Lenovo Legion Tower 5i Gen 8 Gaming Desktop Review: A Solid Starting Point

7.9/ 10
SCORE

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i Gen 8

Advantages

• Strong 1080p performance for the money
• Beautiful design and lighting of the housing
• Good basic specifications
• Some upgrade options for users

Disadvantages

• Mist dust filtration
• Some ugly components
• Only one USB-C port

Getting started in PC gaming can be a challenge, especially if you haven’t put much effort into finding the best components or don’t know how to build a PC. The Lenovo Legion Tower 5i Gen 8 is a simple, affordable entry-level system with the right mix of components, a reasonable price, and a stylish look to get gamers started in gaming without the hassle.

At a base price of $1,149, before the many small discounts that Lenovo systems typically see — right now, the starting price is slashed to $990 on Lenovo’s site — the Lenovo Legion Tower 5i Gen 8 is already a steal. For that money, you’re getting a system that’s ready to handle 1080p gaming with relative ease. It may not be a ray-tracing powerhouse or a 4K workhorse, but it’ll comfortably serve up the bread and butter of gaming.

As logical as the base configuration may be, opting for one of the upgraded specs may come with diminishing returns, as some of Lenovo’s choices for internals (the inside doesn’t look quite as polished as we’d expect from a glass-sided system from a major manufacturer) likely won’t vary significantly from one configuration to the next. If you’re looking for the machine that will get you started in PC gaming, this is a great place to start, but if you’re looking to move up a higher-end system, it might be time to do some research into PC building or budget gaming PCs.

Covers the basic principles of performance

The Legion Tower 5i’s base configuration is certainly respectable for 1080p gaming. The Intel Core i5-14400F isn’t a powerhouse, but it has enough heft to keep frame rates up in more CPU-demanding games, and the RTX 4060 proved more than adequate in our benchmarks, returning well over 100 fps at 1080p across all of them. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Guardians of the Galaxy, it even managed a near-spot-on average of 144 fps, which would be well suited to the sort of budget 1080p or 1440p/144Hz monitor that’s likely to end up on a desk next to the Legion Tower 5i.

With access to various DLSS technologies in the RTX 4060, it’s possible to push framerates or resolutions even higher while still maintaining decent performance. And while the RTX 4060 we used is only a single-fan variant, performance matched that of an Asus Dual RTX 4060 we’ve tested in other hardware fairly well.

Outside of gaming, the Legion Tower 5i showed no signs of struggling with everyday computing. Its score of 8,127.5 in PCMark 10 was a pretty strong indicator that it would handle basic office tasks with ease, and real-world usage bore that out.

A beautiful exterior, but a boring interior

Lenovo has designed some great desktop cases, and the Legion Tower 5i is one of them. The front has a three-dimensional pattern that looks great, especially with the Legion logo glowing in ever-changing rainbow colors on one corner. That front panel could definitely use more dust filtration, beyond the simple dual honeycomb-style metal covers, while there are dual rainbow-lit fans behind it that pull in fresh air.

Those intake fans spin quietly, blowing cool air over the CPU and GPU. I’ve seen plenty of desktops that look like their intake fans are designed with little or no airflow calculations in mind, but Lenovo seems to have put some thought into this one. The intake fans are complemented by another rainbow fan blowing out the back. All of the system fans work together to keep the system running smoothly and quietly, with barely any audible fan noise during a run of 3DMark’s Steel Nomad Stress Test, which the system passed with 98.5% stability. The chassis has a glass side panel, and even has an LED light strip to further illuminate the internals.

All that lighting doesn’t help the internals look anything more than utilitarian. Lenovo didn’t opt ​​for the most exciting-looking components, and some of them may raise concerns about longevity. The motherboard has an exposed chipset with no cooling fins or even an integrated heat spreader. The memory also doesn’t have any heat spreaders, and there are no heatsinks on the voltage regulator module. The CPU gets a basic heatsink with a single, small 80mm fan (higher-power configurations get other cooling solutions). The GPU is also a small, single-fan model with a simple, plastic fan shroud and no backplate. Lenovo has done a decent job of cable management, but the internals aren’t exactly impressive.

On the plus side, there are a number of user-upgradeable options inside. There’s an extra m.2 drive slot to fill, and two empty memory slots. Hidden beneath the power supply shroud, Lenovo has added a hard drive cage and even pre-routed two SATA data cables (though you’ll have to supply the power cables yourself).

The top of the case has a simpler but still sleek grille. There’s a small area to slot in dongles or adapters, and there are a pair of USB-A 5Gbps ports, headphone and microphone jacks, and a power button on the front of the lid. The back, however, is nothing special. Motherboard I/O is basic, with a handful of USB-A ports, a single USB-C port (which offers at least 10Gbps speeds), and a 2.5-Gigabit Ethernet jack. The motherboard includes three additional audio jacks. Since the CPU doesn’t have integrated graphics, the motherboard forgoes any video outputs. Instead, those are all left on the GPU, which offers three DisplayPorts and one HDMI port. For wireless connectivity, you get Wi-Fi 6E, which proved fast and stable when connected to a Wi-Fi 6 router.

It’s not the flashiest or best-performing computer around, but the Legion Tower 5i isn’t a bad buy if you’re looking for an affordable entry-level PC gaming rig.

Performance