Lenovo’s BEST Gaming Laptop? Legion 9i Review
This is Lenovo’s highest end Legion gaming laptop! It’s their new Legion 9, and with plenty of fancy features like built in liquid cooler and a mini LED screen, it does not come cheap. Unfortunately we’ve had some problems with it too, so let’s find out if it’s worth it in this review! The Legion 9 has a forged carbon lid, which Lenovo says is 10% lighter and stronger than traditional aluminum. Every pattern is unique, no two Legion 9’s have the exact same lid finish. There is a soft painted finish on top of the lid, and it actually
feels a little rubbery to the touch, rather than metallic. There’s still a normal amount of flex to the lid though, so it’s hard for me to say how much this actually helps, aside from giving the laptop a different look compared to others and making it a bit lighter. The magnesium-aluminum interior comes in Lenovo’s carbon black color. Fingerprints show up fairly easily on the matte interior, but are easy to clean with a microfiber cloth. The lid on the other hand does a great job of hiding them. There’s plenty of RGB lighting, with front and back light
bars that wrap around the sides, the Legion logo on the lid, and of course the keyboard. Overall build quality feels good, but not quite as solid compared to Razer’s Blade 16,
comes with two chargers. A larger 330 watt GaN charger for full performance, and a smaller 140 watt Type-C charger which is better if you’re on the go if you don’t need full power. The laptop alone weighs 5.6lb or 2.5kg, increasing to 7.8lb or 3.5kg with the 330 watt charger included. But if you’re instead traveling with the smaller 140 watt Type-C charger then the total is 6.6lb or 3kg, and if for some reason you want to take both options then you’re looking at 8.8lb or 4kg. Unfortunately both power bricks use different cable types, so you can’t
just take one cable for both chargers. It’s surprisingly thin compared to other high powered gaming laptops, but it’s a little thicker at the back to accommodate the liquid cooler. My Legion 9 has Intel’s top-end Core i9-13980HX processor, Nvidia RTX 4090 graphics, 32 gigs of RAM, and a 16” Mini-LED screen, but you can customize the specs with the link below. The keyboard has per-key RGB backlighting, and all keys and secondary functions get lit up. There are 3 brightness levels available with the function and up or down arrow keys, and you can cycle through the 6 different
lighting modes with the function and spacebar shortcut. You can also adjust the brightness in 9 increments through Spectrum in Lenovo’s Vantage software, and this lets you customize those 6 different lighting profiles. Along with customizing any key, you can individually customize parts of the light bars or the lid logo. You can also turn the lid-logo on or off any time with the function plus L shortcut. There’s a large vent above the keyboard for air intake, and Lenovo’s setup guide suggests wiping it regularly to prevent dust build up. The vent is so big that it pushes the
keyboard down, so if you’ve got bigger hands like me you may find typing less comfortable as your hands sit on the edge, however the edge is at least rounded nicely, so it’s not sharp. Apart from the placement, the keyboard felt nice to use. I’m told the keyboard is unique compared to other Legion models. It’s slightly thinner at 3.7mm instead of 4mm, yet it still has the same 1.5mm travel distance. I can’t really explain it, but it felt slightly better to me, and my partner thought so too. She doesn’t normally like Legion keyboards, but she’s onboard
with this one. It also has removable keycaps and replaceable switches, which is great because if you have any issues with a key you can swap it out yourself without sending the laptop in for repair and replacing the entire keyboard. It comes with a tool to remove the keys, 16 switches and 8 keycaps, 4 are white and 4 are different colors. The ceramic keys are just a little smoother compared to the stock ones. And just like last year, I found them a little awkward to remove, but hey, there are spare switches if you break one. The
pushed down keyboard means a smaller touchpad. It’s made of glass and feels super smooth, but it is smaller compared to most others vertically. You can still move the mouse cursor from top to bottom on the screen though, so it works alright for me, but the palm rejection might not be great. It’s not a problem for me, because when I naturally rest my hand on WASD there’s plenty of space, but my partner’s hand sits much closer to the touchpad, and she would accidentally touch it when playing games which would affect the game rather than get ignored.
But you can lock the touchpad with the F10 shortcut. There’s a fingerprint scanner in the power button which works fast and accurately. As for ports, the left side has a 3.5mm audio combo jack at the back and an SD card slot towards the front, while the right has two USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, Type-C near the front, and a Type-A right up the back. The rest are on the back, from left to right there’s 2.5 gigabit ethernet, a USB 3.2 gen 1 Type-A port, two Thunderbolt 4 Type-C ports, HDMI 2.1 output, and the power input
on the far right. The rear port icons light up to help you plug cables in without turning the laptop around, and you can turn their lighting on or off with the function plus U shortcut. Considering that the Legion 9 is meant to be a higher end premium gaming laptop, I was kind of surprised that the three of the USB ports were slower 3.2 Gen 1, so they’re limited to 5 gigabit rather than 10 gigabit with USB 3.2 Gen 2. Though to be fair, the Thunderbolt 4 ports on the back can go up to 40 Gigabit.
And both of those Type-C ports on the back support up to 140 watts of Type-C charging. Lenovo includes their smaller 140 watt Type-C charger with the Legion 9, and we’ll look at how games and apps perform with that connected soon. Both of those rear Type-C ports also have DisplayPort 1.4 support, so you can connect monitors, and they both always connect directly to the Nvidia graphics, whether optimus is on or off. And same for HDMI, so none of the ports connect to the integrated graphics. We also confirmed HDMI could run our LG B9 TV at 4K
120Hz 12-Bit with G-Sync. Getting inside requires removing 8 Phillips head screws, all the same length. It wasn’t hard to open, but the front was tough even with pry tools. I’ll leave a link to the ones I use below. Inside we’ve got the battery down the front, and then underneath a metal cover there’s the Wi-Fi 7 card along with two PCIe Gen 4 M.2 slots. Unfortunately access to the memory and cooler requires taking out the motherboard. Lenovo has good instructions on doing this in the hardware maintenance manual on their site, but it’s still annoying as I
had to remove about 20 cables from the motherboard. There are two memory slots on the other side of the board, so definitely preferable to soldered memory, but still way harder to access compared to most other laptops. Lenovo sells it with up to 64 gigs of DDR5-5600 memory, or up to 32 gigs of DDR5-6400 overclocked memory. Ours came with 32 gigs running at DDR5-5600, but if we go into the BIOS and enable memory overclocking with the XMP profile it’s able to run at 6400. The average FPS was a little higher in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p, but
there were more dips in performance, as shown by the 1% low. Everything else was tested with the RAM at its stock DDR5-5600 speed, and that was due to a combination of it only being accessible through the BIOS so it’s probably only for enthusiasts, we didn’t find it to help too much, and I didn’t find the option until all the testing was done… Ours has two 1TB drives in a RAID 0 array, so the read and write performance is kind of crazy. The SD card slot wasn’t great though. Our V90 card is capable of 250 megabytes
a second for sequential reads and writes. The card does not click in and sticks out quite a lot, so be careful not to bump it. The Vantage software has an option for optimizing Wi-Fi in the advanced section. It claims to improve Wi-Fi signal by automatically adjusting the internal antenna orientation. The Wi-Fi speed was amazing, and the optimized setting gave a slight boost. These are the best speeds we’ve ever recorded from any laptop by a fair margin. It’s also the first Wi-Fi 7 card we’ve had in a laptop, but our router only supports Wi-Fi 6. The
upgradeability score isn’t bad, but I took off half a point for the awkward access to the memory. Each memory slot gets a full point, so taking off a full point would be equivalent to one memory stick with some soldered, but I think what the Legion 9 has is preferable because at least you have the option of expansion. I also confirmed both M.2 slots can easily fit double sided drives. The speakers are found towards the front on the left and right sides. They don’t sound as clear above half volume, but there’s still some bass. They sound
pretty good around half volume, not amazing but definitely above average. The Latencymon results were bad, but that’s been the case with most laptops this year. The Legion 9 is powered by a 4-Cell 99.9Wh battery. You can enable adaptive refresh rate in Vantage to help save battery. This will automatically lower the screen’s refresh rate to 60Hz when you unplug the charger, which is why it flashes black, and it goes back up to 165Hz when you plug back in. The function + R shortcut can be used to swap between 60Hz and 165Hz at any time, with or
without the charger connected. You can also enable conservation mode in Vantage. This limits the maximum charge level between 75 and 80%, helping battery longevity. You can’t use it at the same time as rapid charge, and you’ve also got the option to charge the battery slower overnight, again to help longevity. It lasted for 5 hours in our YouTube video playback test, not amazing, but pretty typical when we’re talking about gaming laptops with Intel’s HX processors, though that said Razer’s Blade 16 was able to last a fair bit longer with a slightly smaller battery. Lenovo’s Legion Pro
7 lasted a bit longer too, but was worse off when running a game. The Legion also has this message from our sponsor, Pulseway! Say goodbye to the stress of IT infrastructure management with Pulseway. Pulseway’s advanced technology quickly spots and solves problems before they escalate. We all know computers are faster and more efficient, so let Pulseway handle the hard work for you! From executing repetitive tasks, defining multi-level auto-remediation workflows, to ensuring critical patches are automatically applied, Pulseway has got you covered. Think of Pulseway as an extra team member, tirelessly working for you so you can spend
more time doing what matters. So make your life easier and start your free trial with the link below. Back to the Legion, let’s check out thermals next. There are three fans inside but the cooler is underneath the motherboard. There’s a thick heatpipe shared between the CPU and GPU, along with an integrated liquid cooler which covers the GPU memory. We can see the small liquid loop at the top where the copper pipes are. Lenovo’s hardware maintenance guide mentions liquid metal applied to CPU, but no mention of the GPU, so it’s probably paste. By default, the water
pump only turns on if the GPU hits 84 degrees Celsius, 87 on the CPU, and 87 on the GPU memory. The pump light at the back turns on to let you know when the pump is active. I found that enabling custom mode with the fans set to full speed would always activate it. This is way more compact than what XMG are doing with their external liquid cooler, and we’ll see if it works shortly. There are air intake vents directly above the fans, as well as at the back above the keyboard. Air gets exhausted out towards
the left and right sides, with the vent on the left being much bigger due to that side having two fans. Air also gets exhausted from both sides on the back. The Vantage software lets us change between different performance modes, which from lowest to highest are quiet, balance, performance and custom. Balance mode has an optional AI setting which is meant to provide an optimal experience in supported games. Custom mode gives you some control over fan speed, or you can just set the fans to max, as well as some control over CPU and GPU thermal and power
limits for finer tuning. Whenever we’ve tested custom mode, all these sliders have been set to maximum with fans on full speed for best performance. We’ve also got the option of enabling a GPU overclock through vantage too. It works in all modes except quiet mode as long as the larger charger is connected. You can customize it through here, but we’ve left it default any time it was tested. As I figure it’s a simple one click option for a performance boost, all our testing has been done with it on. There’s also a CPU overclock option, but it’s
only available after enabling it through the BIOS. We haven’t used it. You can press the function and Q shortcut to cycle between all performance modes except custom. The color of the power button changes so you can easily tell which is currently in use, as noted here. Performance and custom modes cannot be used when running on battery power, or with the Type-C charger. The internal temperatures were fine at idle, but the fans were always audible. The rest of the results are from combined CPU and GPU stress tests which aim to represent a worst case full load
scenario. Temperatures get higher as we move into higher performance modes, as expected, but even in the higher modes they’re relatively cool compared to other laptops. It gets 6 to 7 degrees warmer with the lid closed because the vent above the keyboard gets blocked, but even still, it’s not what I’d call hot if you want to dock the laptop. Maxing the fans out in custom mode was a few degrees cooler compared to performance mode, but as you’ll hear soon it’s much louder too. The cooling pad I test with, linked below, was able to lower temps further.
There’s not really a performance difference in terms of clock speed with the cooling pad in use because thermal throttling was not a limit. Custom mode was able to clock much higher than performance mode on the processor, despite also running cooler, and that’s because custom mode was able to run the cpu up to 55 watts before hitting a power limit. The GPU is also able to run 10 watts higher in custom mode, so this is what I would consider to be a full powered RTX 4090 gaming laptop, despite it being on the thinner side. Overall, the
internal temps are quite low considering we’re getting full GPU performance from a thinner laptop, but I think this is due to the big vents and triple fan setup rather than the liquid cooler. The liquid cooler only covers GPU memory, and by disconnecting it from the motherboard I was able to confirm that the memory ran a couple of degrees cooler with it connected in a long term sustained stress test. I used max fans in custom mode to ensure the cooler would activate. The GPU core temperature and GPU clock speed were the same with and without the
liquid cooler, so this wouldn’t result in a performance difference in games unless the GPU memory was throttling. There’s not that much of an FPS difference between performance and custom modes with a game running. The AI option didn’t seem to do much in this specific game. You can’t go higher than balance mode with the Type-C charger connected, and the bigger charger was able to perform 40% better in balance mode, or 63% faster if you count custom mode, which is only available with the bigger charger. The CPU power level can run higher when the GPU isn’t active,
like in Cinebench, where 120+ watts was possible in custom mode. Unlike the game, the CPU performance gap with the Type-C charger connected wasn’t as big when comparing to the bigger charger at the same performance mode. I don’t know if it’s a bug, but I found that you can tick performance mode in the vantage software and it will change to performance mode in the Windows power plan without actually setting performance mode in Vantage, because the power button doesn’t go red. This technically means that it’s possible to get much better single core performance with the Type-C charger
connected, more in-line with what performance mode is offering. But if you cycle Vantage between quiet and balance modes, the power plan will change back to balance mode. The single core performance is quite good compared to other results. The multicore performance is decent, but far from the best. It’s slightly behind Razer’s Blade 16, and XMG’s Neo 16 with liquid cooler. Lenovo’s Legion Pro 7i is able to score higher because it’s a thicker laptop that can run its CPU with more power. Performance lowers if we unplug the charger and instead run purely off of battery power, but
the Legion 9 is now ahead of those other two 16 inch laptops, though Dell’s 16 inch laptop was scoring 16% higher. I mean even an 8 core Ryzen laptop is slightly ahead. Most laptops I test are in the low 30 degrees Celsius range on the keyboard at idle, and the Legion 9 was in line with this, but it feels warm due to the metal chassis. The keyboard was a little warmer with the stress tests running, but the wrist rest area felt cooler now. The keyboard temps continue to rise in the higher balance performance mode, and
it feels a bit warm resting on WASD. The higher performance mode gets warmer still on the keyboard, despite the keyboard being closer to the front and further away from the CPU and GPU. It’s a fair bit cooler in the custom mode with everything maxed out, including the fans, but it’s much louder too, let’s have a listen. The fans were constantly audible, even when sitting there doing nothing in quiet mode. They get louder in the higher modes, as expected, with custom mode being significantly louder compared to performance mode when maxed out, but you can of course
customize the fan speed. The temps were quite cool with custom mode in our stress testing, so you could absolutely lower the fan speed without any loss in performance. This is Lenovo’s only Legion gaming laptop with a Mini-LED screen. And honestly, it looks great, when it’s working properly. We had this weird problem whenever you turn optimus off that the screen just loses half its max brightness. So if you’re running on dGPU mode it looks really dim. We aren’t alone, others in discord confirmed the issue. Everything was fine after a Windows reset, but Lenovo was able to
replicate the problem and are investigating. When things are working properly though, the screen looks great with high color gamut and good contrast. It gets fairly bright, we measured around 600 nits in SDR mode. Lenovo claims over 1200 nits in HDR mode, but unfortunately our tools can’t properly test HDR. Backlight bleed wasn’t a problem. With the screen on all black it’s not quite off, but it’s extremely dim, and you can see the dimming zones change to follow the trail of the mouse. During regular use we didn’t notice anywhere near as much blooming or halo effect compared
to other mini LED laptops, and Lenovo seem to be countering that by lowering the brightness of areas showing darker content, so sometimes just dragging the mouse cursor over a window in dark mode can look a little weird as it’s not as bright as normal. I’m not confident in these response time results, because PWM flickering from the screen’s backlight zones confuses my tools, and it’s hard to account for both pixel response time and the slower backlight changing, so a partially completed result is the best I can do. Lenovo are claiming a 3ms response time, and what
I was able to measure isn’t too far off. The total system latency is the amount of time between a mouse click and when a gunshot fire appears on the screen in CS:GO. The Legion 9’s mini LED screen isn’t great here. The cheaper Legion Pro 7 was 15ms faster in this test, and even the lower tier Pro 5 was faster. The Legion 9 has a MUX switch. You can set the GPU working mode in Vantage to dGPU mode, but you have to reboot to make the change. Most people won’t need to use this, because advanced optimus
is also available through the Nvidia control panel software, and G-Sync is available when optimus is off. There’s a 1080p camera above the screen, but there’s no Windows hello face unlock despite being Lenovo’s flagship gaming laptop. You can disable the camera with the switch on the right. Here’s how the camera and microphones look and sound, and this is what it sounds like while typing on the keyboard with the fans currently active. Now let’s find out how well the Legion 9 performs in games! The results are kind of weird… Cyberpunk 2077 was tested the same on all
laptops, and the Legion 9 is shown by the red highlight. We’re starting out with 4K results, as the laptop has a high resolution 3200 by 2000 screen, and in this case the Legion 9 was performing similarly to other RTX 4090 gaming laptops. But things take a turn when we step down to 1440p. The Legion 9 is now the lowest 4090 result at this resolution, granted it’s not that far behind Razer’s Blade 16, which is another thinner gaming laptop. Still though, Alienware’s cheaper x16 with RTX 4080 wasn’t far behind at all. Things get even worse at
1080p, with the Legion 9’s 4090 now sitting in between the 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti from last gen. Even the far cheaper Legion Pro 5 with 4070 was hitting higher FPS, so what’s going on here? It looks like a CPU bottleneck, because at 1080p and 1440p the i9-13980HX was running at 55 watts, which we saw in the thermal testing earlier is as high as it’s allowed to run at with the GPU maxed out at the same time. Thermals are perfectly fine, but the GPU utilization is just 50% in Cyberpunk at 1080p with the 4090 running
at 120 watts. Considering how good the thermal results were earlier, I was kind of surprised that they didn’t boost the CPU power limit above 55 watts to reduce or prevent this. Lower resolutions are just more CPU bound, so we’re not getting a great result in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p. But to be fair, the Legion 9 does have a 3200 by 2000 screen. A resolution that’s closer to 4K than it is to 1440p. So this shouldn’t really be an issue if you’re gaming at the native screen resolution, as that’s just more GPU heavy. And it also
doesn’t happen in every game either. Red Dead Redemption 2 was tested with the game’s benchmark, and again at 4K the Legion 9 was one of the best RTX 4090 results. Only XMG’s Neo 16 with water cooling is ahead, and let’s be real, a 1 FPS gap is within the margin of error range. The fact that the Legion is ahead of far larger 17 and 18 inch machines is impressive. It dips down a little at the lower 1440p resolution, but unlike the last game, it’s far from being one of the worst 4090 results. It’s lower out
of the same selection of laptops at the lower 1080p resolution, but the results are much more reasonable compared to what we saw in Cyberpunk. Again, it’s nowhere near being the lowest 4090, so it just goes to show that it depends on the game as to whether or not lower resolutions will run bad. It’s also not a problem in Control at 1080p, because this is a GPU heavy game. Even at a lower resolution like this the 4090 was still able to max out at 170 watts with the CPU at 50 watts, so no CPU bottleneck and
a great result compared to other bigger 4090 laptops. The Legion 9 was providing excellent performance at 1440p too, again only beaten by that water cooled XMG laptop which is also a thicker laptop too. I’m still impressed that it’s ahead of so many other larger laptops, and again the Legion 9 is still one of the better results at 4K too, but to be fair there’s only a very minor difference compared to most other similarly specced laptops. Here are the 3DMark results for those that find them useful, now for some content creator tests. The maxed out CPU
and GPU specs have the Legion 9 performing in-line compared to other top of the line laptops, and in many cases the ones performing better are larger, thicker machines. Lenovo’s BIOS gives you more customization compared to ASUS, Gigabyte or Razer laptops, but there’s nowhere near as much tuning potential compared to what MSI offers in their advanced BIOS. Linux support was tested with an Ubuntu 23.10 live CD, and and the results were bad. Only the keyboard and ethernet worked. The touchpad, camera, speakers and Wi-Fi did not work. Keyboard shortcuts for adjusting screen brightness did not work, and
neither did changing performance mode. But shortcuts did work for changing lighting effect, lighting brightness, and turning the rear port icons and lid logo on and off. Pricing and availability will change over time, so check the link below the video for updates and current sales. And if the Legion 9 does have a good sale, we’ll be sure to add it to our gaminglaptop.deals website. We update that everyday to include all of the latest sales, so make sure you check it out regularly to save money on your next gaming laptop. Alright so I’m working on this review
over Black Friday, so the prices are much lower than normal. The RTX 4080 config is available for just over $3000 USD, but for some context, the lower tier Legion Pro 7 with 4080 is on sale for $1800. Meanwhile the RTX 4090 version of the Legion 9 that we’ve tested in this video goes for $3400, again with currently available coupons applied. That is cheaper compared to Razer’s Blade 16 with RTX 4090, which I consider to be competition to the Legion 9. But that said, without sales the Legion 9 was more expensive at close to $4400. So
you’re paying a massive premium for what should be one of the best gaming laptops, and although the performance in games at higher resolutions was certainly impressive, especially when compared against thicker laptops, there are just a few compromises that make it harder to justify. Like the smaller touchpad and less keyboard space while typing. Or that the fans were almost never silent. Though that said, while filming they have just recently finally turned off. But don’t worry, I’m sure they’ll be back soon. It’s really annoying if you need to upgrade the RAM. For some reason there are three
USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, so 5 gigabit speed. I would just expect a top-end model like this to offer the best 10 gigabit speed with Gen 2. But again, you can get 40 gigabit with the two Thunderbolt ports on the back. The liquid cooler is a nice idea, but in practice it barely seems to make a difference. There’s no Windows Hello face unlock, and Linux support was the worst out of any laptop tested this year. The most annoying thing of all was the screen being dimmer with optimus off, that needs to be fixed. CPU heavier
games at lower resolutions may run into CPU bottlenecks, but I think in most cases as long as you’re playing at 1440p and above, it’s not going to be a problem. And these high-end specs are certainly capable of running modern games at high settings with higher resolutions. It’s not all bad though. The build quality feels nice and I like the unique lid. The screen does look great, when it’s working properly. The changeable key caps and switches is a nice bonus and improves repairability. It’s got memory overclocking which is usually a rare feature in laptops, even if
we didn’t find it to matter much in one game. The Wi-Fi speed was the fastest of any laptop ever by a fair margin. And the included 140 watt Type-C charger gives you options when traveling. But honestly, unless this thing has features that you really want like the fingerprint scanner, glass touchpad, rear port icon lighting, more RGB lighting or 2.5 gigabit ethernet, you could save a fair bit of money getting the cheaper but bigger Legion Pro 7 instead. There’s a good reason the Pro 7 was in my top 5 laptops tested this year, so check out
this video next to find out why!
