Lenovo has already made some of the best gaming laptops on the market in 2023, but the company isn’t resting on its laurels. Recently, it announced the Lenovo Legion 9i, its new flagship model that delivers a premium gaming experience in a surprisingly thin chassis thanks to the magic of water cooling.
Indeed, this is a laptop with a self-contained water cooling system, so you get a ton of performance in a compact package. If you want to know everything there is to know about the Lenovo Legion 9i, you’ve come to the right place.
Lenovo Legion 9i (2023)
The Lenovo Legion 9i is a powerful gaming laptop with a self-contained liquid cooling system, allowing it to be thinner and lighter than most laptops in its class. It also has a stunning Mini-LED display and a unique forged carbon design.
Lenovo Legion 9i: Price, release date, and specs
The Lenovo Legion 9i was announced during IFA 2023 alongside the Legion Go, a handheld gaming PC. Like that device, the Lenovo Legion 9i is set to launch in October. Lenovo’s press release mentions a starting price of $4,399, but we’re actually seeing the laptop listed on Lenovo’s website for $3,800 if you want to pre-order it.
Of course, that base price does include some top-of-the-line specs, so it’s not actually too surprising. But it definitely looks concerning as the starting price for a laptop.
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What you need to know about the Lenovo Legion 9i
The Lenovo Legion 9i is doing a lot of cool things to justify its price tag, not just in terms of performance, but also in regards to the design and display. Here are some of the highlights.
Water cooling… on a laptop?
We’ve already mentioned it, but yes, the Lenovo legion 9i is the first 16-inch gaming laptop to feature a self-contained water cooling system. What that means is that the entirety of the water cooling loop is inside the laptop itself, including the pump, so you don’t need any external components to make it work. The cooling system is designed in partnership with Cooler Master, and it’s exclusive to Lenovo, so you won’t see it anywhere else.
In this case, the water block is placed over the GPU’s VRAM, which is one of the areas that tends to be stressed the most during gaming, helping to keep performance at a maximum while minimizing noise. The rest of the components, like the GPU die and the CPU, use a vapor chamber cooling system and a lot of airflow to keep things running smoothly. There are thousands of ventilation holes above the laptop’s keyboard, so much so that you can actually see right through where the fans are.
This cooling system is why the Lenovo Legion 9i manages to fit in a 24-core Intel Core i9 processor and an Nvidia GPU with a massive 175W of power while still being relatively compact. It maximized both performance and portability.
A stunning mini-LED display
Beastly gaming performance deserves a beautiful display to play those games on, and the Lenovo Legion 9i delivers on this front, too. By using its PureSight Mini-LED display, which we’ve seen in laptops like the Lenovo Slim Pro 9i, Lenovo delivers a fantastic visual experience with up to 1200 nits of brightness in HDR mode and fantastic color coverage, including 100% of Adobe RGB and DCI-P3, so everything looks vibrant on this display.
It’s a very sharp screen, too, with 3200×2000 resolution, and the 165Hz refresh rate ensures you can still get all the frames you need for high-end competitive gaming. There’s no option for 240Hz or above, but for the vast majority of people, this is more than good enough.
Lenovo tells us there will also be a cheaper panel without the Mini-LED technology and 500 nits of brightness, though this isn’t mentioned on the official spec sheet. The launch model should include the top-tier configuration.
Forged carbon lid and a lot of RGB
To help make the Legion 9i lighter due to the added weight of the water cooling system, Lenovo had to use a new top cover made from forged carbon chips. Aside from the lighter weight, this forging process also helps ensure this laptop looks unique, since you can see different tones all throughout the lid, and the forged chip pattern is unique for every unit of the laptop. In the end, the laptop comes in at 5.64 pounds, which is fairly light for such a powerful machine.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a gaming laptop without RGB, and the Legion 9i has a lot of it. The keyboard has per-key RGB lighting, and there are two light bars, one on the front and one on the back. The Legion logo on the lid is also RGB backlit, so you have plenty of ways to show off.
It includes two chargers
One last thing worth mentioning is that, for whatever reason, Lenovo is including two chargers in the box for the Legion 9i. The main one you’ll probably want is the 330W power adapter that uses a proprietary connector. This will charge your laptop faster even during intense gaming sessions, but it’s bulkier and it will only work with select Lenovo laptops that have powerful GPUs like this.
However, Lenovo is also throwing in a 140W USB-C power adapter that can help you juice up the laptop while it’s turned off or doing less demanding usage. Because it’s USB Type-C, it’s compatible with almost any high-end laptop these days.
Considering the starting price, the Lenovo Legion 9i is definitely not a laptop for everyone, but if you want a powerful gaming laptop that has pretty much no equivalent on the market, it’s looking pretty good right now. It’s already listed on Lenovo’s website with a starting price of $3,800, so you can grab it right now if you’re interested.
Lenovo Legion 9i (2023)
The Lenovo Legion 9i is a powerful gaming laptop with a self-contained liquid cooling system, allowing it to be thinner and lighter than most laptops in its class. It also has a stunning Mini-LED display and a unique forged carbon design.