This is the gaming PC you should buy under $1,000

I’d given up on the idea that you could pick up a gaming PC under $1,000. Between the rising cost of components and the demands of modern PC games, I thought the era of a unicorn gaming PC under $1,000 was behind us. The Lenovo Legion Tower 5i proved me wrong. It’s not only a gaming PC under $1,000 that can hold up today — it’s one of the best gaming desktops you can buy.

A smart configuration with a focus on gaming allows the Legion Tower 5i to come in under $1,000 while still delivering an excellent gaming experience. There are a few issues, particularly when it comes to future upgrades, but for those who want to get into PC gaming at a reasonable price without much fuss, the Legion Tower 5i is your ticket.

Specs and pricing

Undoubtedly, the most attractive part of the Lenovo Legion Tower 5i is its price. Available at Best Buy, the configuration I reviewed (see below) comes in at $1,150. If you shop through Lenovo’s website, you can pick up this exact configuration with 512GB of storage and get the rig for $990. It’s been years since I’ve seen a desktop under $1,000 worth recommending. The Legion Tower 5i fits that bill. It’s not just that the price is low — this is genuinely powerful gaming PC.

The Core i5-14400F at the heart of the PC isn’t anything to write home about. It’s a decent CPU with 10 cores spread across six performance cores and four efficiency cores, but it’s really built for the needs of gaming. I’m glad to see Lenovo trim down on the CPU to focus on gaming performance. I saw something similar with the Starforge Navigator earlier this year.

A slightly weaker CPU makes way for the RTX 4060 under $1,000, which is an excellent GPU for 1080p gaming. As I dig into my benchmarks, you’ll see that in action. More important than raw performance, the RTX 4060 supports Nvidia’s DLSS 3, giving you access to frame generation and super resolution in some of the most demanding games available today.

I put together a similar configuration with off-the-shelf parts, and it came out to about $800, minus a copy of Windows 11. It’s cheaper than buying the Legion Tower 5i, sure, but you also have to put everything together yourself. The premium Lenovo is asking for is about $200, which is perfectly reasonable.

If you have the budget to spare, Lenovo allows you to push this design further. You can pack in up to a Core i7-14700F and an RTX 4070 Ti Super, along with 32GB of memory, for $1,827. That’s a solid configuration, but the base version of the Legion Tower 5i really stands out due to the fact that it arrives under $1,000.

Build quality and design

The Legion Tower 5i looks incredible. Lenovo has nailed the design of a modern gaming PC here, with just the right mixture of gamer flair and clean design, with a textured front, long lines on the top of the case, and rounded corners. It’s easy to write off the design here as basic, but the more you look at the Tower 5i, the more you can appreciate the balance that Lenovo was able to achieve, especially stacked up against designs like the Alienware Aurora R15.

Internally, Lenovo gives you some solid upgrade options. The case includes two drive sleds for a 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch drive, and Lenovo pre-routes both SATA power and data cables to the slots so you can pop in a new hard drive and quickly expand your storage. The motherboard also includes four slots for RAM, so you can easily upgrade to more memory down the line — just make sure to avoid mixing and matching the included memory with new memory.

There’s even an extra NVMe slot on the motherboard, giving you even more options to expand your storage. These are all simple upgrades that shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to do. And Lenovo doesn’t put any roadblocks in your way.

More significant upgrades are a different matter. Lenovo uses its own motherboard design, so you don’t have any options for a full platform upgrade. In addition, Lenovo is using a non-modular 500W power supply with only a single 8-pin connector for PCIe power — you won’t be able to slot in a more powerful GPU without upgrading the power supply.

I can appreciate that Lenovo gives you options for critical upgrades like storage and memory, though I don’t see an argument for using a custom motherboard layout. Lenovo uses a standard layout in its Tower 7i, and given the popularity of custom PCs like the Origin Neuron, the lack of a standard motherboard layout is a missed opportunity.

Heating and cooling

The Legion Tower 5i has a fairly standard cooling setup. You get two 120mm intake fans in the front of the PC, along with a single 120mm exhaust fan in the rear. Lenovo doesn’t mess around with extra fans in the top or bottom of the PC, instead settling on a single path of airflow through the case. It works, too. The Tower 5i doesn’t get too loud under load in games.

The CPU is a different story. For the Core i5-14400F, Lenovo basically uses a box cooler. It’s a tiny heatsink with a tiny fan capable of dealing with CPUs that can get up to 65 watts, and when you push the CPU in a demanding workload like Cinebench, you’ll hear the CPU fan ramp up. For higher-end configurations, Lenovo uses a larger tower-style CPU cooler. I wasn’t able to test it, but I’d guess it’s much quieter.

Still, the cooler works. Under a full Cinebench R24 load, the Core i5-14400F maxed out at 88 degrees Celsius, and it took a few minutes for the CPU to reach that point. This CPU can operate up to 100 degrees, so you shouldn’t need to worry about thermal throttling.

Bloatware and configuration

The Lenovo Legion Tower 5i is a mainstream gaming PC. You can buy it at Best Buy, so you can expect some bloatware. Lenovo’s drug of choice is McAfee, which is preinstalled on the PC and is as annoying as ever. Not only do you get pop-ups asking you to engage McAfee’s protection and browser extensions but you’ll also get a Windows takeover when the service has expired, prompting you to upgrade or uninstall it.

It’s fairly tame all things considered — you can just uninstall McAfee the moment you set up the Legion Tower 5i. More important is how Lenovo allows you to manage the PC, which happens through Lenovo Vantage. There, you can get software updates, monitor your system’s vitals, and get support. Companies like Dell and HP spread out their support over several apps rather than condensing everything into one spot, so it’s great to see Lenovo set you up with a one-stop-shop for managing your PC.

As for the configuration, nothing was out of place. The memory was running at 4,400 MT/s as advertised, and Resizeable BAR was enabled for the GPU. The memory speed is strange, though. Although there are technically speeds below DDR5-4800, that’s the base speed you see most DDR5 run at. DDR5-4400 just wasn’t a great choice. It has higher latency than even DDR5-4000, and faster DDR5 has become the standard. There’s some performance loss, as you’ll see from the benchmarks below, though the Core i5-14400F isn’t as sensitive to memory speed given its lower overall performance.

The memory is more of an interesting note than anything else. You might see a slight drop in performance in games, but those situations should be few and far between. My best guess is that Lenovo chose DDR5-4400 because it’s not popular, and the company was likely able to cut the cost of production by choosing a slower memory spec.

Performance

The Lenovo Legion Tower 5i is a gaming PC first and foremost, and that shows up in its performance. There are some compromises, particularly with the CPU and slower DDR5 speeds. However, the Legion Tower 5i still holds up in the area it matters most, even if that means trading a bit of performance in other applications.

You can get a sense of CPU performance from my results below. The Core i5-14400F is below both the Ryzen 7 7700 in the HP Omen 40L and the Core i7-13700KF in the Alienware Aurora R16. However, it’s important to note that the Core i5-14400F is in a class below these two CPUs. It’s slower in apps like Premiere Pro and Photoshop, but it can still hold up for basic productivity tasks as long you don’t need as much CPU grunt as possible.

The main limiting factor here is the arrangement of cores in the Core i5-14400F. It’s effectively a six-core CPU, so apps that want to see eight strong performance cores will lose some performance. You can upgrade the Legion Tower 5i with a more powerful CPU if that’s your focus. For my review unit, the weaker CPU makes sense for a focus on gaming.

On the gaming front, the RTX 4060 shines. Here, I’m comparing the Legion Tower 5i to a custom RTX 4060 gaming PC with a more powerful CPU and faster DDR5 memory. Most graphics cards run within a few frames of each other, so the comparison here is trying to answer how much performance you’re giving up with the configuration Lenovo settled on. Some performance loss is expected, but even with that expectation, the Legion Tower 5i holds up surprisingly well.

This isn’t a PC built for 4K gaming, though it may be able to hit 60 frames per second (fps) in some titles with the help of DLSS 3. At 4K, completely constrained by the GPU, you can see that the Legion Tower 5i matches the custom RTX 4060 PC in Returnal and Red Dead Redemption 2. The custom PC gains a few frames in Horizon Zero Dawn and Cyberpunk 2077, likely due to how those games can scale to CPUs with higher core counts.

1440p is more comfortable for the RTX 4060 in games like Horizon Zero Dawn and Red Dead Redemption 2, where you’re able to hit above 60 fps with the Legion Tower 5i. To be clear, this configuration isn’t built for 1440p. It’s built for 1080p, and more demanding games like Alan Wake 2 or Black Myth: Wukong will force you down to that resolution. Still, it’s great to see how you’re able to get above 60 fps in large AAA games at 1440p with a PC that costs less than $1,000.

Still, 1080p is where the Legion Tower 5i shines the most. Even the demanding Cyberpunk 2077 is running above 60 fps, and that’s before you factor in the upscaling or frame generation available to the RTX 4060 inside this PC. Performance is shockingly close to the custom RTX 4060 gaming PC at 1080p, with only Cyberpunk 2077 showing a clear difference. Again, this is due to how the game can scale to larger CPUs, and a good showcase of what the Core i5-14400F gives up in practice — not much.

I didn’t include upscaling and frame generation performance here, and that’s for good reason. At 1080p, the benefits of upscaling start to disappear. Because of that, it’s important for a desktop to nail raw performance. From there, upscaling is just a cherry on top. Thankfully, the Legion Tower 5i meets that mark.

Should you buy the Lenovo Legion T5?

Yes. For $1,000, the Lenovo Legion Tower 5i is a fantastic gaming PC. There are some oddities with the memory, and you can save money by building the PC yourself. For those who want to jump into PC gaming without a thought about configuration and piecing everything together, however, the Legion Tower 5i guides you down the right path.

The major limiting factor is upgradability. Lenovo offers a lot of options to perform simple upgrades with extra hard drive space, pre-routed cables, and extra room on the motherboard for both storage and memory. When it comes time for a more significant upgrade, however, you don’t have a lot of options in the Legion Tower 5i. And in the case of a full platform swap, you’ll have to ditch the Tower 5i and start from scratch.

That’s a reasonable caveat given the price of the Legion Tower 5i. Considering the performance you get out of the box, you shouldn’t need to make that significant of an upgrade for quite some time.