Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “NEW Lenovo Legion 9i (2023) – Their Best Gaming Laptop!”.
Foreign, what’s going on guys, it’s your average consumer and it’s not often that a company will reach out to partner, send me their latest device and tell me put it through the grinder and that’s what Lenovo did so today. Let me introduce you to their craziest laptop, yet this guy right here, it’s a Lenovo Legion 9i. Here we have it guys. This is lenovo’s latest and definitely their most beautiful laptop. Yet the legion 9i – and I got ta, say they went kind of crazy with this one.
Now you might see this and say Judd. What exactly are we looking at? Well, this is actually forged carbon flakes sprinkled across the top of the laptop, and it goes through this crazy process to get it nice and molded into here, and it is super smooth and what’s really cool about this is that every single laptop, every single 9i is A completely unique device because of the process that they go through, so it ends up looking really cool and because it has the Legion logo over here in RGB, it just adds like a really nice effect, easily hands down their best looking laptop today. So while all of this is looking awesome, it’s also got some awesome. I o so in the back here. We’Ve got our DC input and HDMI 2.1 Port, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, as well as your USB, a port and an ethernet port.
Now, on the left side, we’ve got our headphone jack, as well as an SD card reader and on the right side, we’ve got our USB a port C port and an electronic shutter which not only kills the camera but audio as well. Now, in the front, we’ve got a 16 inch, 3.2 K mini LED display with a 165 Hertz refresh rate. We’Ve also got true strike, keyboards, obviously with RGB uh.
If you haven’t noticed, this thing has RGB all around it. So for those of you who, like to gaming RGB mode, you can absolutely do that now. You’Ve also got your trackpad and looks like a giant speaker right again. It is not Jay. We did this last time where we thought this thing had like this huge speaker. Grille uh, but this is actually a vent for cooling.
They paid quite a lot of attention to cooling. So there’s like vents all over. You got this one up top. You got them on the side. You got them on the bottom and even the back. So all of that airflow is really important to this machine and at the top you’ve got like this interesting little bar here that houses the 1080p webcam. Actually, it’s like a reverse Notch. There’S a notch on the outside, instead of on the inside and over here, you’ve. Also got your power button which doubles as a fingerprint reader, so you can log in with Windows, hello. I love everything about this machine in terms of the design, but if you don’t want to do the whole gamer thing, if you want to turn off the RGB, it does a really good job.
Looking like a really normal computer, which is a bonus now in terms of specs, this thing is an absolute Behemoth. So, let’s talk about it, so we’re looking at a 13th generation Intel Core I9 processor with up to an Nvidia RTX 4090 up to 64 gigs of RAM 2 terabytes of SSD storage, the max battery capacity you can have on a laptop. It also comes with a quick move up to Wi-Fi seven, not to mention lenovo’s new AI chip, the la2. So, as you can tell on paper, this thing is an absolute behemoth, but we’re not here for spec sheets and numbers.
That’S not how we do. Let’S talk about what it’s like to actually use it foreign guys. I got to spend some quality time with the 9i and I have some thoughts. So you look at the design.
You look at the spec sheet. This thing is obviously impressive. Now this is a 16 inch gaming laptop. Thankfully it’s Sleek enough to pass as just like a larger laptop rather than those super bulky. Gaming laptops that you know are super thick. The 99 definitely feels like one of those specked out beefy boys, but doesn’t come with any of the real size disadvantages from an everyday usage perspective. I think I enjoyed the screen and typing experience the most for me. I never really find myself falling in love with gaming laptop screens.
They usually have high refresh rates, which is obviously great for gaming, but there’s always something missing from the entire package, whether that’s color accuracy bezels on the screen quality of the backlight. There’S always something that just feels a little bit off, and I honestly am happy to say that I haven’t had that experience here. What’S kind of cool is that this is overall, the same body size as some of lenovo’s 15-inch models, but because they decrease the bezel size, they were able to fit a 16 inch display in here now. You do have like this reverse Notch.
When it comes to the 1080p webcam over here, but honestly, I’ve got no complaints. It actually makes the screen a little bit easier to open when it’s closed. So when it comes to that everyday stuff, like I said, it’s got a nice screen so watching content is good, but something else I wanted to touch on that we use every day are, of course, the keyboard and trackpad. Now I love the layout of this keyboard and typing on. It feels really comfortable. This is lenovo’s.
True strike keyboard. I don’t know about you guys, but I personally like having access to a number pad. I always opt for bigger laptops, so I can make sure I have that number pad. So I’m very happy that it’s included here now, what’s also nice, is that you get access to these Quick Settings baked into the keyboard. So if you want to turn certain settings off whether it’s switching the rgbs turning them off or just maybe even changing your power settings, you can do all of that with the FN button here and when you’ve got the backlight on your keyboard on you can see. It’S the specific spots that you can change all of the settings, so things, though I think a lot of us know that gaming laptops don’t usually have the best speakers, but I found that this one is surprisingly good.
Just throwing some Lo-Fi really quick, we’re only at 70 here now, there’s not much low end, it’s not going to be a laptop where it just thumps or anything, or it’s not going to shake your table at all. But it’s enough that you can feel comfortable listening to what you’re listening to it’s, not that super Trinity sound that we usually hear from gaming laptops. So definitely quality speakers here and those are actually located right here and right here.
But if we’re being honest we know, most people are probably going to use a gaming headset with this thing, especially when gaming but good to know that the speakers sound decent. Nonetheless, now one more thing when it comes to the everyday usage, while I really do like the overall design there’s one aspect that might get annoying to some, so we’ve got this nice rubberized texture, but over time, as you use this, if you’ve got like oily fingers, Like your boy does over here, you will start to see marks all over it. I honestly really like the way the rubberized texture feels in the hand, but you do have to keep in mind that it picks up oily prints.
If you’ve got them, you got oily fingers thumb now, let’s get to the meat of this. We got ta talk about performance now, I’ll be honest, even though the keyboard is nice and it definitely is comfortable to use while gaming I’m one of those PC Gamers who still likes to use a controller. So there goes my tech confession for the week and all of the games that I normally play on this machine. This thing handled like a champ and you guys can see some of the frame rates we were hitting for some of the games that I like to play like I said max settings across the board, so this thing handles it really well now. Obviously, this thing is spec well to handle that stuff, but what’s also in here that we got to give some credit to is lenovo’s AI chip. Now the 9i has lenovo’s la2 Chip, which is their AI processor.
In here, which is going to help with the overall performance of this machine – and it’s got great features like scenario detection, so it knows when you need the power the most. So, if you’re doing something, that’s not really intensive versus playing a pretty heavy game. It’S going to know to send a little bit more juice and resources over, so that you’re getting the most out of your gameplay or maybe even decreasing some of the power that this thing is using if it doesn’t need it.
So the AI chip is really well integrated. Here and honestly, we can spend like a full video talking about what that thing contributes to the overall performance here and it’s pretty wild to see AI actually playing a role here and even learning the way you game and all that stuff to increase the performance out Of your laptop mind-blowing stuff, because it does make an impact here now we all know when it comes to gaming on a gaming laptop. You could throw a ton of specs inside of here and make it as crazy as possible.
But if it can’t keep cool and sustain that performance for long periods of time, it doesn’t matter, but Lenovo has went pretty crazy with this machine and added so many different cooling options to get the most out of this, and I’m talking about a triple fan system And an integrated liquid cooling pump and that combo has allowed me to play games on this thing for hours without issues. Does it make a lot of noise? The fans definitely do kick up. You know you’re doing something intensive the fans they definitely whirl. But for me it’s definitely not so bad. I don’t like, when fans kick up when you’re doing like regular activities, that’s my pet peeve. What was nice is that you get tons and tons of control with lenovo’s Vantage software. Now, last but not least, we got ta talk about battery. It’S a gaming laptop you guys, battery life isn’t going to be its strongest suit.
I don’t think many people play any games on their laptops without it being plugged in and if you do play without it, you know you’re going to be gaming for just like an hour or two now. What’S really impressive here is that it does have rapid charge. So that 330 watt charger is going to be able to charge this thing up really quickly. Now I brought this thing down pretty close to zero and I think I was able to get a full charge in about an hour or so maybe a little bit more than an hour and give or take a few minutes.
But overall you guys. This laptop is just it’s honestly, everything everything that you want and need in a laptop. I feel like this thing absolutely delivers on, but that about wraps it up. You guys, let me know your thoughts on the legion 9i, like I said best, I’ve used so far. I’M glad it’s mine, but till next article guys it’s your average consumer peace. Now I got some other gaming laptop .