Lenovo Malaysia has brought in all of its latest line of Legion gaming line of laptops, portable PC and monitors to a showcase event available for the local press, and we get to see in person the most high-end of its gaming laptop slate, the Lenovo Legion 9i.
As previously reported, this is the top-end of Lenovo Legion’s… legion of laptops. The price point alone should leave you in awe. In Malaysia, the starting price is RM21,999. That’s eight PS5s worth of money. That’s enough to get a vehicle.
(Lenovo’s online store does offer the Legion 9i at a lower price point, albeit with pared down specs. You can spec it up towards that RM21,999 price point if you want.)
But you can’t tell by just looking at it.
And that’s the greatest thing this the Legion 9i does. It doesn’t tryhard. It’s not showboating. In the car community, you’d call this a sleeper build—unassuming exterior but hides a beast of a spec when you look under the bonnet. But if you know, you know. That’s not some tacky sticker or livery on the lid of the chassis, that’s Forged Carbon, material you’d find on supercars as option you can spec for. But you wouldn’t know it even if you touch it, it just feels like some sort of composite material by the way it sounds when tapped with a fingernail. Even the design of the chassis look remarkably unassuming.
With all the Lenovo Legion and Lenovo Loq laptops on display at the press event we attended, they all blend in together. Depending on how you look at it, that can be a good thing (the cheaper Loq line looks just as good as the Legion 9i if you don’t look too hard) or a bad thing (the design is all too samey and as a result, bland). I argue that’s a good thing. Tacky-looking laptops with “gamer” aesthetics not only look cringe, but also screams to the public that this is one fancy, likely expensive laptop that may attract the wrong attention. Plus, safe-looking slabs like this won’t look outdated in the years when their specs eventually be outdated.
The other impressive tech the Lenovo Legion 9i hides is the 3D effect. Thanks to 3D-capable display powered by the jutting camera array up top, the Legion 9i’s screen can make any image pop. There’s no special software or developer support to make this happen. Any game, heck any content can have that 3D effect, even movies and videos. It was mentioned by one of the folks setting up the booth that they tested this effect on a Blackpink music video, which works wonders.
The visuals of Cyberpunk 2077 just pop like magic, giving you the illusion of depth. But anyone else looking next to your shoulder will have a headache, as the 3D effect is designed to only work with one pair of eyes. There’s tech out there that enable the 3D effects to work for a crowd of onlookers, but the Legion 9i is only offering a personal 3D experience.
Should you be spending a whole year of a Malaysian’s current minimum salary on a Legion 9i? Don’t be silly. A lot of its cool features are either superfluous for most gamers or are already in effect on lower-end Legion models. The Legion Coldfront Vapour chamber, a literal cool feature, which only uses exhaust vents through the entire back of the laptop with no side vents (your mouse-wielding hand will be grateful for this change) and concentrated heat sink design is applied across all the 10th generation Legion and Loq gaming laptops.
But the Legion 9i is for those who have money to spend, but don’t want to flex. And it works as the platonic ideal of a Lenovo Legion should be—the mullet of gaming laptops, a gentle giant, a subtle beast, and the ultimate sleeper gaming laptop.