The Lenovo T730 is a prebuilt gaming PC with some powerful hardware inside. In this review
we’ll check out gaming performance, overclocking, thermals and basically everything else to
help you decide if it’s a system you should consider buying.
The Lenovo T730 is available with different hardware configurations, my unit here has
the 8 core Intel i9-9900K CPU, Nvidia RTX 2080 graphics, 16gb of memory in dual channel,
and for storage a 512gb NVMe M.2 SSD and 2TB hard drive. The motherboard also has gigabit
ethernet, 802.11ac WiFi, and Bluetooth 4.1.
You can find prices for varying configurations of the T730 linked in the description, and
I’ll cover upgrade options towards the end of the video.
The case has a 28L volume and starts with a 12kg weight, but will of course vary based
on specs. The dimensions of the case on the Lenovo website don’t line up with what I’m
seeing, so these are based on my own rough measurements.
The black case is made of metal and plastic with an acrylic side panel, though the view
is obscured by the metal mesh pattern behind it, which isn’t that big of an issue as
the interior is mostly plain metal. A similar mesh is found on the front, which should help
with air flow. There’s some Legion branding towards the top right on the front which lights
up, and above this is the DVD drive, which is hidden behind a sliding door.
On top of the case there’s a handle, which I found very useful when taking it out of
the box, but otherwise it would depend on how often you find yourself moving your PC
as to how useful that would be. The front I/O is found up here too, and from left to
right we’ve got two USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A ports, 3.5mm microphone and headphone jacks
and the power button.
On the back down the bottom there’s the 500 watt power supply. Above that we’ve
got the outputs from the graphics card, so these can vary by model. My RTX 2080 has a
Type-C port, single HDMI and three DisplayPort outputs. The motherboard has 4 USB 3.1 Gen
1 Type-A ports up top, while the lower two are USB 2.0, along with the ethernet port
and 3.5mm audio output. I’ll also note that I wasn’t able to determine a difference
in quality listening to music through either the front or rear 3.5mm jack.
Underneath there’s are just some rubber feet.
Both the left and right side panels can be removed by taking out two thumb screws. On
the right there’s nothing really going on here, just some cable routing and two spare
SATA power connectors.
On the left panel we’ve got the window, and then inside access to everything else.
The look of the interior wasn’t too bad, no ketchup and mustard cables at least so
that puts it ahead of some other pre built systems, the motherboard PCB was black and
there is customizable RGB lighting, more on that soon.
On the bottom there’s the 500 watt power supply, which isn’t modular. Next to that
there are two 3.5 inch drive bays, and both are pre wired to the motherboard for both
power and data, so you just need to screw either a 2.5 or 3.5 inch drive into the bay
and stick it back in, no need to mess around with cables.
Towards the front there’s a 120mm fan preinstalled down the bottom for intake with a spot above
it to install a second. There’s one spare fan header on the motherboard, however there
was no dust filter present on the intake vents.
Above that we can see our Nvidia RTX 2080 graphics card, which has a blower style cooler
in this case so should help exhaust some of the air inside the case.
Otherwise the only other air exhaust is from the 120mm fan at the rear, which is on the
all in one liquid cooler for the CPU. This looks a little small considering how hot the
9900K can get, but we’ll test out thermals soon, but spoiler, it does fine. The spec
sheet notes that it’s a 130 watt TDP cooler, and we’ve got some large VRM heatsinks too.
The motherboard is Z370, so overclocking the CPU is supported, more on that soon. The motherboard
has two memory slots, both of which are populated here. Next to that there’s the single M.2
slot for storage, which in my case contains the 512gb NVMe M.2 SSD, and it’s covered
in a heatsink to keep it cool from passive air flow.
I checked underneath the graphics card and we’ve got the M.2 slot for the WiFi card.
In terms of lighting there are three RGB light strips, two in the front which are controlled
together, and one above the window, and all are controlled through the Lenovo vantage
software. The colour in the center of the CPU cooler, which is the Legion logo, is also
controlled along side the top light bar, and these can be controlled independently of the
front lighting. The coloured lights can be turned off, but the CPU cooler still has the
white lights on the outside which could not be disabled
The Lenovo Vantage software also allows you to update the system or overclock the CPU
and memory, no graphics card overclocking or fan control supported through here unfortunately.
By simply ticking RAM overclocking the memory speed will go from CL19 DDR4-2666 to CL16
DDR4-3200, though this will require a reboot to complete. The CPU overclocking option on
the other hand will set all 8 CPU cores to 5.1GHz and boost the power limit from the
stock Intel 95 watts to 130 watts, the same TDP the cooler is rated for, and I found this
stable under all tested workloads, however as we’ll see soon I didn’t get to this
speed under stress test.
Now let’s look at the thermals, testing was completed with an ambient room temperature
of 21 degrees celsius, so expect different results in different environments. I’ve
stress tested the CPU with Aida64 and the GPU with the Heaven benchmark, so treat these
kind of as worst case results.
At stock the 9900K was hitting the 95 watt power limit defined by the Intel spec, and
unfortunately the blower style 2080 was actually reporting as thermal throttling. Fortunately
it was possible to boost the GPU fan speed through MSI Afterburner which removed this
and allowed it to perform better, though as we’ll hear soon this does make the system
louder.
When we enable the CPU and RAM overclocking through the Lenovo Vantage software the CPU
power limit raises to 130 watts and allows all 8 cores to run up to 5.1GHz.
At this point we can improve performance further with some manual tweaks. We can boost the
CPU power limit which will give us more performance, but at the expense of more heat and fan noise,
and I did this using Intel XTU. Alternatively we can undervolt the CPU, so it will use less
power and run cooler while also performing better, in this case I’ve done both.
I was also seeing the GPU temperature lower as the CPU started performing better, as the
exhaust fan on the CPU cooler would ramp up, forcing more air to draw in from the front
of the case.
These are the average clock speeds for the same tests just shown. At stock under this
stress test load the CPU was reaching 4GHz on all 8 cores out of the box. We can see
that by boosting the GPU fan speed manually the GPU clock speed rises up as it is no longer
thermal throttling. By enabling the Lenovo CPU overclock we’re able to get about 400MHz
clock speed extra out of all 8 CPU cores, and again similar improvements to the GPU
once we boost its fan speed. Raising the power limit of the CPU gave a little boost to CPU
performance, while the CPU undervolt allowed us to almost hit 4.8GHz on all cores, while
the GPU overclock was almost reaching 2000MHz.
Here are some Cinebench CPU benchmarks, which show the difference in performance at stock
and then with the extra performance gained with the overclock setting through the Lenovo
vantage software. By boosting the power limit and undervolting through Intel XTU we were
able to squeeze out some additional performance.
As for the fan noise produced by the system I’ll let you have a listen to some of these
tests.
At idle it was fairly quite, and still not really that loud compared to other systems
I’ve tested with the stress tests going. When we enable the CPU overclock through the
Lenovo software the total system volume rose a bit as the CPU fan spins up. After this
point we’re doing custom tweaks to boost performance further, so only the first three
tests represent out of the box noise levels under worst case stress test.
I’ve also measured total system power draw from the wall, at idle we’re looking at
47 watts, then 336 watts with the Aida64 stress test and Heaven benchmark running. This rises
by over 50 watts once we enable the built in Lenovo overclocks, which boost all CPU
cores to 5.1GHz and PL1 from 95 watts to 130 watts. By further raising the power limit
and overclocking the graphics we’re pulling much more power for not too much extra gain
as we start hitting diminishing returns.
Finally let’s get into some gaming benchmarks, I’ve tested these games with the memory
and CPU overclocked, as the Lenovo vantage software allows you to easily enable these
built in settings at the click of a button, no GPU overclocking though as they don’t
offer that out of the box and I wanted to represent what most people buying a system
like this would be likely to run with.
Battlefield 5 was tested in campaign mode, and at 1080p with RTX off it’s running very
well, even with ultra settings almost 120 FPS averages were possible, with up to 180
reached at low settings. Stepping up to the 1440p resolution saw lower results as expected,
however realistically I think 90 FPS even at ultra settings is still a great result
for this test. At 4K we’re only just below 60 FPS at high settings, and I still found
it to play well without issues, and while it looks awesome you’d of course want lower
settings for higher frame rate if playing competitively.
Far Cry New Dawn was tested with the built in benchmark. Again at 1080p, as expected
with these powerful specs, we’re seeing excellent results in this test. At 1440p there’s
a bit of a performance drop, but realistically the results are still looking good, with almost
100 FPS at ultra settings still possible. At 4K things drop back a fair bit more, though
it was still possible to hit 60 FPS at high settings, and we’ll see how we can improve
this game further with some custom overclocking soon.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was also tested with the built in benchmark. At 1080p we’re
seeing quite high results for this test, still around 120 FPS even with all settings maxed
out at highest. At 1440p the results drop back again, though not too far, it should
still play quite well even at higher settings with this resolution. At 4K we’re almost
halving the frame rates from 1440p, and while we’re still getting decent frame rates at
lower settings I’d probably just stick to 1440p and higher settings here.
CS:GO was tested with the Ulletical FPS benchmark. This is a game that gives high frame rates
on pretty much any hardware, so I just wanted to show an example of something that is less
resource intensive. At 1080p even with max settings we’re just under 400 FPS. At 1440p
max settings are still getting over 300 FPS, with minimum settings not too far below 500
FPS. Even 4K was still setting great results, for contrast these are still a bit above most
gaming laptops that I usually test at 1080p.
We’re seeing very nice performance here due to the i9-9900K and RTX 2080 graphics,
all games were playing great even at higher settings, even at 1440p. 4K still worked well
at most setting levels in these titles, it just depends on the games you’re playing
and settings in use.
As covered earlier it was possible to further improve performance by undervolting and boosting
the power limit of the CPU. I’ve also manually overclocked the graphics with MSI Afterburner,
so let’s see what sort of improvements we can get with this best case scenario.
I’ve tested Far Cry New Dawn with the built in benchmark, and we can see these changes
are making some difference at 1080p. Simply by enabling the predefined CPU and memory
overclocks in the Lenovo Vantage software gives us 6% higher average FPS in this test,
and then another 6% with my additional CPU undervolting and graphics overclocking. At
1440p we’re seeing a similar pattern of improvement, and again about a 6% boost to
average FPS with each level of change. At 4K there’s a smaller 4% improvement between
Stock and the Lenovo overclocks, as these are only CPU and memory they have less of
an effect in GPU demanding tests, such as at the 4K resolution. This is why we see a
larger 11% improvement from the Lenovo overclocks with my custom changes, we’re more GPU bound
at 4K so the graphics overclock helps more.
I’ve used Crystal disk mark to test the storage, and the 512GB M.2 NVMe SSD was scoring
quite well for the read and write speeds. The 2TB hard drive was performing better than
I expected, though they are using a 7,200RPM drive which is nice, as many others seem to
cheap out on 5,400 ones.
For up to date pricing check the links in the description, as prices will change over
time. At the time of recording, in the US they don’t seem to have the exact specs
I’ve got here, however with 9900K and double the RAM and double the SSD storage we’re
looking at around $2100 USD. Meanwhile here in Australia we’re looking at about $4500
AUD for these same specs I’ve tested in this video.
Comparing against other prebuilt systems from the larger brands, the price doesn’t seem
to be all that different here, and while you can always build your own system for cheaper,
that’s not who these sorts of machines are targeted towards. With that said though. for
around the same price here in Australia $100 more gets you basically the same specs but
with 2080 Ti graphics, which is probably worthwhile considering the performance improvement that
offers over the 2080.
Overall Lenovo’s T730 gaming PC is a very capable machine. It’s not large, but not
small either, yet still offers great performance. Unfortunately due to the blower style graphics
card it did get hot and thermal throttle under extended periods of load, however it was possible
to prevent this by raising the fan speed. Unfortunately I didn’t see a way of changing
fan speed or controlling the graphics through the software provided by Lenovo, so I had
to do that with third party options, which a user buying a prebuilt system may not be
familiar with.
Likewise while it was possible to easily overclock the CPU and memory with one click using Lenovo’s
software, I’d like to see GPU overclocking added in future, as we saw at higher resolutions
this can offer a large performance improvement, though as the GPU was thermal throttling I’d
also like to see fan controls provided as well. While on the subject of fans, some dust
filters for the front air intakes would also be nice additions.
Despite this, as we’ve seen gaming performance was still excellent. With this particular
configuration even some 4K gaming was possible, depending on the games and settings of course,
while 1440p and 1080p were absolutely no issue at all. Whether or not you like the design
of the case will of course be personal preference, but at least it’s got a handle.
Now let’s talk about upgrade options, I’ve left this to the end as I suspect many people
buying a prebuilt system like this just want it to work out of the box, but if you know
a bit about what you’re doing this information may be useful if you’re after some upgrades.
In terms of graphics it should be possible for you to replace the GPU as long as it fits
in the given space in the case. There’s room to use a three slot card if you remove
the included support bracket, and the case has room for cards up to about 38cm in length.
The power supply may be a limitation though, it only seems to include a 6 and 8 pin connector,
so if you have two 8 pins you might need an adapter.
The 500 watt power supply might start to become a limitation depending on what you’re upgrading
to, as we saw once I had tried to get the best performance out of the 2080 and 9900K
the system was pulling 495 watts from the wall.
The PSU appears to be standard ATX form factor though, and connects to the motherboard with
an 8 pin and 24 pin connectors. The power supply was 14cm in length, and the distance
to the drive bays is about 20cm, so you’d need to leave some room for the cables if
replacing it.
The CPU is also upgradeable, the Z370 chipset supports up to the i9-9900K at the moment,
which is what we’ve already got installed here. If you have the lower 9700K going to
the 9900K should be an option, assuming it has the same cooler. The spec sheet seems
to indicate that it does, if not you may need to look at upgrading that too. At this stage
we don’t know if Intel will keep using this socket and chipset for future CPUs beyond
the 9900K.
As mentioned already the motherboard has two memory slots. In the US it’s sold with up
to 32gb, so two 16gb sticks, though I’m not sure on two 32gb DIMM support.
In terms of storage there’s just the single M.2 slot, so the only upgrade path there is
to add one more SATA drive. The motherboard has three SATA ports, all of which are in
use already. One for the DVD drive, and two that are pre wired to the two drive bays.
Technically if you don’t need the DVD drive though you could wire up a third drive to
that port.
Many prebuilt systems tend to not have many upgrade paths and make use of proprietary
form factors, however that was not the case here. It should be quite straightforward to
upgrade most parts of this system like a regular PC which is great to see, though without replacing
the motherboard the 9900K may be the end of the line in terms of CPU power, granted that
one should be quite good for many years yet.
Let me know what you thought of the T730 down in the comments, and if you’re new to the
channel consider getting subscribed for future tech videos like this one.