Lenovo Legion Tower 7i Gen 8 (2024) Review | PCMag

Redesigned last year and updated this year with 14th Gen Intel CPUs and Nvidia GeForce RTX Super graphics cards, the Legion Tower 7i Gen 8 ($2,569.99 as tested) is Lenovo's best gaming desktop. This beast is built for 4K gaming and features a massive liquid-cooling solution and RGB lighting galore. The boutique Origin Genesis may present even more luxury, but the relative value equation of this particular Legion model is hard to beat. It earns our Editors' Choice award for mainstream gaming desktops.

A blacked-out case and tempered glass mark this Legion as a pure gaming machine. You'll find enough RGB lighting to illuminate a small room. The included Lenovo Vantage app features three lighting profiles and lets you tailor brightness and patterns across seven lighting zones.

At 19.4 by 8.3 by 18.3 inches, this Legion is larger than many mid-towers, such as the Alienware Aurora R16, but it's not entirely on the scale of an all-out monolith like the Origin Genesis. It easily accommodates an extra-long GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super graphics card and a 360mm CPU liquid cooling solution for its Core i9-14900KF processor.

The top front panel features two 10Gbps USB Type-A ports (an improvement over the 5Gbps ports seen when this desktop debuted with 13th Gen Core processors), two retro USB 2.0 ports, and separate 3.5mm headphone and microphone ports. Unfortunately, the case still has no front USB Type-C port. The power button is on the right.

Moving around back, the motherboard backplane has one 20Gbps USB-C port, four more 10Gbps USB-A ports, another USB 2.0 duo, a 2.5Gbps Ethernet jack, and six audio jacks including optical-out (S/PDIF). You won't find any monitor output on the motherboard since the Core i9-14900KF lacks integrated graphics, but the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super card serves up the expected one HDMI and three DisplayPort monitor outputs. The internal wireless card supports Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3, not the latest Wi-Fi 7 standard.

The Legion Tower 7i follows the aftermarket's lead by using all standardized components, so you won't have to source a proprietary part for upgrades or repairs down the line.

A sticker advises laying this tower on its side before removing the tempered-glass side panel, secured by two retainer-style thumbscrews. The spacious interior is well laid out. Cable management is respectable, if not outstanding, with most cables tied off or not visible.

The triple-slot, triple-fan GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super dominates the view. Its dual-zone RGB lighting is intricate even by aftermarket standards. One PCI Express x1 slot is available below it.

The ATX (9.6-by-12-inch) motherboard is based on the Intel Z790 chipset and has a blackout design with many heatsinks. Its four DIMM slots support 128GB of RAM; the two 16GB modules installed here look generic in this otherwise flashy interior. It also has two M.2 Type-2280 slots for storage drives.

For cooling, three 120mm fans on the liquid-cooling radiator provide airflow, while one 120mm rear and two 120mm top fans serve exhaust duties. This desktop isn't silent, but the fan noise melds into the background, and it increased only mildly during our benchmark tests.

The bottom compartment houses the surprisingly modular 850-watt power supply. Two toolless 3.5-inch drive bays with pre-run power and SATA cables for easy storage expansion are ahead of it.

Our Legion includes Windows 11 Home and is covered by a one-year warranty. It was mostly free of unwanted software except for a McAfee antivirus trial. A basic USB keyboard and mouse are also included; serious gamers will put these aside.

Our Legion features an Intel Core i9-14900KF CPU (24 total cores, 5.6GHz turbo), an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super graphics card, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB NVMe solid-state drive. The price fluctuated between $2,329.90 and $2,569.99 during our review period. Higher-end configurations are available with a GeForce RTX 4080 Super GPU.

At this writing, a comparable HP Omen 45L was $2,589. HP allows custom configurations, whereas this Legion is only available preconfigured. I also saw the Alienware Aurora R16 for $1,999, though it had a Core i9-14900F instead of a higher-wattage KF-series chip and isn't at Lenovo’s quality level. Overall, the Legion appears to be competitively priced and is much less money than a boutique PC like the abovementioned Genesis.

Our selection of comparison systems is a bit limited at the moment since we've just revamped our benchmark-software test suite. We begin with the MSI Vision Elite RS, which packs an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, followed by the HP Omen 35L, which has an RTX 4080 Super. Beyond those are a pair of GeForce RTX 4060 desktops, the Lenovo Legion Tower 5i Gen 8 and the MSI Codex R2. Our Legion Tower 7i is most comparable with the HP based on component choices alone.

We run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.

The next few benchmarks stress the CPU, using all available cores and threads to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. All of these tests are also cross-platform, working comparatively across x86, Arm64, and Mac M-series processors. Maxon's Cinebench 2024 uses the company's Redshift engine to render a complex image using the CPU or GPU. We run the multi-core CPU benchmark that works across all of a processor's cores and threads—the more powerful the chip, the higher the score—and its single-core variant.

Geekbench 6.3 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. We record its multi- and single-core scores; higher numbers are better. Our last CPU stress test is the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.8, which converts a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution; lower times are better.

Next, we run one cross-platform content creation benchmark on all systems: Adobe Photoshop 2024 using the 1.2.20 version of PugetBench for Creators by Puget Systems. This test rates a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes various general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

PCMark’s main test saw the Legion Tower 7i finish just below the Vision Elite. As anticipated, given that the two share a Core i9 K-series chip, they matched each other in the CPU tests, though the Legion fell behind in Photoshop. The other desktops, which use far less potent CPUs, weren't in contention.

We test the graphics inside all laptops and desktops with three cross-platform gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Steel Nomad and its Light variant, Wild Life and its Extreme variant, and Solar Bay.

The Steel Nomad tests use the DirectX 12, Vulkan, or Metal graphics APIs, depending on the processor in play. Both are non-ray-traced benchmarks. Steel Nomad is built for high-end gaming systems and runs at 4K resolution, while the Light version runs at 1440p with less detail.

Wild Life and Wild Life Extreme are less demanding than Steel Nomad, though the two run at 1440p and 4K resolution, respectively. This test aims to compare midrange Windows and macOS systems, tablets, and smartphones.

We turn to Solar Bay to measure ray tracing performance in a synthetic environment. Built on Vulkan 1.1 for Windows and Android (and Metal for Apple devices), Solar Bay subjects 3D scenes to increasingly intense ray-traced workloads at 1440p.

Our real-world gaming testing comes from the in-game benchmarks of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and F1 2024. These three games represent competitive shooter games, open-world games, and simulation games, respectively. We run the tests at 1080p, 1440p, and 2560p (4K) at peak detail settings.

The Legion Tower 7i has the third-most powerful GPU behind the MSI and HP, and it mostly scored that way in both our synthetic and real-world gaming benchmarks. It has ample horsepower for 4K gaming. The HP and its RTX 4080 Super proved faster, particularly at 4K, but the difference wasn't acute in most instances.

The Legion Tower 7i Gen 8 meets the demands of even the most hard-core gamers. This impressive tower excels at running the latest 4K games and looks the part with a flashy case and vivid RGB lighting. Its serviceable design and use of standardized components, such as a modular power supply, are commendable. While adding Wi-Fi 7 and a front USB Type-C port would be welcome, these are minor issues in the grand scheme. Overall, the Legion Tower 7i Gen 8 earns our Editors' Choice award for mainstream gaming desktops.

Lenovo’s Legion Tower 7i Gen 8 gaming desktop powers through 4K games in style, rocking an easily upgradable case with slick, customizable RGB lighting.

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Computers are my lifelong obsession. I wrote my first laptop review in 2005 for NotebookReview.com, continued with a consistent PC-reviewing gig at Computer Shopper in 2014, and moved to PCMag in 2018. Here, I test and review the latest high-performance laptops and desktops, and sometimes a key core PC component or two. I also review enterprise computing solutions for StorageReview.

I work full-time as a technical analyst for a business software and services company. My hobbies are digital photography, fitness, two-stroke engines, and reading. I’m a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology.

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