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Lenovo ‘s Legion Tower 5i mid-tower gaming desktop won an Editors ‘ Choice prize last year and is an even better respect in the $ 949 Best Buy configuration we ‘re testing nowadays. alternatively of the quad-core CPU and 4GB graphics card normally 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 gambling, and even includes both a solid-state drive and a hard campaign. Its 8GB of memory is a piece bare, but that can be easily upgrade late. 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 gambling towers .
Pulling Out All the Stops
The Legion Tower 5i looks every inch a gaming column despite losing the funky carrying manage of the 2020 translation. Its all-black outside is formative but uncompromising thanks to the underlying metallic element frame. At 16.5 by 8.1 by 16 inches ( HWD ), it ‘s within the expect dimensions of a mid-tower desktop .
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Reading: Lenovo Legion Tower 5i (2021) Review
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The diaphanous side is n’t the common temper glass, but it ‘s large and provides a good interior horizon, specially if you turn on the encase lighting. There are no fewer than four lighting zones, all configurable within the add Lenovo Vantage app .
The two movement and one rise 120mm fans support RGB lighting with up to 16.7 million colors. The early two lighting zones—the Legion logo on the front control panel and the home light bar—are pale blasphemous. You can turn the lighting zones off individually.
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Lenovo Legion Tower 5i
Read Our Lenovo Legion Tower 5i Review
Three fans provide most of the Legion ‘s front-to-back airflow. The top panel, like the front, the top panel is grated for extra airflow. The fans occasionally spin up to audible levels but normally stay hushed adequate to meld into the background, even during gambling. connectivity along the column ‘s top edge includes two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports and earphone and microphone jacks. It would have been decent to see a USB Type-C port here .
Around second are four more USB-A ports ( two 3.2 Gen 1 and two bequest 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, queerly adequate, a DVI-D port ; double 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 alternatively of protruding outwardly .
Ample End-User Upgradeability
Removing two thumbscrews gets you inside the Legion Tower 5i. The blacked-out interior and tied-off black cabling hold things professional .
The low-profile CPU cool is belittled, but knock-down enough to handle the estrus from the Core i5-11400 CPU, which has good a 65-watt thermal design world power ( TDP ) rate ; Legion Tower 5i models with higher TDP ratings include a beefier cool. just below it is a 256GB M.2 Type-2280 solid-state force covered with a Legion-branded heatsink. To the right are four DDR4-2933 memory slots, with only one lonely 8GB faculty present and accounted for. Adding more should take only a couple of minutes given the easy access .
The dual-slot GeForce GTX 1660 Super menu is little, not extending past the PCI Express x16 slot. It takes just one 6-pin office connection. The organization ‘s second M.2 Type-2280 SSD slot, evacuate in this exemplar, is just under it .
The loom ‘s two 3.5-inch bays, one of which holds a 1TB hard drive, are accessible after removing the early side dialog box. No tools are required for force facility ; the empty bay thoughtfully provides SATA and world power cables .
The power issue supplies up to 400 watts, which is n’t a lot headroom if you want to put in a firm graphics card but is batch 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 arduous drive. The standard guarantee is one year. Best Buy besides offers an HP Omen 25L mid-tower ( model GT12-0024 ) for the like money ; it makes do with a previous-generation, six-core Core i5-10400 chip and has a larger 512GB SSD but no hard campaign. It, besides, has equitable 8GB of memory, a good indication that doing the under- $ 1,000 gaming background oblivion requires a fiddling cheeseparing. As is, our Legion ‘s 8GB of RAM caused the system to struggle in some benchmarks ; I particularly noted a tendency to skip or drop frames in our real-world gambling tests. Forget about doing any kind of multitasking while gaming. fortunately, adding another 8GB DDR4-2933 UDIMM ( for a healthy 16GB entire ) is not only easy to do but should cost you no more than $ 50. You might besides want to budget for a bet on keyboard and shiner, 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 early gaming towers, whose configurations appear in the board below.
Read more: HP Pavilion x360 15 (2021) Review
Price-wise, the Lenovo is well below the duo—the NZXT tugboat is $ 1,799 and the Maingear Turbo a sock $ 6,438—but we wo n’t have any early bet on desktops for comparison until we get more systems through our brand-new benchmarking regimen. At least this manner, you ‘ll see the integral spectrum of what a small or a bunch of money can get you. ( See more about how we test desktops. )
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
Our first quiz is UL ‘s PCMark 10, which simulates a kind of real-world productiveness and content creation workflows to measure overall system operation. The Legion Tower 5i scored well, particularly against the costly NZXT. It besides did well in PCMark 10 ‘s repositing subtest despite having a small 256GB solid-state drive. Three other benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to pace a personal computer ‘s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon ‘s Cinebench R23 uses that company ‘s Cinema 4D locomotive to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs ‘ Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates democratic apps ranging from PDF rendering and language recognition to machine learn. finally, we use the open-source video recording transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video recording cartridge holder from 4K to 1080p resolution ( lower times are good ) .
Our final productiveness test is Puget Systems ‘ PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the creative Cloud translation 22 of Adobe ‘s celebrated image editor program to rate a personal computer ‘s operation for message creation and multimedia applications. It ‘s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from open, rotating, resizing, and saving an prototype to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters. The Legion Tower 5i ‘s six-core CPU kept it well south of its high-octane competitors, but its numbers suggest that it ‘s absolutely capable of handling tasks that require meaning process muscle. naturally, an eight-core nick would fare better, but getting one of those in a bet on tugboat would mean spend well more .
Graphics and Gaming Tests
For Windows PCs, we run both synthetic and real-world bet on tests. Among the former are two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL ‘s 3DMark, Night Raid ( more meek, desirable for systems with integrated graphics ) and Time Spy ( more demand, desirable 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 crippled 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 gambling is its dulcet spot, no surprise given its low price. Assassin ‘s Creed Valhalla was a fight, averaging below the fortunate 60 frames per second ( federal protective service ), but that game is notoriously unmanageable even for high-end systems. It should be possible to explore 1440p gaming depending on the title, particularly with ocular quality settings dialed back a piece. The GeForce GTX 1660 lacks the ray-tracing capabilities of GeForce RTX cards, but you might not miss them ; see our feature of speech on radiate tracing and personal computer bet on .
An Entry-Level Gaming Star
The Lenovo Legion Tower 5i is a compelling low-cost gambling desktop, particularly 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 meek 8GB of memory, but that ‘s elementary to fix with a DIY upgrade. double memory drives, a clean design, and customizable lighting clinch the Legion ‘s Editors ‘ Choice award as an entry-level bet on column .
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i (2021)
4.0
Editors ‘ choice
See It
$ 1,499.99
at Amazon
Base Configuration Price $ 949.00
Pros
Cons
The Bottom Line
Lenovo ‘s entry-level Legion Tower 5i gaming desktop delivers improved performance and style at a low price .
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