Hardware

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

With high-end features, the economical new gaming desktop places competitive K-12 esports within reach.

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John Breeden II is an award-winning reviewer and public speaker with 20 years of experience covering technology.

Esports offers a new kind of competitive activity where students, both boys and girls, can participate in the same leagues without restrictions based on their overall athleticism or physical ability.

Perhaps the only barrier to entry for schools is having good equipment for esports competitors to practice or compete with. Ideally, this would be in a dedicated space where students can work on both the fundamentals of gameplay and the teamwork skills they need to win matches.

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Lenovo’s Legion Tower 5 Offers Affordable, High-End Features

At the high end, a dedicated gaming or esports PC can cost up to $10,000 or more. However, Lenovo has designed a more affordable point of entry that not only comes packed with a surprising number of high-end features but also will look really cool sitting in an esports arena or practice room.

The Lenovo Legion Tower 5 is a desktop system designed for gaming. It has everything an esports gamer needs, including a fast Intel Core i7 processor, 32 gigabytes of speedy DDR5 SDRAM and a powerful NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card. The Legion T5 even has dual hard drives, just like a high-end gaming rig: a fast, 1 terabyte solid-state drive to handle the OS and whatever game is actively being played; and a slower Serial ATA drive, also 1TB, to store other games and game data.

The Lenovo Legion T5 Stops Critical Components from Overheating

There are many other features that make the Legion a good choice for an esports lab. One of the most important is a well-designed cooling system, which is absolutely critical to keep internal components from suffering heat-related performance issues. A screened vent covers almost the entire front of the case, with more venting on the top and back. Two huge fans draw in cool air from the front and blow it over the Legion’s critical components, which are mounted and suspended in the middle of the tower, before expelling heated air through another powerful fan. In testing, the system remained cool even after hours of hardcore gaming, and the fans were surprisingly quiet — something to consider if a program intends to have a lot of towers in the same room.

DIG DEEPER: Learn how esports content creators help level up K–12 teams.

The Legion T5 also features dazzling LED lights that glow in 16 million colors and can use 12 special effects. So, if they want to, schools can program their towers to shine or flash their school colors, which would create a nice (and perhaps intimidating) display.

Working together, the Lenovo Legion Tower 5’s components form a respectable gaming system that is great for competitive esports, at a price well below $2,000 per unit. It would be a great choice for a K-12 esports lab, providing everything a team might need to start competing without breaking the bank.

SPECIFICATIONS

DEVICE TYPE: Desktop Computer Optimized for Gaming
PROCESSOR: Intel Core i7 I7-12700
RAM: 32GB DDR5 SDRAM (4800 MHz)
VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 (DisplayPort, HDMI)
STORAGE: 2TB (one SSD and one Serial ATA drive)
DIMENSIONS: 15.6x8.1x16.5 inches
WEIGHT: 30.8 pounds

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.

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.