Lenovo’s Legion Tower 5 Offers Schools a Great Loadout for Entry-Level Esports

Here’s How the GeForce RTS 3060 Graphics Card Stacks Up

Lenovo made a lot of smart, economical choices when designing the Lenovo Legion Tower 5 desktop PC for gaming, especially for esports. Costs for an esports gaming rig can quickly spiral out of control, but having hardware that is not on par with the competition can spell doom for the side with inferior gear.

Perhaps the toughest choice facing the Legion’s designers was which graphics card to use. These can be expensive, sometimes contributing to almost half the cost of a new system. Ultimately, Lenovo went with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, widely considered to be one of the best midrange graphic cards available.

I tested the Legion and its RTX 3060 with a variety of games used in esports, starting with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. A high frame rate, or frames per second (fps) — which measures how many times per second an image is rendered on the screen — is one of a competitive gamer’s biggest needs. A higher frame rate equals smoother performance and more realistic game play; lower frame rates make for jerky motion, bad lag and getting killed a lot on the battlefield.

The general rule in competitive gaming is that frame rates should be at least double a monitor’s refresh rate, ideally. That is starting to change as refresh rates climb. For now, when using a standard LED with a 60-hertz refresh rate, players will want a graphics card that can output at least 120 fps, especially if playing competitively.

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Some gaming monitors (like the recently reviewed Acer Predator XB273) can support refresh rates up to 240 or even 280 hertz. In that case, the frame rate probably does not need to double the refresh rate, but it should be boosted to at least meet the monitor’s capabilities.

In my testing as I played Counter-Strike, almost no graphic settings or monitor combination was a problem for the 3060 card inside the Legion. With high graphic settings and 1080p resolution, frame rates soared as high as 325, which is admittedly an older game. I got the same level of great performance with Fortnite, a more modern game, which nonetheless is not too graphically intense.

The card’s performance with the recently released, graphically intensive Call of Duty Modern Warfare II was also good when playing in competitive matches. Depending on how I tweaked the settings, the Lenovo Legion T5 and its graphics card easily achieved between 70 and 110 fps, and the game was always smooth and very playable. I saw similar performance with the soccer-like, vehicular combat title Rocket League, where I continually achieved over 100 fps.

While the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 might not be the highest-performing graphics card available, it did extremely well in all of my testing with a host of games used in competition, making it a perfect choice for esports on a budget.