I really enjoyed my time with the Lenovo Legion Tower 7i Gen 8 series pre-build PC. There is a romance to building your own PC. It becomes your baby in a way, and every part of it is, in a way, a part of you. But it’s not the only way for a PC to be your baby. You can adopt! Pre-built PCs can be a fantastic way to bring a powerful machine into your home and can be the solution to a number of reasons that you might not be able to build your own PC.
Maybe the parts you want aren’t available à la carte, or maybe, like me, you lack the patience, steady hands and cable management skills to put together something you’d be proud of. Lenovo doesn’t have these problems, though. They have the parts and skilled builders that put together the Lenovo Legion Tower 7i Gen 8 series.
The Legion Tower 7i Gen 8 series comes in many forms, with different options for processors, GPUs, memory, storage, cooling, etc. The unit that I reviewed was one of their top-end ones, with a 13th Gen. i9 13900KF processor, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090, 64 GB of DDR5 RAM, a 2 GB SSD and a 250W 360 mm liquid cooler with three fans (one rear and two top). To say that this PC was a beast is an understatement.
There is a ton of I/O on the Lenovo Legion Tower 7i Gen 8, with 4 USB-A 2.0 ports, 4 USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports (capable of data transfer speeds of 5Gbps), 1 USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 port (capable of 10Gbps data transfer), a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port (supporting 20Gbps data transfer), 6 audio ports with an S/PDIF port and all the usuals, like headphones/microphone jacks, power supply and Ethernet port. There is also an LED switch on the back to control the RGB. The number of USB ports is most welcome to this content creator, with a near-endless number of peripherals on my desk, but I would love to see a couple more USB-C ports on this (or any) PC, given the number of peripherals that come with a USB-C to USB-C cable.
“The Legion Tower 7i Gen 8 series comes in many forms, with different options for processors, GPUs, memory, storage, cooling and more.”
Once you have a PC in front of you, all you want to do is push it as far as it can go to see what you can do on it. As someone who games, streams, edits and designs, I can be pretty rough on a PC, often finding out its limitations quickly. I spent the beginning of my review period loading all the software I needed to do my thing, from DaVinci Resolve to OBS to all my games, hooking up all of my gear, and not struggling to find USB real estate. It was a little crowded in the back of the PC, but I like to keep the more readily available ports on the front of the PC available for temporary gear, for which there was plenty of room.
Gaming was such a leap, moving from my RTX 2060 to a 40 series GPU. Without hesitation, I pushed my graphics for Fortnite, GTA V and Minecraft (with the Patrix texture pack that lagged out my PC in no time) to the limit. It was like I was in a new world. The mediocre graphics settings that I was used to allow me to game and stream simultaneously were fine, but to get to change the graphics to their most epic settings made me feel like I finally had some elite gear.
I was able to play any of the games with unlimited frame rates, the highest graphics settings and shader quality. Each gaming experience was so smooth and so beautiful that I dreamed about a scenario where I told Lenovo a long story about being mugged while taking the Legion Tower 7i Gen 8 for a walk.
“With PCs like the Legion Tower 7i Gen 8, two-PC setups are essentially obsolete, unless you are doing something beyond my current imagination.”
Combining gaming with OBS was also a dream. The recording was terrific using the AV1 encoding available on the RTX 4090, using fewer resources to get quality video and allowing me to keep my game settings high. Streaming was also easy, although I should qualify this by saying that my scenes didn’t have all the usual elements I use on my regular setup, so it was much less intensive. I did have my browser events, like alerts, set up, but it was an overall, simplified setup. With PCs like the Legion Tower 7i Gen 8, two-PC setups are essentially obsolete unless you do something beyond my imagination.
I pushed the editing pretty hard as well, with 4K footage and an abundance of plugins and effects, and not once was there any lag or issues with rendering. Overall render speeds were 50-70% faster than on my own PC. With the sheer power of a 13th Generation Intel Processor, a top-of-the-line GPU, and quadrupling the amount of RAM, I didn’t need to test that much to know that it would be better than I have, but I was impressed with the performance nonetheless.
It was almost like I didn’t know there was a world where you could smoothly edit a video. The only difficulty I had with this was that I knew I’d have to go back to that old world, where I had to wait a bit when moving through the timeline to be able to jog through the timeline frame by frame.
The Legion Tower 7i Gen 8’s value on Lenovo’s website was $4019.99 USD; a premium price for a premium PC, but with a different combo of parts, you can go as low as $2429.99 USD, and sales are always happening, saving you from 10% up, putting a significant amount of cashback in your hand. When I tried the Lenovo Legion Tower 7i Gen 8 Desktop PC, I sought to push it to its limits but only found that its idea of limits wasn’t the same as mine. What I thought would be ways to bring the PC to the brink were really just ways for it to impress me further and to think it was all pre-built.
