Lenovo’s Legion Tower 5i mid-tower gaming desktop won an Editors’ Choice award last year and is an even better value in the $949 Best Buy configuration we’re testing today. Instead of the quad-core CPU and 4GB graphics card commonly found in under-$1,000 towers, it boasts a six-core “Rocket Lake” Intel Core i5 processor and 6GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Super for comfortably smooth 1080p gaming, and even includes both a solid-state drive and a hard drive. Its 8GB of memory is a bit scanty, but that can be easily upgraded later. An aggressive four-zone-lit case tops it off, making the Legion Tower 5i impressive for the price. The machine earns another Editors’ Choice award among entry-level gaming towers.
Pulling Out All the Stops
The Legion Tower 5i looks every inch a gaming tower despite losing the funky carrying handle of the 2020 version. Its all-black exterior is plastic but sturdy thanks to the underlying metal frame. At 16.5 by 8.1 by 16 inches (HWD), it’s within the expected dimensions of a mid-tower desktop.
The see-through side isn’t the usual tempered glass, but it’s large and provides a good interior view, especially if you turn on the case lighting. There are no fewer than four lighting zones, all configurable within the supplied Lenovo Vantage app.
The two front and one rear 120mm fans support RGB lighting with up to 16.7 million colors. The other two lighting zones—the Legion logo on the front panel and the interior light bar—are pale blue. You can turn the lighting zones off individually.
Three fans provide most of the Legion’s front-to-back airflow. The top panel, like the front, the top panel is grated for additional airflow. The fans occasionally spin up to audible levels but usually stay quiet enough to meld into the background, even during gaming.
Connectivity along the tower’s top edge includes two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports and headphone and microphone jacks. It would have been nice to see a USB Type-C port here.
Around back are four more USB-A ports (two 3.2 Gen 1 and two legacy 2.0), a USB-C 3.2 Gen 1 port, Gigabit Ethernet, and three audio jacks (line-in, line-out, and microphone).
The GeForce GTX 1660 Super graphics card offers one HDMI, one DisplayPort, and, oddly enough, a DVI-D port; dual monitor users will need to mix and match connections or buy adapters. Wireless connectivity comes courtesy of an Intel Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 card. I like that the wireless antenna is built into the case instead of protruding externally.
Ample End-User Upgradeability
Removing two thumbscrews gets you inside the Legion Tower 5i. The blacked-out interior and tied-off black cabling keep things professional.
The low-profile CPU cooler is small, but powerful enough to handle the heat from the Core i5-11400 CPU, which has just a 65-watt thermal design power (TDP) rating; Legion Tower 5i models with higher TDP ratings include a beefier cooler. Just below it is a 256GB M.2 Type-2280 solid-state drive covered with a Legion-branded heatsink. To the right are four DDR4-2933 memory slots, with only one lonely 8GB module present and accounted for. Adding more should take only a couple of minutes given the easy access.
The dual-slot GeForce GTX 1660 Super card is small, not extending past the PCI Express x16 slot. It takes just one 6-pin power connector. The system’s second M.2 Type-2280 SSD slot, empty in this model, is just under it.
The tower’s two 3.5-inch bays, one of which holds a 1TB hard drive, are accessible after removing the other side panel. No tools are required for drive installation; the empty bay thoughtfully provides SATA and power cables.
The power supply supplies up to 400 watts, which isn’t much headroom if you want to put in a faster graphics card but is plenty for this configuration.
Send Forth Your Legions: Benchmarking the 2021 Legion Tower 5i
The Legion Tower 5i reviewed here, model 90RS000DUS, costs $949 at Best Buy. That price gets you a six-core, 2.6GHz (4.4GHz turbo) Intel Core i5-11400 processor, a 6GB GeForce GTX 1660 Super GPU, 8GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD loaded with Windows 10 Home, and a 1TB hard drive. The standard warranty is one year.
Best Buy also offers an HP Omen 25L mid-tower (model GT12-0024) for the same money; it makes do with a previous-generation, six-core Core i5-10400 chip and has a larger 512GB SSD but no hard drive. It, too, has just 8GB of memory, a good indication that doing the under-$1,000 gaming desktop limbo requires a little penny-pinching.
As is, our Legion’s 8GB of RAM caused the system to struggle in some benchmarks; I especially noted a tendency to skip or drop frames in our real-world gaming tests. Forget about doing any kind of multitasking while gaming. Fortunately, adding another 8GB DDR4-2933 UDIMM (for a healthy 16GB total) is not only easy to do but should cost you no more than $50. You might also want to budget for a gaming keyboard and mouse, though the generic USB peripherals bundled with the Tower 5i can tide you over.
Let’s get on with the testing. We pitched the Legion Tower 5i against two other gaming towers, whose configurations appear in the table below.
Price-wise, the Lenovo is well below the duo—the NZXT tower is $1,799 and the Maingear Turbo a whopping $6,438—but we won’t have any other gaming desktops for comparison until we get more systems through our brand-new benchmarking regimen. At least this way, you’ll see the entire spectrum of what a little or a lot of money can get you. (See more about how we test desktops.)
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
Our first test is UL’s PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content creation workflows to measure overall system performance. The Legion Tower 5i scored well, especially against the pricier NZXT. It also did well in PCMark 10’s storage subtest despite having a small 256GB solid-state drive.
Three other 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 Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Pro 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).
Our final productivity test is Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Photoshop, 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 Legion Tower 5i’s six-core CPU kept it well south of its high-powered competitors, but its numbers suggest that it’s perfectly capable of handling tasks that require significant processing muscle. Naturally, an eight-core chip would fare better, but getting one of those in a gaming tower would mean spending considerably more.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
For Windows PCs, we run both synthetic and real-world gaming tests. Among the former are two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for systems with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Two other gaming simulations come from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which specializes in OpenGL performance. Though the Legion’s GeForce GTX 1660 Super was hopelessly outclassed by the NZXT’s GeForce RTX 3060, its numbers were still solid.
Moving on, our real-world game testing comes from the in-game benchmarks of F1 2021, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege—simulation, open-world action-adventure, and competitive/esports shooter games respectively. On desktops, we run them at their highest quality presets (F1 2021 at Ultra High, Valhalla and Siege at Ultra) at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K resolutions.
The Legion’s numbers suggest that 1080p gaming is its sweet spot, no surprise given its low price. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was a struggle, averaging below the golden 60 frames per second (fps), but that game is notoriously difficult even for high-end systems. It should be possible to explore 1440p gaming depending on the title, especially with visual quality settings dialed back a bit. The GeForce GTX 1660 lacks the ray-tracing capabilities of GeForce RTX cards, but you might not miss them; see our feature on ray tracing and PC gaming.
An Entry-Level Gaming Star
The Lenovo Legion Tower 5i is a compelling low-cost gaming desktop, especially for first-time purchasers. The $949 Best Buy model we tested provides much more stable 1080p gaming performance, thanks to its six-core Core i5 CPU and 6GB GeForce GTX 1660 Super, than cheaper desktops with quad-core CPUs and 4GB graphics cards. Its biggest downside is its modest 8GB of memory, but that’s simple to fix with a DIY upgrade. Dual storage drives, a clean design, and customizable lighting clinch the Legion’s Editors’ Choice award as an entry-level gaming tower.
