Lenovo Legion 9i review: The best gaming laptop money can buy

Aside from the exorbitant price tag, there aren't a lot of major downsides with this laptop. The performance is outstanding, the screen is absolutely beautiful and bright, and the design is honestly super cool. The only thing that truly suffers with this design is the touchpad, and I personally would like the keyboard to be just a little bit stiffer, but otherwise, it's a terrific machine. If you can afford it, of course.

About this review: Lenovo sent us the Legion 9i for this review, and it did not have any input into its contents.

Lenovo Legion 9i: Pricing and availability

After announcing it at IFA 2023 in September, Lenovo launched the Legion 9i in early October with a starting price of $3,800. It's currently only available through Lenovo itself and B&H, though it should show up at more retailers over time.

The configuration Lenovo sent us is a higher-end one, featuring an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop GPU, 32GB of RAM, and 2TB of storage, using two 1TB SSDs in RAID 0. Configuring the laptop with these specs at writing time would cost you $3,691, though these prices tend to fluctuate as discounts come and go on Lenovo's website.

Design

It looks sick

Gaming laptops usually get to make some more unique design choices compared to more general premium laptops, but aside from RGB lighting, Lenovo's Legion laptops have usually been very conservative. The Legion 9i bucks that trend, though. Lenovo used forged carbon chips to make the lid, which allows the laptop to be thinner and lighter while retaining durability. Personally, I'm more interested in how it looks, and it's awesome. The forged carbon gives the laptop a totally unique look, so much so that every Legion 9i unit is slightly different. It also has something of a textured feel to the touch.

Aside from the lid, the laptop looks as sleek and clean as you might expect from Lenovo. The chassis appears to have some kind of soft coating, which makes it more welcoming to the touch. It still feels very sturdy and premium, though, and while I had some worry that it might be susceptible to skin oils, it seems to be holding up very well so far.

If you do want something flashy, though, Lenovo went all-out on RGB lighting here. There's a light strip along the back, another one around the front, an RGB keyboard, and even an RGB Legion logo on the lid. You can customize all of this in the Lenovo Vantage app. RGB has no use aside from being fun, but I'm totally fine with that. I love how this laptop looks when it's all lit up.

It's surprisingly thin and has a lot of ports

Water cooling is one of the main highlights of this laptop. You might take that to mean performance is above all other laptops, but keep in mind, laptop GPUs are already limited to 175W of power, so there's only so much a water cooling system can do for performance. Instead, the real benefit of this choice is the size of the overall laptop. The Lenovo Legion 9i is just 18.9mm thick, despite packing both an HX-series processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 with 175W of power.

As Lenovo puts it, the goal with the Legion 9i was to bring together the Pro and Slim series it uses in other Legion laptops. The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i also has 175W of power, but it measures between 21.97mm and 25.9mm in thickness. Meanwhile, the Legion Slim 7i is 18.9mm thick, but it maxes out with an RTX 4070 with 115W of power. This laptop has the best of both worlds, and it also weighs 5.64 pounds, which is very light for a laptop with these specs (though this is definitely not one of the lightest laptops around).

This laptop has the best of both worlds.

Of course, as with most gaming laptops, there are plenty of ports here. The back houses two Thunderbolt 4 ports, a USB Type-A port, RJ45 Ethernet, and HDMI, along with the proprietary charging connector. On that note, it's worth mentioning the laptop actually comes with two chargers. The proprietary charger supports 330W for super-fast charging and to use while gaming, but you also get a 140W charger if you want something more widely compatible for traveling.

On the right side, you'll find USB Type-C and Type-A ports, along with an electronic shutter for the webcam. Meanwhile, the left side houses the headphone jack and a full-size SD card reader. There's a ton of connectivity here, you'd be hard-pressed to complain.

Keyboard and trackpad

Typing is totally fine

Lenovo is known for making some of the best keyboards you can find on a laptop, and you can feel a lot of the company's DNA here. The curved keycaps definitely look familiar, and the typing experience is mostly as good as you'd expect from something like a ThinkPad. I do wish there was a little bit more tactility to the keys, though, especially for gaming. I'm not sure why, but these keys feel a little bit softer than usual, and I would like it if they felt a little firmer. Still, it's a very comfortable and responsive keyboard.

The weirdest thing about it is that it's pushed down in the chassis to make room for the big cooling system along the top, so my wrists don't have as much room to rest on the laptop when I'm typing. I've found that it's mostly just enough space for me to still be comfortable, but it may not be great for everyone. It also has a number pad, which can be useful, but also pushes everything to the left, so it can take some time to adjust to typing if you're not used to this layout.

The touchpad is small and cramped

The biggest downside of having the keyboard pushed down is that the touchpad suffers too, and it actually suffers the most. This is one of the smallest touchpads I've ever used, at least in terms of height, so it's far from ideal. It's also off-center because it's aligned with the spacebar and the keyboard has a number pad, so I've had many instances of right-clicking when I thought I was left-clicking.

Since this is a gaming laptop, you'll definitely use an external mouse.

The idea here seems to be that since this is a gaming laptop, you'll definitely use an external mouse anyway. I can understand that, though at this price, maybe a mouse should just come in the box. As small as it is, however, the touchpad feels really nice, and it's well made, so I don't hate it. It's just a necessary sacrifice for this design.

Display

Mini-LED shines for gaming

Lenovo equipped the Legion 9i with a mini-LED display, which can run at up to 165Hz and has a very high resolution of 3200x2000. This is an identical panel to the one in the Lenovo Slim Pro 9i, but it works phenomenally here. I was surprised to see this as the display since it definitely seems geared more toward creators rather than gamers, but it really doesn't disappoint.

Everything looks phenomenal on this screen, and when you consume HDR content, especially games, it really comes alive. I often don't value HDR very much, but when playing Forza Horizon 5, you can truly feel the brightness of the harsh sunlight and see the deep blacks in parts of your car. I found myself almost squinting when staring directly at the sun in the game.

When you consume HDR content, especially games, it really comes alive.

Lenovo touts 100% coverage of Adobe RGB, sRGB, and DCI-P3, and yes, colors look absolutely fantastic on this screen. My actual test measurements didn't quite match Lenovo's spec sheet, but they're still very good results. I got 100% of sRGB, 98% of DCI-P3, and 89% of Adobe RGB.

As for brightness, the SpyderX calibration tool measured nearly 1000 nits in SDR mode, which is incredibly bright. This laptop is easily visible no matter where you are, but because it's mini-LED, it can still produce perfect blacks at the same time.

Keep in mind that this calibration tool isn't really suited for HDR displays, so it's hard to test Lenovo's claims of up to 1200 nits. However, it is certified for VESA DisplayHDR 1000, so you're getting a terrific experience here, no doubt.

It has a decent 1080p webcam

It's taken way too long to get here, but most laptops have 1080p webcams these days, and while gaming laptops can sometimes still be the exception, that's not the case here. The Legion 9i has a 1080p sensor, and it looks all right. It won't blow anyone away, but it does the job better than a 720p webcam would.

It does lack Windows Hello facial recognition, but at least you get a fingerprint reader built into the power button just below the screen. I'll take any form of Windows Hello I can get.

The audio experience is pretty great on this laptop, too. The speakers get very loud, but they don't sound muddy or distorted to me, so I was happy with them.

Performance

It's really, really fast

If you looked at the spec sheet above, you probably don't need me to tell you this computer is fast. The CPU is an Intel Core i9-13980HX, which has a whopping 24 cores and 32 threads, complete with boost speeds up to 5.5GHz. It will tear through just about anything you need it to do. On top of that, it also has an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop GPU, with a TGP of 175W, the maximum allowed by Nvidia's design. My configuration also includes the standard 32GB of RAM running at 5600MHz, though you can get an overclocked version running at 6400MHz, or opt for 64GB instead.

All of this means the laptop performs exceedingly well in just about every scenario. Of course, I tried some gaming, with titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and some fun games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Forza Horizon 5. Here's a quick summary of the performance I saw when playing these games. Unless stated otherwise, all games were run at their maximum graphical settings with DLSS enabled at the Quality preset and frame generation disabled.

Elden Ring appears to be an outlier here in terms of performance, and I'm not sure if there's some driver bug or poor optimization going on. The game is locked at a maximum 60FPS, but it struggled to hit that at max settings, despite not using anywhere near the full power of the GPU. Most of the time, it hovered around 100W, so there was certainly headroom to go faster. Cyberpunk 2077 is obviously a very demanding game that can't run that smoothly at max settings (Ray Tracing Overdrive), but you could easily get solid performance out of it by lowering those settings.

This is an incredibly fast laptop, and it holds that performance pretty well.

Regardless, you can tell this is an incredibly fast laptop, and it holds that performance pretty well. I even streamed myself playing most of these games for nearly 3 hours, all on the laptop, and while it definitely impacted performance, they were more than playable with some tweaks. The liquid cooling loop only cools the GPU's VRAM, and a vapor chamber is used for the rest, but the cooling system does its job well. Lenovo really went all-in on airflow, which is why the keyboard is pushed down. You can look straight through the laptop where the fans are, so there's plenty of air going through it. It gets pretty loud, but not with a whiny sound, it just feels like a lot of air is being pushed out.

Of course, I also ran the usual benchmarks, and the laptop did great there, too, especially in the GPU tests. I haven't had the chance to test another laptop with an RTX 4090, but this is incredibly fast.

To be clear, these benchmark results aren't necessarily breaking records, but what's impressive about them is getting them in a laptop this compact. Being able to push an RTX 4090 this hard in a laptop this compact is extremely impressive.

One last thing I want to mention because it is somewhat uncommon in laptops is the storage. This laptop comes with two 1TB SSDs, but they work as a single drive in RAID 0. What that means is data is being split across both drives, and because both can be used simultaneously, drive speeds are incredibly fast. These are PCIe 4.0 SSDs, but because they're in RAID 0, the speed ends up close to that of a PCIe 5.0 drive.

Of course, the downside here is that if anything happens to just one drive, you lose all the data on both. But if performance is the name of the game, this has it, and everything feels super snappy on this machine.

Battery life is atrocious

As is typical of powerful gaming laptops, all this performance comes at the cost of battery life. Running the laptop in balanced mode with all the RGB lights on, I got anywhere between just 1 hour and 23 minutes to 3 hours and 8 minutes. With RGB off, I managed to get between 2 hours and 5 minutes to 3 hours and 58 minutes. Unlike most laptops I review, I used this one at 20% brightness most of the time, not to save battery but because I found 30% to be too bright with this mini-LED panel. No matter how you slice it, this isn't a laptop made for use on the go, and you probably know that going in.

This isn't a laptop made for use on the go.

For my more standardized test, I tried playing back a 720p YouTube video at 50% brightness and volume. I tried this with RGB on and it lasted just 3 hours and 33 minutes, but with RGB off, it ran for about 4 hours and 57 minutes.

Should you buy the Lenovo Legion 9i?

I feel confident in saying that the Lenovo Legion 9i is the best gaming laptop on the market right now. It may not be the fastest of all of them, and it may not be the thinnest, but it's certainly the laptop that crams the most power into the most compact chassis. It's truly impressive, and it's all topped off with a beautiful mini-LED display that delivers absolutely stunning visuals. Plus, you get a super-fast SSD, a cool-looking design, and enough RGB lighting to light up a room. It's not for everyone, but if you have the money, you can't do much better than this.

You should buy the Lenovo Legion 9i if:

• You want one of the most powerful gaming laptops in a chassis that's still portable
• You're looking for one of the best HDR experiences on a laptop
• You want a laptop that feels premium
• You have a lot of money to spend

You should NOT buy the Lenovo Legion 9i if:

• You only care about performance and not portability
• You need decent battery life
• You plan to use the touchpad often
• You can't stomach paying $4,000 for a laptop