I’ve never been a huge fan ofgaming laptops, in my eyes it has always made more sense to have a nicedesktop systemat home and a slim and light ultra-portable laptop for computing on the go.
That’s not to say there aren’t incredibly impressive gaming laptops on the market, but there has never been one that could convince me that it’s worth carrying such a bulky machine on a regular basis.
Then there’s also the fact that most of them are made from plastic, sometimes with quite garish designs, and that’s not exactly appealing when the price tags are in the thousands.
Of course, some gaming laptops are built with portability in mind, but there are usually some big compromises made to achieve this slimness. Whether it’s the use of a low-specGPUor some severe throttling of the performance.
When you’re buying a machine for gaming, you want the best performance you can get, and that usually means a hefty thick machine that you’ll be hesitant to carry from the living room to your bedroom, let alone lug around in a backpack while travelling.
For all these reasons,ultrabookshave always made more sense to me. And they’re great for getting your work done, but what about when you want to runBaldurs Gate 3? In that scenario, they’re far from ideal.
Lenovo has just announced the Legion 9i gaming laptop, and it makes an excellent first impression. It’s extremely powerful, sporting up to an Intel Core i9 13980HX processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 laptop GPU along with up to 64GB of 5600Mhz DDR5 and 2TB ofPCIe Gen 4 SSD storage. But despite, that, it weighs in at just 2.58kg and is pretty slim, for a gaming laptop at least.
This is partially achieved through the use of materials like forged carbon, which covers the lid. Not only is it an extremely strong and light material, but it gives the laptop a very distinctive look, and due to the way it’s manufactured, no two laptops will look exactly the same. Of course, being a gaming machine, there’s plenty of RGB lighting, the most LEDs Lenovo has ever put on one of its laptops, in fact. The rest of the chassis is made from recycled aluminium, there’s no cheap-feeling plastics here - even the keyboard has ceramic keycaps!
So with monstrous hardware in a slim chassis, we can probably expect thermal throttling, right? If Lenovo’s marketing is to be believed, that won’t be the case.
The Legion 9i should be capable of a 230W TDP and 150W for theRTX 4090alone. This is achieved with a new hybrid cooling system developed with Cooler Master that integrates liquid cooling with vapour chambers to keep everything cool under pressure.
While I saw the laptop in person, I haven’t been able to put it through its paces just yet. So take these claims with a grain of salt, but there’s great promise here, to say the least.
Elsewhere, the laptop features a 99.9Wh battery, dual Harman speakers with Nahemic tuning, Thunderbolt 4 connectivity and up to a 3.2KMini LEDdisplay with 165Hz refresh rate and 100 per cent Adobe sRGB coverage.
It’s probably the most enticing gaming laptop that I’ve come across, but, as you might expect, it doesn’t come cheap. Prices start at €4499 when it launches in October. I might be ready to make the switch, but I’m not sure my wallet is.
