Though budget gaming desktops aren’t as wallet-friendly as they used to be, the performance per dollar they serve up has never been greater. Lenovo’s Legion Tower 5i Gen 8 exemplifies this. Lenovo offers it direct with a 10-core Intel Core i5-13400F and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 in its $1,319.99 base model. Our review unit is a better deal if you look at just list prices; a Best Buy-specific model, it goes for just $1,249.99 but includes an RTX 3060 card instead. Impressive standard features and AAA-acing performance aside, though, we still prefer the NZXT Player: One to this Legion because it provides even more power for its price. But don’t count the Legion out: This is a well-rounded tower that does little wrong and only needs a sale to set it soaring.
Design and Configuration: Budget Price, Mid-Tier Features
The no-frills budget gaming desktops of yesteryear are a far cry from what you can get today. The Legion Tower 5i Gen 8 elevates itself with premium features, including a tempered glass (not plastic) side panel and multi-zone addressable RGB lighting.
(Credit: Molly Flores)You'll find not one but two 120mm fans behind the aggressive front airflow grate, with one more at the rear, which creates a lot of breeze. A white LED interior strip illuminates everything inside.
(Credit: Molly Flores)The front fans, the rear fan, the LED strip, and the illuminated Legion front logo represent four lighting zones; models equipped with optional 150-watt (W) CPU air cooling get a fifth zone from another 120mm fan on that cooler. Our model made do with a low-profile CPU cooler that doesn’t look impressive but handled thermals just fine. I noticed little noise from this tower throughout my testing, even during gaming tests.
As always, the Lenovo Vantage app enables lighting-zone configuration: All zones have brightness adjustment, while the RGB zones (that is, all but the interior LED strip) have advanced effects, such as breathing, color cycling, and even a reactive mode that varies color based on CPU temperature. Vantage also provides basic GPU overclocking and access to Lenovo support, and it can check for system updates. You'll find three profiles for storing settings.
(Credit: Molly Flores)Lenovo’s official measurements state that the Legion Tower 5i is 16.77 by 8.07 by 15.63 inches (HWD), but I found it was 17.4 inches tall including its rubber feet—nevertheless the ballpark size for a mid-tower. Front ports include two 5Gbps USB-A ports and separate 3.5mm headphone and microphone jacks. Having no USB Type-C port here is a glaring omission, particularly for VR headsets and other accessories. The power button is on the right.
(Credit: Molly Flores)Around back, the motherboard includes many USB ports (one 10Gbps USB-C, two 5Gbps USB-A, and two legacy USB 2.0) and a trio of 3.5mm audio jacks (microphone, line-in, and line-out). Networking options include Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi 6E, with Bluetooth 5.2. The wireless antennas are built into the case.
The Legion’s tempered-glass panel comes off after undoing two thumbscrews, revealing a spacious and reasonably well-wired interior. The MicroATX (9.6-by-9.6-inch) motherboard is all that fits; you'll find no standoffs for installing a larger motherboard down the line. The board doesn’t skimp on expansion, though, with two M.2 slots and four DDR5-5600 RAM slots. The Legion-branded heatsink on the included M.2 drive shows attention to detail. You'll also get to use an open PCI Express x4 slot.
(Credit: Molly Flores)The other side of the tower houses the 500W power supply, which isn’t modular, but its cables are tied off neatly enough. Its removable dust filter is commendable. You'll also find two 3.5-inch drive bays here, each with a toolless caddy and nearby power cables.
Naturally, the Legion Tower 5i Gen 8 has some preloaded bloatware, notably a McAfee security software trial and the usual preloaded Windows 11 apps, including Spotify and TikTok. This is always disappointing, though uninstalling them takes minutes. Lenovo backs the tower with a one-year warranty and its uprated Legion Ultimate support.
Testing the Legion Tower 5i Gen 8: Ample 1080p Power
The $1,249.99 Legion Tower 5i Gen 8 we’re testing from Best Buy includes a Core i5-13400F CPU (six Performance and four Efficient cores, up to 4.6GHz), 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060. This version of the GPU has 12GB of video memory instead of the 6GB that saddles lesser versions of the card. A basic USB keyboard and mouse are included.
As noted, Lenovo starts the pricing on its own store at $1,319.99 ($989.99 on sale) with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050, a still-capable but rapidly aging GPU that will struggle in demanding games. Even the GeForce RTX 3060 is getting long in the tooth, though Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 desktops are still outside of what we’d consider budget territory. The Legion Tower 5i can actually be had with up to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070, but those models push up past $1,500.
You can also buy this tower with AMD silicon as the Legion Tower 5 (no “i”) Gen 8; Best Buy had it with an AMD Ryzen 5 7600 and a GeForce RTX 3060 for $899.99 at the time of writing. A sale like that would do wonders for our Legion since NZXT’s Player: One delivers a GeForce RTX 3060 for $949.
For performance comparison, the Legion Tower 5i will face the NZXT Player: One with a GeForce RTX 3050 (the company has since upgraded it to a GeForce RTX 3060) and several higher-end towers, as we haven’t tested many entry-level gaming towers lately. They include the Dell XPS Desktop (8950), the iBuyPower Gaming RDY Y40BG202, and the older Asus ProArt Station PD5. The Dell’s Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is also available in pricier Legion Tower 5i Gen 8 configurations.
Productivity and 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 also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.
Our other three 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 Geekbench 5.4 Pro from Primate Labs 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).
Finally, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems, 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.
PCMark’s main test saw the Legion doing as well as it could have been expected to do, slotting in between the NZXT and the Dell. Its 512GB SSD also was closest to challenging the iBuyPower in the storage test chart.
The Legion’s Core i5-13400F was obviously no match for the iBuyPower’s liquid-cooled Intel Core i7-13700K, but its real competition was the NZXT’s Core i5-12400. Both chips have six Performance cores, but the Core i5-13400F also tacks on four Efficient cores, which gave it leads of roughly 15% and 43% in Cinebench and Geekbench, respectively.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
For gaming desktops, we run both synthetic and real-world gaming benchmarks. The former includes two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, the more modest Night Raid (suitable for systems with integrated graphics) and more demanding Time Spy (suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). We then run two OpenGL exercises, rendered offscreen by the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which allows for different native display resolutions; more frames per second (fps) means higher performance.
Our real-world gaming benchmarks are those built into F1 2021, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege, tested at higher resolutions and quality settings. These three represent simulation, open-world action-adventure, and competitive/esports shooter games respectively. We run Valhalla and Siege twice each at Ultra quality (at both 1080p and 4K), while F1 2021 is run at 4K only, with and without AMD and Nvidia's performance-boosting FSR and DLSS features turned on.
With such widely varying configurations, these desktops elude exact comparisons, but the Legion’s RTX 3060 predictably produced scores above the RTX 3050 NZXT and below the RTX 3060 Ti Dell. It easily surpassed 100fps at 1080p, which couldn’t be said for the NZXT, and it even handled 1440p with playable frame rates.
Entry gaming towers aren’t as cheap as they used to be, as I noted, but at least you won’t need to compromise on visual quality settings to enjoy games at 1080p, which has been the entry-level standard for a few years now.
Verdict: A Fine Budget Gaming Tower (If It’s on Sale)
Lenovo’s Legion Tower 5i Gen 8 is a reliable performer and delivers lots of promise for a budget gaming tower, including a tempered-glass door, multi-zone RGB lighting, and quiet operation. All we can really criticize is its price: Not being on a bigger sale at review time with an RTX 3060 hurt its appeal next to the NZXT Player: One, which remains our Editors' Choice award holder among budget gaming desktops. That said, this Legion can go toe to toe with the NZXT if the price is right, and don’t forget Lenovo sells an AMD version that is often even cheaper.