Lenovo Legion T5 gaming desktop
ZDNET’s key takeaways
- The Lenovo Legion Tower 5 is accessible now for $1,880.
- This desktop excels at a variety of duties, from gaming to 3D picture rendering and graphic design.
- Nonetheless, due to the PC’s squat design, some customers could have problem discovering a snug place for it.
extra shopping for decisions
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Constructing a gaming PC might be troublesome when you’re new to the pastime. Luckily, pre-built desktops take away a lot of the guesswork; you’ll be able to count on them to ship dependable efficiency straight out of the field. Particularly since gaming desktops include more and more aggressive {hardware}.
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Lenovo’s Legion Tower 5 (or T5 for short) is a main instance of a stable prebuilt desktop. It’s a gaming laptop, however as I found over the couple of weeks of my testing, it’s versatile sufficient to achieve content material creation. Permit me to elucidate.
Desktop footprint
Trendy PC circumstances typically have a vertically tall design, a method of laptop known as a “tower.” This form is in style for quite a lot of causes: they facilitate airflow for cooling parts, however extra importantly, they take up much less bodily area.
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The Legion T5 does issues somewhat totally different. As a substitute of increasing upward, it is stout. It measures 8.31 x 19.31 x 16.3 inches. Beneath is a picture of the Legion T5 subsequent to my Maingear MG-1 (16.88 x 19 x 8.12 inches) beneath my desk. Each computer systems within the picture beneath are consistent with one another. Discover simply how a lot the Lenovo laptop stands proud (and the way a lot decrease it’s).
Discovering an area for the Legion T5 could show tough due to its stout body — at the least it was for me. I swapped out my private PC with the Lenovo desktop for a time, and infrequently discovered myself bumping the facet of the pc with my legs and chair. Fortunately, the perimeters and corners of the desktop are rounded, so I prevented something too painful.
All concerning the aesthetics
The selection between stout and tall tower PCs comes down to private choice. Admittedly, the Legion T5 appears to be like fairly cool. I actually favored the bumpy warmth vent on the high. I requested Lenovo if this design had any sensible functions, they usually instructed me it was only for aesthetic functions. Both means, it was a great name on their finish.
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Port choice is surprisingly restricted. A bulk of the inputs are positioned across the again of the desktop. Simply to spotlight just a few, you may discover three DisplayPort inputs, an HDMI 2.1 for outputting 4K video at 60Hz, and three totally different audio ports. That is all nice to have, however I actually would’ve favored it if the entrance had extra as a result of it solely has three: a 5Gbps USB-C enter, a 5Gbps USB-A port, and an audio jack.
At greatest, you may have sufficient room for a pair of headphones, a controller, and one accent. Extra ought to’ve been out there inside arm’s attain, as there’s loads of room. Lenovo’s Legion Tower 7i, for instance, has three USB-A inputs on the entrance.
One other neat factor concerning the Legion T5 is its ARGB lighting. The “A” stands for “addressable,” which is Lenovo’s fancy means of claiming customizable RGB lighting. Through the Legion Area app, customers can activate lights over sure parts, just like the rear fan or GPU. You possibly can combine and match no matter you wish to create enjoyable mild arrays.
Dynamic desktop
Underneath the hood is an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 graphics card, and 32GB of RAM. Unsurprisingly, gaming on the Lenovo Legion T5 felt clean, even when working demanding titles. This configuration allowed fast-paced shooters like “Name of Responsibility” and stylized motion video games like “Hades 2” to run and not using a hitch, conserving framerates persistently excessive. I used to be in a position to keep targeted on matches as an alternative of worrying about sudden dips in efficiency. Any gamer will inform you that having good stability makes a world of distinction.
The highly effective {hardware} brings out the visible options that make trendy video games shine. Lush environments, like these present in “Monster Hunter Wilds”, felt lifelike. Particle results had been explosive, and in-game lighting appeared true to life. The Legion T5’s means to assist a number of visible enhancers and nonetheless get principally clean efficiency permits the desktop to separate itself from the common prebuilt laptop.
I say “principally” as a result of I bumped into some visible glitches enjoying “Ultimate Fantasy 15” at its peak settings. Characters would spaz out, limbs flailing round as the sport struggled to run at such a excessive decision. To be honest, it is probably these glitches are the results of some type of driver situation, not essentially the {hardware} struggling to maintain up.
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Nonetheless, I wished to spotlight this second as a possible situation you may encounter. Whereas the {hardware} is actually highly effective, you’ll be able to at all times run into just a few efficiency troubles.
Past gaming, the Legion T5 proved to be a powerhouse for artistic duties. Workloads like 3D rendering in Blender profit vastly from the highly effective {hardware}. They cut back rendering wait instances, permitting customers to fast hop between preview renders and tasks. The workflow accelerates significantly. On Adobe Premiere Professional, video modifying felt seamless. I uploaded my very own 4K recording, and due to the {hardware}, I used to be in a position to seamlessly navigate by the video timeline, making use of numerous results with out slowdown.
My essential gripe with the {hardware} is that it solely comes with 1TB of storage. After putting in seven video games from Steam, I used up a lot of the SSD. At this time’s AAA video video games take up dozens of gigabytes of area, so 1TB simply does not fairly minimize it. Should you do not thoughts paying somewhat further, I like to recommend buying an external drive.
ZDNET’s shopping for recommendation
Lenovo’s Legion Tower 5 is at the moment out there at Finest Purchase for $1,880. That is a fairly good value. I used to be truthfully anticipating to be over $2,000. Should you want the additional area, you’ll be able to head over to Lenovo’s web site and buy the Tower 5i Gen 10, which has a 2TB SSD for $1,980. It has the identical graphics card, though the Tower 5i swaps out the AMD processor for an Intel Core Extremely 7 265F CPU.
For avid gamers on the go, I like to recommend the 10th-generation Lenovo Legion Pro 7i. It is a gaming laptop computer with barely higher {hardware} and a vibrant 16-inch 250Hz OLED display.
