Lenovo Legion Tower 5i Gen 8 (2024)

PCMag editors select and review products independently. If you buy through affiliate links, we may earn commissions, which help support our testing.

The Lenovo Legion Tower 5i Gen 8 is a mass-market gaming desktop that looks sharp and delivers reliable performance at an accessible price. (It starts at $999.99, and our test sample rings up at $1,149.99.) You get a handsome mid-tower chassis with a glass side panel, RGB lighting from three included fans, bold Legion branding up front, and components capable of steady, playable frame rates at 1080p resolution. In our test unit's case, those parts comprise an Intel Core i5-14400F processor, 16GB of dual-channel DDR5-4400 RAM, a 1TB NVMe solid-state drive, integrated Wi-Fi 6E, and an 8GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card. This Legion won't impress if you're looking to leverage a high-refresh-rate monitor, but it'll suffice for basic AAA gaming. That said, similarly outfitted rivals, such as the Editors' Choice-award-winning MSI Codex R2, will save you a couple of hundred dollars.

Design: High-Airflow Mesh Meets RGB Flair

The Legion Tower 5i has a well-designed gray chassis with a glass side panel. Inside, you get three fans with integrated RGB lighting and plenty of room for expansion, whether that's expanded cooling, PCI Express cards, or a larger graphics card (though the 500-watt power supply limits headroom for the last). Overall, I love the look. The front mesh design and glowing Legion branding make it look like a gaming machine without being obnoxious about it.

The 26-liter chassis measures 16.8 by 8.1 by 15.6 inches, a typical size for a midtower. Like many case sides these days, the tempered-glass panel has a smoked tint that hides some of the unsightly internals in every PC when off but provides excellent views when on. The system includes three 120mm RGB fans, with two in front as intakes and one on the rear as an exhaust. The top panel is empty, with room to mount additional 120mm/140mm fans or a dual-120mm AIO liquid cooler. As configured, the system has plenty of airflow and room for expansion.

The "front" I/O panel sits atop the case for easy port access. On the right is a circular power button with a white LED (easily mistaken for a drive activity light). On the left are two USB 2.0 ports and separate 3.5mm audio jacks for a microphone and headphones. I'd like a USB Type-C port up here, but you'll find one on the back.

Lenovo doesn't install much bloatware to spoil the clean Windows installation. The Legion Arena gaming hub is ready to go, and for most users, it is a more convenient way to launch games from one location instead of via multiple launchers such as Steam, Epic, and EA. You also get Microsoft 365, McAfee LiveSafe, and Xbox PC Game Pass trials. For those interested in tweaking their system, Lenovo includes the Legion Vantage app for download. A generic USB keyboard and mouse come in the box; proper gamers will aim to replace these right away.

The back of the chassis has room for expansion, with four card-bracket positions on the case, but two are already in use, so you're limited to a one-slot expansion card. The rear I/O looks sparsely populated but includes seven USB ports: four USB 2.0 (480Mbps), two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A (5Gbps), and one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C (10Gbps). Audio outputs for the base Realtek ALC897 codec consist of three 3.5mm jacks (microphone, headphone, line out). Atop the rear I/O panel zone is a small, nondescript button that toggles the RGB lighting on and off.

Components: Clean Look, Vibrant Lighting

To get inside the chassis, you remove two screws on the back to take off the glass panel. Once it's off, you'll have access to the internals except for the power supply (it's 500 watts here, but 850 watts in Core i7 models), which sits in its own chamber. The MicroATX motherboard (Lenovo 3769) is on the basic side, but it does have two M.2 sockets, four SATA ports, and a PCIe x8 slot (which runs PCIe 4.0 x4). Cable management looks as neat as can be with everything that's connected.

The Legion Tower 5i line consists of five preconfigured models that range from $999.99 to $1,999.99. The flagship combines an Intel Core i7-14700F with a 12GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super card and 32GB of RAM (at the same relatively slow DDR5-4400 speed). Real power-seekers can opt for the Legion Tower 7i family instead, which goes up to a Core i9-14900KF and GeForce RTX 4080 Super but, curiously, uses even slower RAM than our 5i model.

The Tower 5i Gen 8 is one of the more attractive budget gaming desktops. It provides room to expand, and the battle-station-like chassis looks cool all lit up. I don't see much to dislike, but I wonder why Lenovo uses such tepid memory, as that leaves some performance on the table compared with similar configurations from competitors.

Testing the Legion Tower 5i Gen 8: Your 1080p Chariot Has Arrived

We recently updated and revamped our benchmarking-software test suite and are gathering new datasets, so the performance comparisons available to us at the moment are slightly limited. Still, we came up with one direct competitor for the Tower 5i Gen 8 (the $979.99 MSI Codex R2 mentioned earlier) and a couple of higher-priced systems: the HP Omen 35L, and the compact Asus ROG NUC 970, which we've tested and are in the process of reviewing. (Note: The ROG NUC uses a mobile-grade CPU and GPU.) The specifications of the contenders are in the table below.

Productivity & Content Creation Tests

We run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and includes a storage subtest for the primary 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 R24 renders a complex scene using the company's Cinema 4D engine. Geekbench 6.3 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. We then use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Finally, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems. This testing software uses Adobe's famous image editor, Photoshop version 25.1, to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes various general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks, from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

Our test subject proved a competent productivity machine but left some meat on the bone. Despite having the same processor and graphics card, it fell behind the MSI Codex R2 in some tests, likely at least in part due to its notably slower memory configuration.

Graphics & Gaming Tests

For gaming desktops, we run both synthetic and real-world gaming benchmarks. The former includes five gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark: the more mobile-focused Wild Life and Wild Life Extreme tests, the DX12-based Steel Nomad and Steel Nomad Light tests for gaming PCs, and the Vulkan-based ray-tracing benchmark Solar Bay.

Beyond those synthetic tests, our real-world gaming benchmarks are test sequences built into F1 2024, Cyberpunk 2077, and Call of Duty III: Modern Warfare. These represent simulation games, action role-playing games, and a popular first-person shooter. Each benchmark is run three times using the same settings at different resolutions (1080p, 1440p, and 4K).

The Legion Tower 5i Gen 8 performed as expected in our gaming tests (which is to say, well behind the HP Omen's mighty RTX 4080 Super GPU). Again, it proved slightly slower than the Codex R2 with the same hardware. Our testing suite is a stressful one; only Call of Duty broke the 60-frame-per-second (fps) threshold at 1080p. Image-quality adjustments will need to be made in some modern AAA titles to keep above the magic 60fps number, but the Lenovo will play just fine in others (Fortnite, Overwatch, Apex Legends, and games of that ilk).

Verdict: A 1080p Churner, But Not Quite Your Best Buy

The latest Lenovo Legion Tower 5i is a legitimate contender in the budget gaming-desktop market. You get a sharp-looking case with a cool mesh design and RGB lighting, not to mention a capable 1080p gamer that can even play at 1440p with some image-quality adjustments. For $1,149.99 as we tested it, it's a well-rounded system, and those not shopping in the budget aisle can step up to a Core i7 config with faster graphics and a beefier power supply.

We like the Tower 5i Gen 8, but it falls a bit short when compared with the MSI Codex R2 we recently reviewed. The Codex costs a tad less with similar hardware but features a more robust power supply (a key factor for possible future GPU upgrades) and faster RAM that helps performance. (Also, the Codex supports Wi-Fi 7 versus Wi-Fi 6E, which, admittedly, not many users can take advantage of today. But it future-readies the machine.) A price cut would make the Lenovo a more attractive option for economy-minded gamers.