You won't find many ports on this machine. On the top panel, you get two USB Type-A 3.2 connections, one USB Type-C 3.2 Gen 2, and a headphone jack (and the power button, of course). But the back panel features only four USB-A ports (2.0, to boot), an Ethernet jack, an HDMI 2.1 output, and another headphone jack. At the bare minimum, the LOQ Tower 26 should have two more USB Type-A 3.2 ports and another USB Type-C.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The GPU's bracket gives you three DisplayPort 2.1 ports and one HDMI 2.1. For wireless connectivity, you get the aforementioned Wi-Fi 6 for internet and Bluetooth 5.2 for your peripherals. That's behind the current generation—Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4—but we're dealing with a midrange-at-most gaming PC, so the older standards aren't a major issue.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Now we head under the hood—and here come the quibbles. Things start off well, as the case panels slide on and off smoothly, even if the thumbscrews were attached a little too tightly for my taste. But you'll quickly realize you've got scant room to maneuver inside that cramped case. And other limits are immediately apparent.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

For starters? The motherboard. It's a nondescript, proprietary model that is roughly MicroATX size—meaning, it's also small, which makes it tough to tinker with. (That's complicated by the fact that there isn’t more detailed documentation around the components in the box.) If you know PC parts, though, you'll see right away that this is a nonstandard board by its use of laptop SO-DIMM memory—not the usual desktop DIMMs—and a non-typical power supply connector, for starters. No typical 24-pin connector here.

Lower down, you get one PCI Express 4.0 x16 slot, which is occupied by the GeForce RTX graphics card, and one PCI Express 3.0 x1 slot. For storage, the Lenovo offers two M.2 slots, accessible on the front, one of which was occupied by the 1TB SSD in our model. You also get two bays for 3.5-inch hard drives, reachable on the back of the board. The two DDR5 SO-DIMM slots can support up to 128GB of RAM (64GB each). Our unit features twin Samsung-made 16GB sticks.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Now, even on sale, this LOQ is not exactly a budget tower. But Lenovo didn't leave a good path for upgrades here in another way: the power supply. It's an unimpressive 500-watt model, and also proprietary, with a non-typical connector to the mainboard. It's barely robust enough to handle the RTX 5060 Ti GPU, and you will likely have a tough time upgrading the CPU or GPU in the coming years unless you get a better power supply. You'd have to rely on Lenovo's parts sources for that.

Finally, the machine comes with four case fans and a heatsink/fan combo for the CPU. They don’t rev like an engine, thankfully, but I could definitely hear them when the system was under load.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Performance Testing: You Can Mix It Up, at Moderate Settings

The Lenovo LOQ Tower 26 is best suited for gaming in 1080p or 1440p. You can dip into 4K every now and then, depending on the game, but don't flip on the max settings unless you’re using frame generation. Let’s see how that compares with four competing gaming PCs.

First off, we’ve got the Asus TUF Gaming T500 ($1,299.99 as tested), which also sports a RTX 5060 Ti, but with double the VRAM. Stepping down a bit, there's the CyberPowerPC Gamer Xtreme ($1,099.99 as tested), with an RTX 5060. Then, leveling up from the Lenovo LOQ Tower 26, we’ve got the Lenovo Legion Tower 5 Gen 10 ($1,879.99 as tested) with an RTX 5070,s and the iBuyPower RDY Element Pro R07 ($2,599.99 as tested) with an RTX 5070 Ti.

Productivity and Content Creation Tests

Our primary overall benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC's storage throughput. 

Three more tests are CPU-centric or processor-intensive: Maxon's Cinebench 2024 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution. Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Creators rates a PC's image-editing prowess with a variety of automated operations in the popular image editor Adobe Photoshop 25.

The Lenovo LOQ Tower 26's AMD Ryzen 7 8745HX put up a good fight in these benchmarks, mostly keeping up with the competition and winning at least one total victory. It finished last only on the storage test.

In terms of real-world performance, the Lenovo LOQ Tower 26 ran as smoothly as you might expect. You would probably only notice real-world differences and slowdowns among these machines under professional creative workloads, stopwatch-timed side-by-side. I saw very little slowdown when navigating multiple Chrome tabs while Cyberpunk 2077 ran in the background.

Graphics and Gaming Tests

We challenge all desktops' graphics with a quintet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. The first two, Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K), use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. The next pair, Steel Nomad's regular and Light subtests, focuses on APIs more commonly used for game development to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. Last, we turn to 3DMark Solar Bay to measure ray-tracing performance.

Our real-world game testing is based on the in-game benchmarks for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and F1 2024. These three games—all benchmarked at full HD (1080p or 1200p), 2K (1440p or 1600p), and 4K (2160p) resolution—represent competitive shooter, open-world, and simulation games, respectively.

Each game gets benchmarked at high detail or the highest available settings. We run the Call of Duty benchmark at the Extreme graphics preset on desktops. Because the test can produce triple-digit frame rates even on low-end PCs, this approach yields sensible results for evaluating high frame-rate performance. Our Cyberpunk 2077 test settings aim to push PCs to their limit, so we run that game on the all-out Ray Tracing Overdrive preset without DLSS or FSR. Finally, F1 2024 measures GPUs’ ability to render high-polygon-count models and densely detailed environments at fast speeds.

The Lenovo LOQ Tower 26’s RTX 5060 Ti delivered a pinch more power than a regular RTX 5060, but it’s not a radical difference. I still recommend sticking to 1080p and 1440p, both of which would net you playable frame rates in AAA games at high settings (just not max settings). The Lenovo's scores hovered around the results for Asus TUF Gaming T500’s own RTX 5060 Ti, but the Asus’ 16GB of VRAM on its RTX 5060 Ti card gave its numbers a boost in spots.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

You could technically hit 4K in some games, like Modern Warfare III, but for more demanding titles, you would need to rely on DLSS 4 frame generation to get similar frame rates. Remember, though, that frame generation can create artifacts—it's not a perfect science. 

Overall, you’ll get the most use out of this system if you treat it like what it is—a midrange-at-best gaming PC—and not infer too much from the $2,089 MSRP.