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.