The Legion Tower 7i is a clean and neatly packed gaming PC with a powerful Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 and Intel Core Ultra 9 285K tamed by a 360mm AIO cooler – which makes it a solid high-end prebuilt gaming rig, even if it is quite expensive. It’ll give you that powerful performance you want in a premium gaming PC, but if you’re into shiny RGB components, you may want to opt for RAM that doesn’t look like a naked piece of circuit board.

However, if all you’re interested in is graphics performance, there are certainly cheaper gaming PCs out there. And while I do like the RGB lighting, the case screams budget more than anything else. That may be a dealbreaker for some, but the Legion Tower 7i still offers everything you need in a gaming PC to take on modern AAA games at high settings.

Design and Features

The Legion Tower 7i slimmed down from last year’s model, which is great because it was quite chunky. It now measures 18.8 inches tall (previously 19.37 inches) and 16.34 inches wide (previously 18.27 inches). It’s still kind of chunky, but it’s an improvement.

But the Lenovo Legion Tower 7i is still your average 35-pound mid-tower blasted in a stormy gray paint that will make you mistake it for any other nondescript gaming PC until you turn the lights on. Then, you’ll get blasted with the bold RGB, highlighting the tower’s caged honeycomb aesthetic alongside its bright Legion logo. Meanwhile, the rounded edges and fans on top add to the mechanical aesthetic. If you’re looking at the tempered glass panel when the lights kick on, white LEDs glow and highlight the components in the chassis, while the liquid cooler, GPU, and rear fans alight in RGB. However, the RAM remains to be naked in the motherboard.

Popping open the glass panel was easy; I just removed two thumbscrews in the back and slid it off (getting it back on required similar minimal effort). While the RTX 5080 is a relatively average size, it does take up the size of two PCIe slots. Below that, there’s one PCIe 4.0 x16 and PCIe 3.0 slot, but if you want to plug anything into those ports, they’ll need to be relatively thin cards. But even with the tight packing, this is an extremely clean build, with the cables neatly packed.

Getting the back panel off was a bit harder. The thumbscrews were tight as heck (I had to pull out a screwdriver), and I had to put way more pressure than I should have to slide it off (and back on). The cables in the back were zip tied and shoved in the empty space in front of the PSU slot. It looks neat, but if you wanted to replace anything, you’ll need some scissors and some dexterity to avoid knocking a cable out of the PSU.

The front panel connectors are located at the top instead of the front, near the power button. There’s a headphone jack, one USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, two USB 2 Type-A, and one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C slot. It’s great to see a Type-C port on the front since it was missing last year, and gaming PCs need more than one Type-C slot in 2025.

You can find the other Type-C port on the back, which supports Thunderbolt 4. You also get four USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, two USB 2.0 Type-A, an RJ-45 Ethernet, and six audio ports. The number of audio ports is confusing, for sure, but its the same amount as on the previous model. There’s also a DisplayPort on the motherboard, which most people shouldn't use, but can be useful for troubleshooting.

The Legion Tower 7i also comes with a generic keyboard and mouse. If you’re buying an expensive gaming PC like this, you probably shouldn’t play games with a keyboard and mouse you could find in a lost and found bin. That seems brutal, but after playing a few matches of Marvel Rivals, the mouse could not keep up with my movements to defend myself before I got ganked. The keyboard is less offensive, but it’s still at the bottom of the barrel. Its membrane keys are mushy and don’t offer the satisfying feedback you need from a gaming keyboard, and the kickstand on the underside barely lifts it up, providing nearly no support for my wrists.

Software

Unfortunately, the Lenovo Legion Tower 7i does have some bloatware, like the Lenovo Vantage app, which keeps track of your warranty, system information, and can maintain hardware health with scans and driver updates. That is useful, especially if you don’t want to deal with Windows 11’s built in hardware management. Lenovo also pre-installed the ‘Lenovo Now’ app, which is essentially a link to the Lenovo Subscription Marketplace, which will try to sell you stuff you probably don’t need – you should probably uninstall that.

However, one tool you should actually keep on the machine is LegionSpace. This is where you can monitor your CPU, GPU, and RAM, change the lighting profile of your PC and adjust performance profiles between Quiet, Balance, and Performance. You can also use this app to overclock your GPU, which I wouldn’t do unless you’re comfortable doing the necessary tinkering.

Performance

That chunky card you see in the Legion Tower 7i is an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 GPU with 16GB of VRAM – that's as premium as you can get if you want to stay around $3,000. It's paired with an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K and 64GB of RAM. You won't be getting triple-digit frames in every game you play, but you won't need DLSS 4’s frame generation for 4K, 60 fps gaming.

Jumping into Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K with the Ray Tracing Ultra preset and DLSS set to Performance, the Legion Tower 7i hits a strong 76 fps. If you want to take advantage of that high refresh rate display you got for your birthday, throw on Frame Generation (x2) to get 124 fps. Jumping to Multi-Frame Generation (x4) will net you 198 fps.

Similarly, the Legion Tower 7i managed a strong 62 fps in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, while frame generation took it up to 94 fps. The Legion struggled the most with the Metro Exodus benchmark, hitting 59 fps, but that tracks since it’s a heavy workload without all the upscaling. A competitive game like Black Ops 6 runs smooth, at 121 fps, which is enough to catch the enemy slipping.

I hopped into a few matches of Marvel Rivals (trying to do those weeklies) at 4K, with the Ultra preset and DLAA, 4x Multi-Frame Generation. I averaged about 167 fps with 44 milliseconds of latency as I scorched a Jeff from across the arena with Phoenix’s cosmic flame. You won't be able to fill out a 4K, 240Hz display on max settings, but the Legion Tower 7i offers more than enough for the average gamer, even a competitive one. If you turn down a few settings, or play less demanding games, you’ll definitely be able to saturate a 240Hz refresh rate

If you don’t want to compromise, you can just get the Legion Tower 7i with an RTX 5090, but then you start getting to prices that make the Origin Millenium or the Maingear Apex Artist Series look a little more reasonable – and that’s saying something.

Rami Tabari is a contributing writer at IGN with over 9 years of experience in the tech and gaming industry. You can find his bylines at Laptop Mag and Tom's Guide (and on a random Predator review at Space.com). When Rami isn't wading through a sea of the latest gaming tech, he's agonizing over the worldbuilding in his upcoming novella.