Pros & Cons
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- Potent performance for the price
- Relatively quiet even under load
- Sleek black chassis with honeycomb accents
- Reliable Lenovo Legion support
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- Challenges in upgrading or tinkering with components
- Large case footprint
Lenovo Legion Tower 5 Gen 10 (2025) Specs
| Boot Drive Capacity (as Tested) | 1 |
| Boot Drive Type | SSD |
| Desktop Class | Gaming |
| Graphics Card | Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 |
| Operating System | Windows 11 |
| Processor | AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D |
| RAM (as Tested) | 32 |
If you want to spend midrange money on a gaming desktop PC, Lenovo's 10th-generation Legion Tower 5 (starting at $2,089.99; we tested a Best Buy-exclusive $1,879.99 configuration) poses a tricky question. This Legion Tower's powerful AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D and Nvidia RTX 5070 give it a shocking amount of performance for the price, and it comes with Lenovo’s superb tech support and warranty coverage. But here's the trade-off: The Legion Tower 5 has a non-standard design that eats up more desk space and makes upgrading challenging. This makes the Legion Tower a fine set-it-and-forget-it PC gaming rig that fumbles on upgradability, which many PC gamers find crucial. Our most recent Editors' Choice award-winning gaming desktop is the cost-no-object Velocity Micro Raptor Z55a, while the Alienware Aurora (2025) presents a fine step-up alternative to Lenovo's latest Legion Tower.
Configurations: A Decent Midrange Choice
The Legion Tower 5 comes in a few different configurations, all combining an AMD Ryzen CPU with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 or RTX 5070 Ti, which helps keep the price point in the midrange zone. Lenovo's base model, which will run you $2,089.99, features an AMD Ryzen 7 7700X processor, an RTX 5070 graphics card, 32GB of DDR5 5200MT/S memory, a 1TB SSD, and an 850-watt (W) power supply (PSU).
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Lenovo also sells the Legion Tower 5 with Ryzen X3D CPU options, including our review configuration, which features an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, an Nvidia RTX 5070, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, a 1TB SSD, and an 850W PSU. You can get this model from Best Buy for $1,879 (seemingly exclusively priced) or on sale for as low as $1,539.99 on Best Buy at the time of writing. You can upgrade the Ryzen 7 X3D configuration with an RTX 5070 Ti or bump it up to a Ryzen 9 7950X3D and RTX 5070 Ti with a 2TB SSD.
Design: A Sleek and Subtle Revision
Lenovo prioritizes a lower-key look with this Legion Tower. It ditches the honeycomb front we saw in previous Legion models, introducing a more streamlined design with a sleek eclipse-black chassis and subtle honeycomb details inside the case.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The redesign might seem underwhelming, but I like the more subtle accents, since they make it easier to decide which part of the desktop to show off. The low-key aesthetic also helps the Legion Tower 5 go incognito during meetings.
The new footprint isn't quite as subtle, as Lenovo switched up the motherboard and case configuration with Tower 5. At 15.1 by 8.3 by 18 inches (HWD), the desktop measures a bit longer and squatter than your standard mid-size gaming tower—more of a squat rectangle than a standard upright design—so it takes up more desk space than your average gaming PC.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)This also means your I/O ports on the back panel are in slightly different places, with the power cable on top and the GPU outputs on the bottom.
Upgradability: Not for the Hobby Builder
Lenovo uses a non-standard component setup for the Legion Tower 5 Gen 10 redesign, making the machine a little tricky to upgrade. Even though the case has a bigger external footprint, the inside is beyond crowded, as the honeycomb accents cover the PSU behind the front panel of the chassis. You'll also find just one PCIe 4 spot available on the motherboard, so it will be a tight fit if you plan to add any PCIe accessories.
Regardless, it's not impossible to update the Lenovo. You can switch out the default RAM kit (if you’re careful and have small fingers), and you can replace the GPU if you remove the clunky CPU cooler to give yourself room to access the motherboard. But if you plan to replace the PSU, good luck: It will be tough to find a unit that fits the case nicely and routes well to the power port on the rear panel. You'll also have a hard time accessing the PSU from the back side of the case, so rerouting any PSU cables is an exercise in frustration.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Thankfully, since the Tower 5 has an AMD build, you can upgrade the CPU without worrying about Lenovo’s proprietary Legion CPU heatsink-and-fan combo; it will work with any AM5 socket processor. So that's a plus, assuming you don’t ever need additional power overhead.
Summing up: If you want to install a more powerful GPU or CPU sometime after buying this desktop, the wise choice is a different tower. It would also be tough to upgrade the Tower 5’s cooling, so adding more powerful components may leave you with inadequate airflow. The default configurations will give you enough airflow to keep the processors operating at full power, but I’m not confident the Tower 5 could withstand an upgrade to the RTX 5080.
Software: Legion Space Is Still Just Somewhat Useful
Like most Windows desktops, the Legion Tower 5 operates smoothly out of the box once you get through the Windows setup process. The preinstalled Legion Space app lets you adjust your performance settings and monitor your CPU, GPU, and RAM temperatures. You can also tinker with your RGB lighting and overclock your GPU from within the app, so you don’t need to fool around with your BIOS settings.
However, if you plan to overclock the RAM or GPU from the shipping defaults, I recommend adjusting the fan curves in the Legion Tower’s BIOS to ensure enough cooling for the increased memory and clock speeds.
Performance Testing: Landing Right on Target
We tested the new Legion in a series of productivity, content creation, graphics, and gaming benchmarks to see how it compares with competition like the Asus TUF Gaming T500MV ($1,299.99 as tested), the Alienware Aurora (2025) ($2,299.99 as tested), and the Alienware Area-51 ($4,649.99 as tested). With this broader representation of the power spectrum, we can understand how the Legion Tower 5 compares with the gamut of Nvidia RTX 50-series GPUs.
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Productivity and Content Creation Tests
Our primary overall benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC's storage throughput.
Three more tests we use are CPU-centric or processor-intensive: Maxon's Cinebench 2024 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Creators rates a PC's image editing prowess with a variety of automated operations in Adobe Photoshop 25. (The Alienware desktop could not complete this test.)
The Legion Tower 5's robust Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU performed well on these tasks but lagged behind the more powerful Alienware Area-51 (as we'd expect). None of the productivity tests really leveraged the Legion's 3D cache, though, and Lenovo's desktop didn't end up too far behind. Having the dominant parts here, the Area-51 desktop's commanding overall result makes sense, but these numbers nevertheless indicate that the Aurora is a potent PC for general use and content creation, especially for its sale price at Best Buy.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
We challenge all desktops' graphics with a quintet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K) use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds.
Steel Nomad's regular and Light subtests focus on APIs more commonly used for game development, like Metal and DirectX 12, to assess gaming geometry and particle effects.
We then turn to Solar Bay to measure ray-tracing performance in a synthetic environment. This benchmark works with Vulkan for Windows and Android and Metal for Apple devices, subjecting 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—all benchmarked at full HD (1080p or 1200p), 2K (1440p or 1600p), and 4K (2160p) resolution—represent competitive shooter, open-world, and simulation games, respectively. Each game runs at high detail or the highest available settings: Extreme for Call of Duty, Overdrive for Cyberpunk, and Ultra High for F1 24.
With Call of Duty, the Extreme graphics preset can produce triple-digit frame rates even on low-end PCs, so this approach promotes sensible results to evaluate high frame-rate performance. (The Asus system could not complete our Call of Duty benchmark.) Our Cyberpunk 2077 test settings aim to push PCs to their limit, so we run it on the all-out Ray Tracing Overdrive preset without DLSS or FSR. Finally, F1 represents our DLSS effectiveness (or FSR on AMD systems) test, demonstrating a GPU’s capacity for frame-rate-boosting and upscaling technologies. The capacity of these frame-rate boosts changes with the version of frame generation tech available, with DLSS 2 and 3 stitching in one AI-generated frame for every originally rendered frame, and the latest DLSS 4 inserting up to three additional frames. (FSR can generate up to four new frames per original, while XeSS can only stitch in one new frame per original frame.)
The Legion Tower 5 and its RTX 5070 GPU stayed in the middle of the pack, trailing the Area-51 (which rocks a high-flying RTX 5080 GPU). On both real-world and synthetic benchmarks, the Legion ranked about where we’d expect, given the power differential.
Lenovo's desktop pushed smooth frame rates at 1080p and 1440p, but genuinely struggled at 4K—also in line with its expected performance. This is where the next GPU up the ladder within the Aurora desktop showed what it can get you for the extra cash, which is better performance at 4K in some games. While the Legion Tower benefits from the Ryzen 7’s onboard 3D cache, it isn't enough to close the gap with the Aurora's step-up graphics card in the gaming tests.
Regardless, keep the Lenovo's benchmarks in perspective. The Legion Tower 5 provides a much more compelling price-to-performance ratio than the more powerful Alienware desktops, making it an excellent midrange choice.