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.
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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)
