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.
