LENOVO ISN’T MESSING AROUND with its Legion gaming PCs. They are resolutely, uncompromisingly, just PCs. Sure, there’s the faintest nod to ‘gamer’ styling with the RGB-illuminated front panel and see-through side, but the Legion Tower 5i is, without wanting to sound at all mean, pretty basic.
I think it’s grand. I’m all for that when it comes to affordable gaming PCs; I don’t want to see money wasted on needless luxuries when I’m chasing down a good budget rig. The CPU cooler is a no-name brand, there are no VRM heatsinks or SSD-cooling plates on the barebones motherboard, and the memory sticks are bare PCBs.
The OEM Nvidia RTX 4060 graphics card is similarly simple, but beautifully so. I’m into miniature cards where they make sense, and the low-end Ada Lovelace GPU is so efficient that it doesn’t need a massive dual-slot, triple-fan cooling array to keep it running to full effect.
Thankfully, at this level, we have components smart and efficient enough that they don’t overly tax the cooling options available, so there’s no fan noise or overheating to complain about. Neither the CPU or GPU go beyond the 76 C mark under heavy gaming loads, and while the Intel processor will hit 95 C when all its cores are being hit at 100 percent processing load, that’s actually entirely standard.
Lenovo has gone for the Core i5 14400F, a ten-core, 16-thread Raptor Lake Refresh chip that’s arguably one of the best budget CPUs around. It’s no productivity beast, I’ll be honest. Despite that effective ten-core labeling, what you’re getting are actually just six Hyperthreaded Performance cores, with a further four Efficient cores for lighter workloads. But for gaming, those P-cores are the important factor, and are more than capable of delivering data to the GPU in a speedy enough manner to keep the frames rolling.