Lenovo Legion Tower 5i (Gen8) review.

Lenovo isn’t tinkering with its Legion gaming PCs. These are definitely and uncompromisingly just PCs. Sure, there’s a slight nod to the “gamer” style with the RGB-lit front panel and clear side, but Legion Tower 5i is, without wanting to sound mean, quite ordinary.

Which I think is great. I’m all for this when it comes to affordable gaming PCs. I don’t want money to be wasted on unnecessary luxuries when I’m looking for good budget gear. And there are certainly none of those here. Remove this side panel and you’ll see what I mean; The CPU cooler is an unknown brand, there are no VRM heatsinks or SSD cooling plates on the barebones motherboard, and the memory cards are also bare PCBs.

The OEM Nvidia RTX 4060 graphics card (essentially an off-brand card made for system builders) is similarly basic but pretty. I like miniature cards where they make sense, and the low-end Ada Lovelace GPU is so proficient that it doesn’t need a huge two-slot, three-fan cooling system to keep it running at full capacity.

Now you might be feeling a little intimidated by all this talk about restricted cooling options, a basic CPU cooler and a miniature graphics card. I get it, you’re worried about this device overheating and getting damn boisterous when you run any game more demanding than Solitaire. Put that fear aside because at this level we have components that are astute and proficient enough to not overload your available cooling options.

In my tests, neither the CPU nor the GPU exceed 76°C under massive gaming load, and while the Intel CPU does hit 95°C when all its cores are loaded at 100% load, this is actually completely standard. In fact, other systems we’ve tested even reach temperatures of a throttling 100°C, so the fact that the Legion Tower 5i doesn’t go that far highlights why it doesn’t need an costly CPU chiller.

But what is this processor I am talking about? Lenovo opted for the Core i5 14400F, a ten-core, 16-thread Raptor Lake Refresh chip, which is arguably one of the best budget processors on the market. We still recommend the Core i5 13400F as the best budget CPU, but only because it’s about $10 cheaper if you buy it as an upgrade – otherwise they’re the exact same CPU.

It’s not a productive beast, I’ll be forthright. Despite this effective ten-core designation, you actually only get six Hyperthreaded Performance cores and another four Efficient cores for lighter workloads. However, for gaming, these P-Cores are an critical factor and are more than capable of feeding data to the GPU speedy enough to keep good frames flowing.

And that GPU is the budget RTX 4060. This is the lowest-spec RTX 40-series graphics card, whose specs only serve to highlight this placement. However, it’s a powerful enough GPU for 1080p gaming and comes with all the benefits of DLSS 3.5, including Nvidia’s Frame Generation technology, which delivers free frame rates in supported games. It’s this extra GeForce freezing that slightly pushes Nvidia’s budget card ahead of the AMD alternative.

In addition to the well-balanced processor and graphics card combination, Lenovo has added a 1TB Samsung PCIe 4.0 SSD (and quite speedy at that) and 16GB of DDR5 memory. Unfortunately, the same memory runs at 4400 MT/s, but since it wasn’t designed to be a workstation beast, that snail-paced RAM won’t be a real hindrance.

How does it actually work? Well, our suite of gaming PC benchmarks run at 1440p to capture performance at both ends of the market, on both high-end and low-end PCs. And while native performance isn’t very high – you can see why they call the RTX 4060 a 1080p GPU – as soon as you start to drop down in terms of DLSS and framerate, you’ll start to see properly playable framerates.

Achieving an average of a silky 60fps in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p, combined with a figure of 49fps at 1% low is impressive – especially considering that when running natively without Frame Gen and DLSS you only get 24fps a second. Still, even with the panacea of ​​scaling and interpolation, I wouldn’t recommend the Legion Tower 5i as anything other than a 1080p gaming PC.

You’re still far behind the RTX 4070 Super in terms of gaming performance, but you’ll only find this GPU in gaming PCs that cost well over $1,200. And this is where I think we should start talking about money.

When I first received this machine for review, it was listed at Best Buy for $850 and had been there for a few months, but even though there are tons of Black Friday gaming PC deals right now, the cheapest one is equipment is available offer for is $900 at Lenovo’s own store.

This is still a decent price, but there are RTX 4060 machines with the same specifications available on the market for much less, e.g. iBuyPower scale. Overall, sales times aren’t stupid, but the Lenovo Legion Tower 5i remains one of the best budget gaming PCs from a huge name brand.

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Legion’s basic setup suits me, and it also means it’s an simple system to upgrade. There’s a spare M.2 slot for an additional SSD, which complements the 1TB drive already inside, so there’s no space issues if you want to go with higher-spec storage. The only problem is the OEM B660M motherboard Very basic, even in the BIOS, which can cause some problems when trying to run XMP on speedy RAM sets. It also only has a few USB ports and only a single Type-C connector on the rear panel.

Another sticking point is the 500W power supply. You could probably upgrade to an RTX 4060 Ti, but even that might be a bit of a stretch. Realistically, if you want to make a major GPU upgrade, you’ll need a up-to-date power supply along with it. However, unlike the Alienware computer, the power supply in the Legion Tower 5i is also completely standard.

I have a huge pliable spot for the Legion Tower 5i, and actually for the other Legion Towers I’ve tested. These are basic gaming PCs that don’t pretend to be something they’re not, and even that liquid RGB lighting can be turned off with a single physical button on the back of the device. However, Lenovo faces a lot of competition in the budget market from manufacturers such as Newegg’s ABS and newcomers such as Yeyian. This is a level of competition that seems much more aggressive than Lenovo, and perhaps even more aggressive than it may be.

If you’re looking for a solid model from a well-known brand, the Tower 5i will be a great choice, especially since you’ll be able to find it at a consistent, solid discount. If you only want the best performance on the market at the lowest price, however, if you are willing to shop around, there are better alternatives.