Lenovo has announced a new Legion 9i, and it might be the most amazing thing I’ve seen in the Legion line. It’s coming out in October, starts at a whopping $4,399 (you know, a totally normal price to pay for things), and Lenovo is adding all sorts of wacky stuff.
Clearly, the company is more excited about the fact that the 9i is the first 16-inch gaming laptop with a self-contained liquid cooling system. This is exactly what it looks like. Most laptops use air cooling to transfer heat through heat pipes to a radiator; instead, a liquid-cooled device does it with water and a pump that, as you might imagine, can handle much more thermal mass. In theory, such a system could allow the 9i to draw truly massive amounts of power (up to 230W, Lenovo claims) for a ridiculous gaming experience.
To be clear, liquid cooling is something that has been tried before on laptops Of this size. But it’s usually done externally, which is to say, you plug something into a little port on the back, and that thing blows out a little bit of water on the inside. Lenovo’s claim seems to be that the Legion 9i can be completely cooled using this method, without the need for anything.
Now this could It’s going to be very exciting, but I can’t stress enough that we have no idea how well it’s going to work. Also, I feel compelled to point out that Legion’s cooldown is already very good. The last two generations of Legion 5i that The edge The ones we’ve reviewed have been remarkably great, without much noise, throughout our tests. I’m sure a liquid system will make some difference, of course, but how much remains to be seen.
So before we all throw our Legion 7i models out the window (and I know some of you are tempted), we’ll need to see how it performs when the units actually hit shelves.
Another interesting feature is the forged carbon cover, which will give each unit a unique pattern. The design has an original feel to it, and it may be interesting to know that your unit looks different from the thousands of others on the shelf.
But what I’m most happy to see here is the 165Hz 16:10 Mini LED display. It has a 94 percent screen-to-body ratio, which is impressive not only among gaming laptops but among laptops as well. . Mini LEDs aren’t cheap, but when you spend some time playing with one it can be downright painful to go back to a regular IPS panel. I still miss the Razer Blade 16’s Mini LED, and I reviewed it half a year ago.
And then we get inside. The Legion 9i will be powered by the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, which is the most powerful mobile GPU on the gaming market today. Up to 64 GB of memory and 2 TB of storage will be available. Good material.
The processor I have mixed feelings about; it is a 13th generation Intel Core i9-13980HX. This is the most powerful mobile processor Intel has ever made and it’s nothing to sneeze at. Still, it’s kind of hard to be too excited about Intel machines right now because AMD’s 7945HX3D chip is hitting shelves soon, and that chip, in our tests, left the Core i9 in the dust. (The ROG Strix Scar X3D, the monstrous 17-inch model that houses that X3D chip, is also much cheaper than this Legion model.)
So I see this 9i device, right now, mostly as a crazy idea that will showcase Lenovo’s cooling solution and how much additional performance it really brings. But if you have money to buy one, you should know that I am very jealous of you and I am cheering for you from afar.
