Review: Lenovo Legion Tower 7i Gen 8 (Windows PC)

About five years ago, I built my own PC, for the first time in at least 15 years, having used Macs in the interim. Last year I went back to a Mac Mini on the desk, and then recently decided to go back to Windows for reasons I wrote about yesterday. Building a computer is definitely satisfying, though the idea that these machines still require big bulky rectangles is a little weird. This time around, I didn't really want to build, provided there were solid options using fairly conventional parts. Lenovo seemed to get solid reviews for their gaming computers in that sense, though the wisdom of the Internet said don't buy anything that isn't well discounted. And so the algorithm pointed me at this monster.

The Mac Mini was $1,600 early last year, which is pretty steep, though the exact same model is now $1,300. When I priced stuff out last year, I probably would have had to spend well over $2,000 for a PC that met my needs. I misjudged the Mac situation, but you can read that prior post for that. What I landed on from Lenovo was a configuration that included an Intel i9-14900KF CPU, the current top of the line in the Core series, and an RTX 4080 Super GPU, the second-best from Nvidia's consumer line. The GPU right now is generally going for around $1,100 by itself. Then pile in 32 gigs of RAM, a terabyte of storage, a water cooler for the CPU, an 850W power supply, and all kinds of rainbow lighting packed into a pretty nice case. The regular price was about $3,200, but it was on sale for $2,000, or $1,900 after a credit card rebate. That's for almost-top-of-the-line everything. And I didn't have to build it! There was some price parity between Macs and PC's for awhile, but the extra RAM and storage costs don't make sense. This was a no-brainer.

The port selection is just OK. There are two USB-A 2.0 slots on the front, as well as two USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 that can do the 10 Gbps. The back has a pair of 2.0, four 3.2 Gen 1, one 3.2 Gen 2 and a single USB-C 3.2 Gen 2. It's not Lenovo's fault that there are so many standards, but why the hell did they include all of the flavors? Not having any Thunderbolt 4 ports (40 Gbps), or any Type-C on the front, is pretty weird for a machine of this caliber. They're less necessary when everything is so baked in, but it's still weird. On the inside, there's only one slot available, in part because the gigantic video card takes up three, and there were two open M2 slots for SSD's, where I dropped in the 4 TB I already had, and a 2 TB to put games in. There were also some SATA cables inside, so I put in a "slow" old 4 TB SSD that I can use for backups. So yeah, I guess there are 11 TB of storage in that thing now. As a side note, cable management inside is well done, and there are no "razor blade" edges to the metal parts in the case.

The system drive that it came with benchmarks around 6,200 MB/s, which is pretty great, while the two others I put in exceed 7,000 MB/s. I can't even wrap my head around that when the fastest thing in the computer I built in 2019 was 1,800 MB/s. The RAM is rated for some speed, but reviewers say that some motherboard decisions limit it from its full potential. I doubt it matters much.

I have a pair of 27" 4K monitors from LG that are five years old. Sadly, one has a dark corner, and even ghosts a little from time to time, which is disappointing. I don't want to replace it until the cost of OLED panels come down. In any case, every game I've tried to run from Game Pass or my Steam library will run at a full 60 fps, the refresh rate of the monitor, with all settings turned to their highest and at the full native 4K resolution. I would expect nothing less for a video card that is ordinarily that expensive. Still, it's something to behold. There are scenes in The Last Of Us that look insanely real, like they're from a live-action movie. The Xbox Series X does an OK job at 3D rendering relative to its cost, but the 4080 Super is 2x-4x at everything. Of course, the video card also consumes more than twice the energy, too.

Setup was pretty easy. The included keyboard and mouse were junk, which is fine because I have my own. The software preloaded is minimal, though first to come off was some McAfee crap. Lenovo has a tool to tweak overclocking the CPU and GPU, which is kind of neat, as well as a utility to find stuff to update that doesn't always come through the Windows Update channel, like BIOS updates. This was recently important because of a fix from Intel for the newer CPU's that were ordering excessive voltage and in some cases damaging themselves. Beyond that, no junk, just a clean build of Windows.

The system runs pretty quietly when you're not gaming, but obviously the fans have to work harder when the GPU is putting off all of that heat. I think the GPU has three fans, plus three on the front of the system, two on top over the water cooler radiator, and one fan on the back, plus whatever is in the power supply. I'm surprised that it isn't louder when idling. Even when you are gaming, it's not distracting loud. It does put a lot of heat into my office, which already runs warm in the summer. Oh, and those fans all have LED's in them that you can set to be whatever color or rainbow sequence that you want. The video card and the water cooler also have the LED's. It's kind of obnoxious, but typical gamer stuff, I guess. On my last self-built machine in the mid-aughts, I had to add some LED strips to the inside, and blue was the only color.

Overall, I'm really impressed with Lenovo general design of the machine, lack of Thunderbolt not withstanding. It's well thought out. I'm very happy with the performance so far. I did some testing in Davinci Resolve, and editing is super smooth, even with multiple streams. Rider, which I use for coding, gets around a large solution easily enough. The whole package is an extraordinary value for the price, and I will enjoy again having access to games.