Lenovo Legion 9i (2023) review: a gaming laptop with style, substance, and a big scoop of performance

Lenovo makes some of the best gaming laptops, especially when it comes to the premium Legion series. The flagship Legion 9 gaming laptop made a comeback last year and while it demands a high price, the company has ensured that it delivers on every single aspect, at least on paper.

Apart from featuring some of the most high-end mobile chips from Intel and NVIDIA, the company has gone beyond the limits and uses advanced technologies like a forged carbon fibre lid, a bright mini-LED display, and a special liquid-cooling system made in collaboration with Cooler Master.

Is it the most powerful gaming laptop that money can buy? Let’s find out.

Design and build

The Legion 9i comes with a distinct-looking lid that is not seen on any other Legion laptop. It is made out of a multi-layer forged carbon fiber which makes it lighter than traditional aluminium and, at the same time offers better strength. There is a little bit of flex, but nothing that should be concerning. The forged carbon leaves a camo-style pattern which Lenovo says is unique for every single unit. I was also pleased with the soft finish of the lid which is great for keeping away fingerprints. 

The bottom chassis is all black and is made out of a magnesium-aluminium blend. For RGB there are LED strips embedded into the bottom chassis, alongside the Legion logo on the lid and the keyboard. All of these can be controlled with key combos or using the Vantage software.

Overall the finish is quite premium and it isn’t super bulky, especially for a 16-inch laptop. In terms of weight, the Legion 9i comes in at 2.5kg and a maximum thickness of 0.75-inches, which is pretty admirable considering this notebook features a top-of-the-line Intel HX processor, an RTX 4090 GPU and a beefy cooling system.

Speaking of which, to enhance cooling Lenovo has lowered the keyboard to the middle creating a large vent for additional air intake, which at first looks like a large soundbar. This also means that the trackpad is comparatively shorter, though still wide enough. More on that later. Sitting at the top of the air vent is the power button that includes a fingerprint reader for Windows Hellow login. It even has an LED ring to denote the performance mode.

The device features three USB Type-C ports: two Thunderbolt 4 ports (with DisplayPort 1.4 and 140W Power Delivery) on the rear and a USB-C 3.2 Gen 1 port on the right side. At the back, there is 2.5Gbps Ethernet port, a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port, an HDMI 2.1 port, and an AC adapter port. The right side includes a webcam shutter switch and another USB3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port, while the left offers a 3.5mm combo jack and an SD card reader. I absolutely love the fact that Lenovo didn’t opt for a microSD card, which seems to have become a trend on a variety of laptops.

The bottom cover has a total of eight screws and with a bit of prying, you can get access to the internals. Apart from the battery, there are three cooling fans, two m.2 storage slots, and a slot to install the Wi-Fi card. The memory slots are unfortunately placed on the other side of the motherboard, which requires the removal of additional screws and some delicate cables. This is actually quite disappointing as replacing the RAM is not as simple as one would expect.

Display

Lenovo has nailed the display by using a mini-LED backlit panel. It is one of the best 16-inch displays on a laptop offering a sharp resolution of 3,200 x 2,000 pixels and a claimed maximum brightness of 1200 nits in HDR. There is also support for HDR1000 and you can expect up to 100 percent coverage of Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 colour gamuts. The display feels immaculate for content consumption and should work very well for content creators who seek colour accuracy. You don’t get pitch-dark blacks as an OLED, but it gets fairly dim with very minor light bleed or blooming effect.

For gamers, the display offers support for Nvidia G-Sync and a fast refresh rate of 165Hz. Like most modern gaming laptops, the Legion 9i offers the option of adaptive refresh rate which allows you to drop the screen refresh rate to 60Hz when using the laptop on battery, and switching to 165Hz when plugged in. As for gaming, performance feels smooth on almost all the titles I tested, including fast-paced shooting action on Apex Legends and Valorant.

Keyboard and trackpad

The positioning of the keyboard on the Legion 9i can take a while to get used to, but besides that, it matches what is expected from a premium gaming laptop. Lenovo calls it the TrueStrike keyboard, and offers a 1.5mm key travel distance with customisable RGB lighting. Typing feels super comfortable and responsive and I was able to swiftly write news articles on it within a few hours of usage. The feedback in particular is great, and Lenovo has put extra effort in incorporating user-replaceable scissor key switches. In fact, the laptop comes bundled with ten additional switches and eight glossy keycaps for you to play around with. 

The trackpad works well, but the fact that it offers more width than height hampered my experience. I constantly felt that it didn’t register left clicks properly, only to realise I was clicking on the wrong side of the trackpad. In Lenovo’s defence, most people who are going to game or use the laptop for productivity will use a mouse.

Performance

The laptop features Intel’s13th-gen Core i9-13980HX processor which is one of the most powerful mobile processors on the market despite being a generation old. It comes with 24 cores (eight P-Cores and sixteen E-Cores) with a maximum boost clock speed of up to 5.6GHz. That’s as powerful as most high-end desktop CPUs.

The CPU is paired with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 mobile GPU capable of a maximum TGP of 175W, which is notably the maximum configuration allowed by NVIDIA for this particular GPU. For storage and memory there are two 1TB PCIe Gen 4 SSDs configured in RAID 0 and 32GB of DDR5 SODIMM memory clocked at 6400MHz configured in dual-channel. 

There is also the 2024 14th-gen Intel variant of the Legion 9i that is currently available. That one features the Core i9-14900HX that offers a similar core and thread count but with a 200MHz faster clock speed, paired with up to 64GB of DDR5 5600MHz memory and the option of an RTX 4080 or 4090. 

In terms of raw CPU performance, the Core i9-13980HX is mighty powerful. You can essentially push the limits on this laptop as it is capable of being a desktop replacement in most scenarios. Running the CPU through various benchmarks, the results were, as expected, quite impressive and comparable to some of the most powerful gaming laptops. It managed to score over 9,600 points on PCMark 10 and over 12,500 in the extended version of the same test, which is the highest we have recorded on a gaming laptop in the past few months of testing.  

The Legion 9i also managed to ace most of the graphics-based benchmark tests which is partly due to the special liquid-cooled thermal solution that allows the 4090 to sustain higher clock speeds for longer periods. Don’t get me wrong, the laptop does heat up under heavy loads, with the GPU recording a maximum of 83 degrees and the CPU reaching 92 degrees and even peaking at 100 degrees. Thanks to the positioning of the keyboard, it doesn’t get that hot, but feels slightly warm during long gaming sessions. 

It is also worth mentioning that due to the RAID 0 configuration, the two M.2 SSDs offer a combined storage of 2TB alongside impressive read and write speeds as recorded by the Crystal Diskmark benchmark.

Of course, the laptop shines when it comes to gaming. Even at its 3K native resolution, the Legion 9i was able to deliver impressive frame rates and an immersive gaming experience. AAA titles like CyberPunk 2077 and Read Dead Redemption 2 run way beyond 60FPS and dialing in the right upscaling and frame generation technologies further boosts frames to over 100FPS. If you are a fast-paced shooter fanatic, expect nothing less. 

In Valorant I was able to get over 400FPS and in Apex Legends (which is a slightly more demanding FPS shooter) I enjoyed frames well over 200FPS. Notably, running games at lower resolution (especially at 1080p) has an adverse effect on the performance, as the CPU starts to bottleneck and cranks up to the maximum 55W TDP. Personally, I found 1600p and 1800p to be the perfect resolution to game on.

Battery life

Lenovo has managed to fit a 99.9Whr battery on the Legion 9i, which is the highest permissible limit, especially if you are travelling on a flight. However, despite having such a large unit, it doesn’t last very long. The laptop managed to hold up only 2 hours and 3 minutes in the video loop test on PCMark 10 which ran at 80% screen brightness. To get the best results, I switched the performance mode to silent, screen refresh rate down to 60Hz, and reduced the brightness to 25% wherein I was able to use the laptop for a little over four hours.

The bundled 330W GaN power brick offers fast charging and manages to juice up the laptop from zero to 70% in about 30 minutes, which is impressive. Notably, Lenovo also offers a smaller 140W USB Type-C charger in addition to the regular charging brick. Sadly the review unit sent to me did not include the secondary charger.

Verdict

There’s plenty to like about this laptop, but sadly it caters to a very niche audience, especially for its asking price of Rs 4,49,990. While you can build a premium, high-performance desktop PC with that kind of money, the Legion 9i is suitable for someone who craves desktop-level computing performance in a mobile package. Performance is undoubtedly the star feature and in most cases the Legion 9i fairs better than the beastly MSI Titan GT77 HX and other similarly powered gaming notebooks, despite being way more compact. 

It has plenty of RGB lighting, a comfortable keyboard, along with a bright and crisp display. A few nitpicks would be the below-average battery life, underwhelming speakers, and the short trackpad, but I wouldn’t really consider them deal breakers.

As mentioned earlier, the Legion 9i is also available with the newer 14th-gen Intel Core i9 14900HX. This model is selling at a starting price of Rs 3,79,505 and has the option of stepping down to an RTX 4080, which I personally believe is a more balanced choice.

Editor’s rating: 8.5 / 10

Pros

• Extremely powerful
• Sharp mini-LED display
• Comfortable keyboard
• More compact than the competition

Cons

• Below-average battery life
• Short trackpad
• Expensive