Lenovo Legion C530 Cube review: A small and capable gaming PC

Let’s face it. No one ever wants to have to lug around their gaming PC, especially if they have a big case with a bunch of things inside of it. The Lenovo Legion C530 Cube comes with a small form factor allowing you to carry it around from place to place. It also comes with an 8th gen Intel processor, up to 16GB RAM, and either an AMD or Nvidia graphics card and more. Let’s dive into the full Lenovo Legion C530 Cube review below.

Specifications

The Lenovo Legion C530 Cube sent to us for review has the following features and specifications (configurable when ordering):

• OS: Windows 10 Home
• Processor: 8th Gen Intel Core i5-8400 @ 2.8 GHz (Up to 8th gen Intel Core i7-8700 @ 3.20GHz, up to 4.60GHz with Turbo Boost available)
• Memory: 8GB DDR4 2666MHz (Up to 16GB DDR4 2666MHz available)
• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4 GB (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB and AMD Radeon RX 570 4 GB available)
• Storage: 1 TB 7200 RPM Hard Drive (with 16 GB Intel Optane Memory or 128 GB PCIe SSD available)
• Audio: Dolby Atmos Audio and Sound Radar
• Connectivity: 802.11 AC (2 x 2) + Bluetooth 4.2
• Ports
  • Front
    • x2 USB 3.0
    • Headphone jack
    • Microphone-in
  • Rear
    • x2 USB 3.1 Gen 2
    • x2 USB 3.1 Gen 1
    • x2 USB 2.0
    • HMDI
    • DisplayPort
    • RJ45
    • Audio-out
• Dimension (W x D x H): 9.09″ x 13.07″ x 9.53″ / 231 x 332 x 242 (mm)
• Weight: 19.8lbs

What’s in the Box

• Legion C530 Cube
• Keyboard
• Mouse
• Manuel

Design

If you’re looking for a small form factor PC because you don’t want to lug around a massive case to a LAN party or a new place, the Legion C530 Cube is an option for you. The design is somewhat small while having a boxy shape. Up top is a handle attached to a lip that starts from one end and leads to about halfway over the transparent plastic. The circular black and white power button is on the bottom right-hand side giving you easy access to powering on the PC. Both the left and right side are a blank slate to show off the black color of the PC.

The front and back are where the most detail is, so we’ll start with the front. Lenovo has the “Legion” logo is on the right side in a vertical position and the cool part of the logo being there is that the “O” has an LED in it that lights up red when the unit is powered on. To the left of the logo are 180 holes for cool air to flow through. Below those vents are two USB 3.0 ports, one headphone port, and a mic in port.

Now for the back of the C530 Cube. When you first look at the back, you’ll see a latch that will open the left side of the case allowing you to access the internals such as the motherboard, RAM sticks, CPU, GPU, and more. The right side has two thumbscrews that will also give you access to the inside of the PC, allowing you to access 1hard drives or SSDs. There are also red LED lights to show off through the transparent top panel.

Software

I won’t go into too much detail about Windows 10 Home, but what Lenovo does pre-install for you is their own applications. You’ll get the Y Gaming Mechanical Swift Keyboard and Precision Mouse applications that let you create settings to your comfort with those accessories.  Lenovo Vantage is like the default Task Manager that comes with Windows. It’ll give you some information on how the CPU or GPU or RAM is doing.

Other included applications on the C530 Cube are Dolby Access and Dolby Atmos for Gaming that gives you Dolby sound while you’re playing games or watching movies, McAfee, LinkedIn, and some games from the Microsoft Store.

Performance

The C530 Cube, as tested, comes with an Intel 8th Gen i5 8400 with a starting speed 2.80GHZ. It can be turbo boosted up to 4.60GHz, but I was able to reach 3.8GHZ and there were no real issues, but there were some slowdowns, which I will explain in a bit.

Also, included is 8GB RAM, which is plenty enough depending on what you’re doing. While testing out the rest of the rig, I decided to play some Destiny 2, Fortnite, and Overwatch. While playing Destiny 2, I was sitting at around 87-94 fps and the game was running just fine during gunfights in PVE or walking around or using the Sparrow to get to your destination faster. All these settings were set to high and the screen resolution was at 1080p. I also tested out Fortnite on default settings, which was high and the fps was staying at 60. No doubt, this will be able to handle some great games thrown at it.

If you plan on using the unit for normal daily activity such as web browsing, working on documents, or replying back to emails, this does the job. Now, if you are thinking about using this for video editing, you might want to add in another stick of RAM because there was a bit of stuttering when playing back some clips. When using Vegas Pro 15 for video editing, RAM was sitting at 5.2/7.9GB but when you render your whole video, it jumps up to 7.1/7.9GB which caused some more delays.

Price

At a starting price before any discounts, you’re looking at US$879.99, but you’re getting a GTX 1050Ti GPU and only 8GB of RAM. Price does go up for the GTX 1060 model and AMD RX 570 GPUs depending on the configuration you want. Don’t get me wrong, the starting price isn’t bad but a graphics card from last year with 8GB RAM could be priced lower.

Wrap Up

Overall, I thought the Lenovo Legion C530 Cube was able to handle what the things I tasked it with. Granted, dealing with 8GB of RAM isn’t ideal, but the PC was still able to keep up. If the price could be dropped a little bit more, then I think people would be buying it more.

*We were sent a review unit of the Lenovo Legion C530 Cube for the purposes of this review.

Last Updated on February 3, 2021.