Lenovo Legion 9i (2023) Gaming Laptop Review

Introduction – Legion 9i 2023 (Gen8)

Lenovo’s 2022 flagship Legion laptop, the Legion 7i was a formal break into extreme enthusiast territory for Lenovo’s gaming brand and even to this day, it is still a very powerful laptop. In 2023, Intel has upped their HX series of processors with a larger line-up with the succeeding Intel 13th-gen HX-series and debuting alongside this was a large number of models sporting the new flagship model.

For the Legion family of products, this saw the debut of the Legion 9, specifically the Legion 9i denoting the Intel CPU powering the machine. The other key component in this combination is NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4090. This generation’s king of GPUs reigns unchallenged in its spot meaning NVIDIA can charge pretty much anything for this GPU. The laptop version may not be in the same position as its desktop counterpart but it is still a very power graphics card.

In this review we’ll be checking out the Lenovo Legion 9i, specifically the 16IRX8 83AG001DPH SKU model featuring the Intel Core i9-13980HX and an NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU and topping all that is a 3200×2000 resolution Mini LED display with 1200 nits of brightness. Housing all of those is a new chassis design, one that may be polarizing for Legion loyalists. Read on to find out more about the Lenovo Legion 9i 2023 Gen8 model in this review.

Specification

Closer Look

Exterior Housing – Forged Carbon

Perhaps the most drastic change in this release is the deviation from the office look that has always separated the Legion series from its other “gaming” counterparts in the market. That position has mostly been relegated for the Legion 5 models as models from 2023 for the Legion 7 have had more aggressive angles in their design language.

While the blocky design is still here, Lenovo has perhaps gones from “Stylish outside. Savage inside” to “Savage inside and outside.” as its very busy “forged carbon” top lid really draws the eyes. Now this isn’t a unique technology, forged carbon isn’t exclusive to Lenovo as G-Shock is very famous in using this material as well for its ultralight characteristic. This is exactly what Lenovo is after as well, as the larger cooling capacity also means more weight is being added to the cooling solution so any weight shed from other parts is highly welcome.

The most obvious trait here is the pattern. Forged carbon uses carbon fiber materials lining a mold and then pressed under pressure, another method would require heat. Carbon fiber chopped strands or “tow” are used and the way the pattern in is layed is completely random. This means that no two part is 100% alike. As is with most carbon fiber parts, the the Legion 9i’s forged carbon top cover is light but still very high-strength.

The Legion 9i is only offered in carbon black and I apologize in advance for the bright photo as it doesn’t convey the actual shade of the grey used by Lenovo here. It is darker in actual life in most room lighting conditions.

Bottom Cover and Venting Holes

Moving over to the bottom part we see the extremely large intake vents and the 3 visible  cooling fans from trhe bottom. Not much detail here but we also see the stereo holes on the bottom. The shell has raised rubber feet so unless you’re using this in bed or a soft surface, you’d have some gap for the vents.

IO Ports

Left Edge IO

Starting from the left side we see the majority of the space is assigned for venting. Lenovo does install the 3.5mm combo audio jack at this side at the upper edge and then an SD card slot just wee bit forward to the front.

Right Edge IO

The right hand side gives us a physical webcam shutter toggle to disable the webcam. Lenovo’s implementation uses an electronic disable switch versus a physical blinder on the camera. This feature is not available in all models, see here to find out why some Lenovo laptops have their camera privacy key disabled.

We also have  a pair of USB3.2 Gen1 (5Gbps) ports at this side: one Type-C and one Type-A. The classic Type-A port is way up top so for those that don’t like conecting it at the forward area, this may be a nice compromise.

Notice how the intake vents are blocked half ways on this side. We’ll see more on that when we remove the bottom shell.

Rear IO

Lenovo typically pushes all their IO on the rear side of their laptops and the Legion 9i retains that with large hex vents flanking the middle IO area. We have a 2.5GbE LAN port, perfect for editor setups who need faster physical LAN access to a multi-gig network who just don’t have the setup yet to utilize the faster Thunderbolt storage available right now which can be utilized by the dual Thunderbolt 4 ports on the Legion 9i. These ports are capable 40Gbps up and down on both ports and can also output DisplayPort1.4 while also charging up to 140W with PowerDelivery on a single port, but you have two so it is possibel to do quadruple monitor with the Lenovo Legion 9i 2023:

• 1x main laptop monitor
• 2x via DisplayPort over USB-C (both rear connector)
• 1x HDMI 2.1 port

An RTX 4090 can easily handle all that for productivity, gaming would vary if you’re spanning across 3 screens though. But you could do it.

Peripherals

Display

Depending on who you ask, many will point to the RTX 4090 as the star of the show in this laptop but some will say its the 3200×2000 165hz mini LED display. As bright as mini LED goes, with all the OLED options in the market right now, I feel Lenovo missed putting a fast 1600p OLED for the allure of mini LED ignoring the fact that OLED have an immediate visible appeal in visual quality versus the ultra bright capability of mini LED especially in full screen, something OLED today still can’t do.

Still, this is a vibrant and bright screen but being flanked by OLED laptops in the past month, I had to focus on this model’s strength. Thankfully colors are very accurate and at 165hz, its very fluid in games that hit or exceed that. If not, the G-Sync functionality allows some recompense.

Keyboard

I am very biased to Lenovo’s TrueStrike keys. I don’t even have a Legion laptop, I have a Yoga as my personal unit and I dunked on that in my review for being too mushy. Legion laptops don’t have this issue even with their first iteration and I can confirm that since my only Legion laptop is the Y700 which was from a previous lifetime for Lenovo.

I’m not really a fan of RGB especially on laptops are they are a battery drain but its a must for gaming models and even Lenovo eventually succumbed into fully decking out their Legions with RGB.

The front edge and lid lighting sync with the keyboard and can be customized with different effects. Each key can be customized individually as well for custom lighting setups which apparently is useful for both gamers and people who work in the dark.

Lenovo includes these replacement colored keycaps and switches along with the puller. I have no idea how to feel about this but it is an option and options are good.

Touchpad

I feel this extra wide and narrow touchpad is a better design than the extra large touch pads on other models. This is a must for this design as the Legion 9i has to make room for its venting on the upper part of the keyboard. The touch isn’t anything special. It is responsive and perform within expectation. Due to the size, vertical scrolling is a bit limited though.

Under the Hood

First off, the M.2 storage is underneath that metal heatspreader on the left. This model features two M.2 SSD. As seen earlier, this laptop uses three cooling fans to cool the i9 and RTX 4090 along with the ton of VRAM that the 4090 has.

While I am confident in my teardown skills, this is the extent I can open this up as I’ve done this during the holidays and had limited time. Thus, I can’t confirm the “liquid cooling” that was the buzz around this laptop before launch although images online does suggest this feature is gimmicky at best.

Battery Life

We start all test off with a battery life test to see how long the battery will last under office usage. We use PCMark 10 Battery Test which loops word processing, email, spreadsheet, and other office applications as well as browsing and teleconferencing over and over again until the laptop cuts off. Depending on your laptop and when power saving kicks in, there may be some battery left once the test cuts off which is anywhere from 10% to 2%.

Performance Testing

Photo and Video

As this laptop will see a lot of action possibly for rockstar content creators and those who need power on the go, our creator benchmarks for photo and video is key. Puget Systems has just released their PugetBenchmark for Creator tool so content creators, the tech media and business can easily compare performance figures using actual products. We’re still working on building up the test database, so for now the results will be discussed in the closing of this review.

Office

Potentially the most used desktop software next to Windows OS is Microsoft Office. . This tests the responsiveness and system performance of the system when doing  common office-users tasks, such as copying, pasting, cutting, adding images, resizing, saving, etc..

The Outlook results seem to be an outlier as despite multiple tests, its showing up as a higher than usual score. While this is extremely minor, if a new update has changed the way classic Outlook behaves, then all of these numbers are now incompatible so please be guided accordingly. The rest of the MS Office are stellar which should give a very snappy experience if you use Microsoft’s Office suite.

Gaming Performance Summary

For a full-hardware workout, visit https://benchmarks.ul.com for our system warm-up and stress test of choice.

For benchmarking methodology please see our game benchmark method guide.

Test results are gathered and produced on CapFrameX. This makes it easier for use to get both line graph comparison and raw averages without extra tools. Simply the easiest tool for benchmarking and its available for everyone to use, free of charge. Check it out at capframex.com.

Note: The game tested is Counter-Strike 2, not CSGO. Cyberpunk was tested in 1080 and native reso + native reso with ray tracing.

Conclusion

There is always a need for extremely high-end, high-performance laptops and regardless of how premium they are and how niche the users may be, they still exist. The limited numbers does translate to very actionable choices and for the most part, a lot of these people look for power in the most compact form they can get. And with this you can get a trend on the type of users you have. That said, I do feel there is a larger case for OLED for the screen of choise versus mini LED. And to be honest, not a lot of people in this category understand mini LED except its presence in Apple products.

That said, in practice mini LED display do have their benefits especially in HDR. For pure gaming usage, HDR is very lovely and the high brightness of this display ensure you get those very nice contrast in scenes where it counts. But again, OLED does this better even at lower brightness. To be 100% fair, I’m torn. Mini LED doesn’t have the burn-in concern that OLED has and that makes it more appealling to Lenovo as it won’t force them to warranty burn-in damage to edge cases where burn-in prevention mechanism doesn’t work. For the user though, they really, really have to know what they’re getting with mini LED if you need to justify that mark-up over last gen’s, even with the RTX 4090’s extortionate pricing, mini LED’s tax just trumps it at this point.

Performance-wise, productivty performance is snappy and I said we’d talk about Photoshop and Premiere Pro and both score remarkably well in our PugetBenchmark for Creator standard test. This puts it toe to toe with modern desktops but nothing close to its actual desktop counterpart as the Legion 9i 2023’s score of 6070 for Premiere Pro means its on par with an Intel Core i9-9900K with an RTX 3060 desktop, but nowhere near the score of a modern 13th and 14th-gen i9 that can do 15K. Putting this performanc into light though, you’re getting very usable performance with the Legion 9i 2023 and doesn’t really matter if you edit ProRes or H265, you will be running smooth with this setup. But that leads us to cooling and this is one audible laptop in heavy use.

Users have the option going silent mode but if you want the most performance you want it in Turbo and that really just unleashes those fans and they can reallllyy go. Further tweaking can be done in the Lenovo Vantage software which also includes further utilities and customization.

Our reviewed configuration is priced at around PHP340K~ and the bulk of that price is going to the mini-LED display and the RTX 4090. There’s a lot of reason to want an RTX 4090 but a lot less to want a mini-LED and yes I’m dunking on that screen of choice not because I’m an OLED shill but because you’re not given the option for it in this configuration. Both are still battery hogs so you’d be stuck with that power brick so this falls as a desktop replacement.

All in all, its a high-performance machine that carries the appeal of a Legion product: excellent Lenovo support, great quality and great value added features. The Lenovo Legion 9i 2023 (Gen8) laptop is available now from Lenovo and Legion concept stores and authorized dealers. Check with your favorite shops for pricing and availablility.

Lenovo Legion 9i (2023) Gaming Laptop Review

Final Thoughts

The Legion 9i puts everything bleeding-edge into a single chassis with an Intel Core i9 plus an RTX 4090 but while those come at a price by themselves, with the inclusion of mini-LEDs, the Legion 9i has reached a new stratosphere for premium pricing.

Performance

9.5

Build Quality

9.6

Functionality

10

Value

7.8

Pros

Excellent build quality

Extremely bright screen

Impressive class performance

Good keyboard as expected from Legion

Cons

Extremely high barrier of entry pricing

Weighed down by inherent limits of mobile variants of RTX 4090 and the Core i9

Forged carbon pattern is polarizing

9.2

Rating

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