Lenovo has announced a new Legion 9i, and it might be the craziest thing I've ever seen from the Legion lineup. It's coming in October, it starts at a whopping $4,399 (you know, a completely normal price we pay for things), and Lenovo is offering all sorts of wacky stuff.
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The company is clearly more excited about the fact that the 9i is the first 16-inch gaming laptop with a standalone liquid cooling system. It's exactly what it sounds like. Most laptops use air cooling to transfer heat along heat pipes to a radiator; a liquid-cooled device, by contrast, does this with water and a pump, which, as you can imagine, can handle a lot more thermal mass. Such a system could theoretically allow the 9i to draw truly massive amounts of power (up to 230W, Lenovo claims) for a ridiculously smooth gaming experience.
To be clear, liquid cooling is something that has been tried before in laptops of this size. But it's generally done externally - that is, you plug a device into a small port on the back and that device shoots water inside. Lenovo's claim seems to be that the Legion 9i can be completely cooled using this method, without any gimmicks.
Now, this could be very exciting, but we can't stress enough that we have no idea how well it will work. We also feel compelled to point out that Legion cooling is already notoriously good. The last two Legion 5i generations that The Verge has reviewed ran remarkably cool, without much noise, throughout our testing. We're sure a liquid system will make some difference, of course, but how much remains to be seen.
So before we all throw the Legion 7i models out the window (and we know some of you were tempted), we'll have to see how this performs when the units hit shelves.
Another interesting feature is the forged carbon cover, which will give each unit a unique pattern. The design has a kind of funky vibe, and it can be nice to know that your unit looks different from the thousands of others on the shelf.
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But what we're most excited to see here is the 16:10 165Hz Mini LED display. This has a 94% screen-to-body ratio, which is impressive, not just among gaming laptops but laptops in general. Mini LEDs aren't cheap, but when you spend any amount of time gaming on a display like this, it can feel downright painful to go back to a regular IPS panel.
And then we come to the inside. The Legion 9i will be powered by the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, which is the most powerful mobile GPU in the gaming market today. Up to 64GB of memory and 2TB of storage will be available. Nice stuff.
I have more mixed feelings about the processor—it's a Intel Core i9—the 13980HX. It's the most powerful mobile processor Intel has ever made, and it's nothing short of awesome. Still, it's a little hard to get excited about Intel's machines right now, because AMD's 7945HX3D chip is coming to store shelves soon, and that chip, in our testing, left the Core i9 in the dust. (The ROG Strix Scar X3D, the monstrous 17-incher that houses that X3D chip, is also a lot cheaper than this Legion model.)
So, for now, we see this 9i device mostly as a crazy idea to showcase Lenovo's cooling solution and how much extra performance it actually brings. But if you have the cash to buy one, know that we're very jealous and cheering you on from afar.
Read also: Lenovo announces the new Lenovo Pro Slim 9i and other laptops
source of information:theverge.com
