The Lenovo Legion 9i is a powerful gaming laptop that offers impressive performance and features. One of its standout features is its SSD slots, which are easily accessible and allow for easy upgrading of the Wi-Fi chip if needed. However, this convenience comes with some caveats - the memory is technically replaceable but requires removing the entire motherboard to do so, while the use of two SSDs in RAID has no benefit compared to a single high-end drive, as it uses more power and requires a complete reinstall.

Despite these minor drawbacks, the Legion 9i excels in terms of its overall performance. The laptop's battery life is not impressive, however - even with the RTX 4090 disabled completely, users can expect only around 2 hours of usage time, while gaming and using the graphics card drains the entire battery in about an hour. This means that a smaller charger, such as the one included, becomes more of a necessity than a desirable extra feature.

The display is also worth mentioning - its fast charging option does help to alleviate this issue, but it is not enough to make the laptop suitable for all-day use. The built-in speakers are adequate, with two 2W Harmon speakers that offer pleasant sound quality and can be tuned to individual preferences using software. However, they lack the larger top-firing speakers found on some other laptops, such as MacBooks, which provide a noticeable improvement in sound quality.

One of the things that sets the Legion 9i apart from its competitors is its price point. Lenovo has managed to keep costs relatively low compared to other gaming laptops in this segment, making it an attractive option for those looking for a powerful laptop without breaking the bank. Additionally, Lenovo offers the option to opt for a lower-end model with fewer features if needed, further reducing the cost.

For those who have spent time using the Legion 9i, the overall experience has been overwhelmingly positive. The laptop is well-built and portable, making it suitable for both gaming and work use. It performs admirably, with excellent thermal performance and control over almost every relevant setting available. The display is also a highlight, offering a sharp and bright picture that makes SDR and HDR content look fantastic.

However, like any laptop, the Legion 9i is not without its flaws. The permanent local dimming feature cannot be turned off, which may be a drawback for users who need to create content on the go. Additionally, the use of two SSDs in RAID has no practical benefit, and upgrading the memory requires removing the entire motherboard - a significant inconvenience.

In conclusion, the Lenovo Legion 9i is a powerful and well-built gaming laptop that offers excellent performance and features at a relatively low price point. While it may not be perfect, with some minor drawbacks to consider, it is definitely worth considering for anyone looking for a high-quality laptop in this segment. With its impressive display, control over almost every setting, and comfortable design, the Legion 9i is sure to please even the most discerning users.

In terms of supporting content, this article is brought to you by Corsair and their Virtuoso Pro gaming headset. With its open-back design and 50mm graphene drivers, this headset offers excellent sound quality in games, movies, and music. It is also extremely comfortable, lightweight, and easy to adjust to suit individual preferences. Additionally, the headset's parts are easily replaceable, making maintenance and repairs a breeze. If you're interested in learning more about Corsair's Virtuoso Pro headset or would like to check out other products from this company, be sure to visit their website using the links provided in the description below.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enin this video I'm going to talk about this Lenovo Legion 9i which is a premium tier gaming laptop that comes with some of the highest End Hardware that you can stuff into this slim 16in chassis it has an RTX 490 graphics card an i 93980 HX processor a 32 GB of memory 2 TB of storage and a mini LED display with a resolution of 3200x 2,000 pixels and 165 Hertz refresh rate so it should be powerful enough to replace your desktop PC while being compact enough to serve as a true portable laptop that you can just drag around with you everywhere you go so on paper it definitely sounds like it has everything it needs to be this ultimate gaming laptop but in reality uh there are definitely quite a few things that you need to know and to consider before getting one of these so without further Ado let's begin as some of you know I usually don't review a lot of Lenovo laptops in general now the last one I did was about 2 years years ago and it was an entrylevel budget model that just didn't offer the best laptop experience to put it mildly but these Lenovo Legion models are supposed to be some of the best laptops that you can buy and when Lenovo and nahimic reached out and offered to send over their 9i unit for me to review I was genuinely quite excited because everybody's been talking about how good they are but I never had a chance to actually test them myself and physically this is a very well-built laptop the sh is all metal and it just feels really sturdy it is not too large or too heavy and these 16-in models are actually about the same size as the 15-in laptops from previous generations so you can easily carry them with you every day in a mediumsized backpack the top is made out of compressed carbon fibers which gives it this camo like look and like with any design Choice some people will love it and others won't I have to say it's not really my personal style but I also don't mind it either and it does kind of set it apart from other models on the market but it is very good against fingerprints because no matter how many times you touch it the top will not show any fingerprints at all if you take the razor blade for example that looks really nice and elegant when it's clean and untouched it becomes just this dirty and smudgy mess of a laptop the second you start using it while this one doesn't so it definitely gets points for that it has RG all around it and the Legion logo on the back lights up as well but if you don't like that you can just change it into one constant color or you can turn it off completely there is definitely enough of options for everyone I really like the port layout on this laptop on the back you get a power connection HDMI 2.1 two Thunderbolt type-c ports a type a port and 2.5 GB ethernet connection which means that most of you out there won't need to connect anything to either side of the laptop which is absolutely great you do get a 3.5 mm Jack on the left side which sits all the way towards the back and there's a fulls size SD card reader that sits a bit more to the front and on the right side there's an extra type a port near the back and another type c port and a physical switch to turn the webcam off near the front so objectively when it comes to connections this is a great setup and a great layout it comes with this 330 W charger that isn't too large but there are definitely smaller 330 W Chargers out there which I would like to see in future Generations but you also get this second much smaller 140 WT charger as well that won't be enough to properly game on an RTX 4090 but if you're just taking this laptop with you to school or to work and you only plan on using some lighter applications this charger will be just enough and you definitely want to take it with because the battery life is not that great but I'm going to talk about that a bit later in this video it is very easy to open it up with one hand and the inside looks and feels very decent as well the layout is a little bit different with a keyboard a bit more down than usual due to the extra ventilation and the extra emphasis on Cooling and it does take a bit to get used to this position because the wrist part is now a lot shorter as well now I don't mind it as much personally but it is definitely something to consider the keyboard itself is pretty decent they use scissor switches they're nice and tactile and there is no noticeable wobble while typing it also doesn't Flex until you press it down really hard which also doesn't happen in regular use and I also really like the addition of a numpad which is something that I personally cannot do without both the key caps and the actual switches can be replaced and you get this little box that has a bunch of extra switches as well as some ceramic caps so if you want to you can make your keyboard look just a little bit different than usual I have to say I don't really like the ceramic caps that much because they are very slippery for me but getting resered switches that you can easily swap in and out is just a great move so overall it is a very good keyboard as long as you're okay with the wrist area being a bit shorter and because of that the touchpad is a bit smaller as well but it is a decent smooth and very responsive touchpad that will be completely fine for basic use but as always using a mouse is just better in every possible way the webcam is positioned at the top and as I mentioned before it has a physical switch to disable it completely which is a bit more elegant than the usual covers or sliders it has a very decent quality as well which is still not the standard even for the highest end gaming laptops on the market in terms of specs there isn't that much to choose from uh in most countries you'll probably be ordering this from Lenovo directly and you will get an option to go for either a 480 or 490 with both of them going up to 175 Watts uh you can go for either 1 or 2 terabytes of storage and 32 or 64 GB of RAM uh most versions have the same processor and the same mini LED display so there isn't that much variation between possible models now on the Dutch website there is a non mini LED version listed but I was unable to find it in actual shops anywhere as I said at the start of this video the version I have right here has the I9 the RTX 4090 graphics card 32 GB of ddr5 6400 memory so the memory is a bit faster than in most other laptops and it has two 1 TB ssds in raid so let's see how this performs when it comes to Pure CPU performance it scored just under 30,000 points which is a bit less than the MSI Vector with the same CPU and this result is while it was running in its fastest performance profile and without any manual overclocks and keep in mind Lenova does let you manually overclock this laptop but as always the result will vary per sample if we look at a blender render for example it is only a few seconds behind the Raider completing the render in about 6 and 1 half minutes while a top tier laptop from three generations ago would take 20 minutes to do the same task so for CPU intensive workloads new high-end laptops like this one are definitely a huge upgrade over the older models with a resolution of 3200x 2,000 pixels this laptop has a total of 6.4 million pixels which puts it closer to a 4K display than a 1440p one and there is a lot of pixels for a 16in laptop so if you're gaming you will be completely fine to drop the resolution a little bit if you want to however you do not have to do that now we tested several big AAA titles on this native resolution and most games performed really well even heavy titles like cyberp Punk Dying Light 2 and alen wake 2 ran completely fine on high settings at Native resolution without any upscaling and Assassin's Creed Valhalla god of war and Spider-Man sat at over 100 FPS native and really made use of that 165 Hertz display only Microsoft flight simulator was just below 60 FPS but with a gsync display like this one it was still completely fine but at this high resolution I really do recommend using dlss upscaling which does improve the frame rate significantly for most games and it will also reduce the total latency now I know that opinions are very divided on this topic but in my opinion a dlss should be on by default on high resolution displays like this one and since this is an RTX 4000 series GPU you can also turn frame generation on but that works well for some games but not for all so for cyberpunk 2077 for example I would definitely not turn it on as you don't really need more FPS while the latency gets a lot worse but for Microsoft flight simulator which is running into a CPU bottleneck it can really help out and make the game much smoother than it was so it is an nice option to have and something to experiment with if you want you can also run your games at 1600p instead now normally I don't really recommend running non-native resolutions but the display here is more than sharp enough and you're just not going to see any issues and in most games you do get much better frame rates in return but in cyberpunk and flight simulator for example that are CPU bottleneck it actually doesn't make the game Run any faster and you might as well just run them in n ative resolution but frame rates aside the games just look really good on this display it is not just sharp it gets really bright as well it went to 610 nits in SDR mode and we measured a peak of 1,080 knits in HDR mode and since this is a mini LED display and not an Ola display you can actually get these high brightness values in larger parts of the display and for longer periods of time we even measured more than 1,000 nits on a 100% white image in HDR mode which is just insane and something that an OLED screen just cannot do it also has local dimming so it's not just bright it has a proper high contrast as well it comes with 1536 zones in total which is a lot of zones for such a small screen and that really helps to counter typical mini LED issues like haloing for example now you can still see it here and there if you're looking for it but in a typ typical use you will never notice it and it will definitely not be an issue color performance is decent but it is not perfect it has a fairly wide gamut with over 140% srdb volume but it doesn't cover the entire srdb spectrum and while color accuracy is great out of the box gray tracking isn't accurate enough so if you're watching this on a highquality display you can see that the lighter gray colors actually have this reddish tone in them and we can see that in this graph as well the color balance is just a bit too much towards red now this won't be an issue for Content consumption but for Content creation you will want to manually calibrate it yourself so while this is subjectively one of the most impressive displays that I've ever had a chance to play with uh even if you count desktop monitors it is still not perfect and there are some downsides that are definitely worth considering uh starting with the fact that this display is very clearly pwm driven which means it just flickers a lot and it actually flickered so much that I couldn't even use our osrt measuring tool to measure response times now a typical display would show a close to a straight line in this graph but here you can actually see the huge frequent and somewhat inconsistent Spikes all the way through now I don't think pwm is a big issue for most users but some people are sensitive to this and this laptop would definitely not be a good fit also you cannot disable local dimming now for gaming or content consumption that doesn't really matter that much but for Content creation it is definitely something to think about I mean you can get used to it it's not like you won't be able to edit some photos or videos because of it but if you plan to get a laptop for work to create content every single day you should have the option to turn it off the the extreme brightness also brings some very odd behavior in some situations so if you just set the brightness to the highest setting and look at some HDR games or movies some content might look really Overexposed and reducing the brightness setting can fix that I think that somewhere around 60% was The Sweet Spot but then when measuring brightness again it would still show peaks of 1,000 knits in some white area so yeah you really want to play around with these settings to make sure it is to your own liking while on some other laptops you would just set hdr on and then let your laptop do the work so that is also something to be considered here especially if you don't want to spend your time uh tweaking your display settings now the input latency came in at 16.9 milliseconds which is completely fine for a mini LED technology that is a bit more complex and does cause a little bit more latency than a simple LCD or an OLED display would and this is clearly meant for immersion games and not for competitive Shooters and then for that purpose this latency is more than good enough when it comes to Thermal and noise performance it will completely depend on which profile setting you're in and you do get plenty of them to choose from so there are several presets including quiet performance and balance modes and Lenovo also gives you a ton of options on top of those to completely just fine-tune everything including CPU and GPU power how much power can shift to and from each of those depending on the use case a thermal limits overclocking and so on which is just absolutely great the software itself looks a bit basic here and there and some of the settings could be better organized I would say but there are a lot of very useful options that you can definitely deep dive into if you again like tweaking your machine to Perfection and if you don't the the default profiles are perfectly well balanced if we just look at noise levels of the three default profiles we can see the clear significant steps in noise levels so you can just choose whether you want to keep it basically quiet somewhat audible or kind of loud depending on where you are and exact values will depend on the app or the game that you're running but while playing cyberpunk 2077 for example that is pretty heavy on the GPU and on the CPU numbers were pretty decent in the default performance mode the GPU was pulling 151 Watts on average with the GPU core sitting at 79° C with a hot spot of 86° C which is just fine the memory was running a bit warmer which isn't unusual but since Lenovo is very much so marketing this as a water cool device I kind of expected those temperatures to be a bit lower the CPU on the other hand was running cooler than expected with 77 C while pulling about 55 Watts on average and the fans came in at 52 DB at a 50 cm distance which is actually not bad considering how much power was being used but 52 DB is loud and in this situation you would want to put on your headset and if you already have your headset on you can just yank the fans to 100% which would be even louder but the temperatures would be even better the balanc and quiet profiles will reduce that noise while sacrificing some of the performance but you can still comfortably play most games in the balance profile without bothering anyone that might be sitting nearby opening the laptop is easy enough which is great if you want to clean the fans you can also replace its large 99.99 W hour battery uh both SSD slots are easily reachable and you can replace the Wi-Fi chip in case you want to swap out the Wi-Fi 6E for seven or eight at some point point the only thing you cannot really reach that easily is the memory and it is technically replaceable but you will have to take out the entire motherboard to do so so if you go for this Legion laptop uh do get the model with enough memory to last you for a while now I do wish that Brands will stop with ssds in raid uh it can be great for some useless sequential performance numbers to use for marketing purposes but if you look at Trace benchmarks there is no benefit in having two drives in raid compared to one proper high-end one uh two ssds also use more power than one bigger one and it also means you cannot just add an extra SSD without a complete reinstall so do yourself a favor and if you go for this laptop get the model with a single SSD and keep the option to upgrade open now as I mentioned earlier the battery life is just not that impressive uh even with the RTX 4090 disabled completely you will be lucky to get more than 2 hours with light use only and while gaming and using the graphics card it will drain the entire battery in about an hour so that smaller 140 WT charger for light work is actually more of a requirement rather than a nice little extra now I believe that the display is to blame for this and there is just no way around it it does have a fast charge option which does help a bit but it is far from an all day wireless laptop which some people do need for work and the built-in speakers are all right it has two two wat Harmon speakers that are Pleasant uh they have a bit of a base and they are loud enough and you can use the software to tune it all to your liking but it is missing those large top firing speakers that MacBooks have for example which do sound better and I mean no amount of software magic can compete with that so it's not the best but it's also very far from being the worst so after using this laptop for about a month now now I really enjoyed it and I've mostly had a great experience with it but it is not perfect and there are definitely some big things that you need to consider the main thing for me was the battery life because you pretty much need to have it plugged in all the time uh even if you're doing some very light work and that permanent local dimming which cannot be turned off and it can really affect content creation which is something I do need a laptop for there are also some minor things like you cannot upgrade your memory without removing the whole motherboard and the ssds are in raid which I find pretty useless but the price might be a downside for a lot of people as well and looking at the models that Lenovo is competing with I think that Lenovo is not in a bad position here now you can often pick it up for a bit less than a razor blade an MSI Raider or a strict scar for example and if you want to spend even less and you don't mind skipping some of the fancier bells and whistles you can always go for the seven series instead so it is far from being cheap but relatively speaking I think Lenovo is doing okay when it comes to pricing this laptop and when you do compare it to some of its competitors it is still very impressive overall it is really well built it is still reasonably portable for a gaming laptop that can replace your desktop PC it performs really well uh thermal performance is great with plenty of options to choose from uh you get control over almost every relevant setting there is and you get that super sharp super bright display that makes SDR and HDR content look fantastic it looks so much better than regular LCD panels without having that risk of burn in like OLED panels do so if you're looking for a gaming laptop in this segment and you really don't mind some of the downsides that I mentioned earlier this Legion 9i is definitely worth considering now that is all I had for today but before I go let's hear it from the sponsor of this video this video is brought to you by Corsair and their virtuoso Pro gaming headset with its open back design and 50 mm graphine drivers it offers an excellent sound quality in Games movies as well as music it is very light and extremely comfortable and you can easily adjust it to very small as well as very large heads you can also easily replace the cables uh ear pads headband and covers making repairs and maintenance e easier than ever check them out using the links in the description below thank you so much for watching and for sticking to the end if you like this video and you want to see more videos like this one please do consider clicking that subscribe button so you never miss my future uploads bye y'all and I will see you in the next one byein this video I'm going to talk about this Lenovo Legion 9i which is a premium tier gaming laptop that comes with some of the highest End Hardware that you can stuff into this slim 16in chassis it has an RTX 490 graphics card an i 93980 HX processor a 32 GB of memory 2 TB of storage and a mini LED display with a resolution of 3200x 2,000 pixels and 165 Hertz refresh rate so it should be powerful enough to replace your desktop PC while being compact enough to serve as a true portable laptop that you can just drag around with you everywhere you go so on paper it definitely sounds like it has everything it needs to be this ultimate gaming laptop but in reality uh there are definitely quite a few things that you need to know and to consider before getting one of these so without further Ado let's begin as some of you know I usually don't review a lot of Lenovo laptops in general now the last one I did was about 2 years years ago and it was an entrylevel budget model that just didn't offer the best laptop experience to put it mildly but these Lenovo Legion models are supposed to be some of the best laptops that you can buy and when Lenovo and nahimic reached out and offered to send over their 9i unit for me to review I was genuinely quite excited because everybody's been talking about how good they are but I never had a chance to actually test them myself and physically this is a very well-built laptop the sh is all metal and it just feels really sturdy it is not too large or too heavy and these 16-in models are actually about the same size as the 15-in laptops from previous generations so you can easily carry them with you every day in a mediumsized backpack the top is made out of compressed carbon fibers which gives it this camo like look and like with any design Choice some people will love it and others won't I have to say it's not really my personal style but I also don't mind it either and it does kind of set it apart from other models on the market but it is very good against fingerprints because no matter how many times you touch it the top will not show any fingerprints at all if you take the razor blade for example that looks really nice and elegant when it's clean and untouched it becomes just this dirty and smudgy mess of a laptop the second you start using it while this one doesn't so it definitely gets points for that it has RG all around it and the Legion logo on the back lights up as well but if you don't like that you can just change it into one constant color or you can turn it off completely there is definitely enough of options for everyone I really like the port layout on this laptop on the back you get a power connection HDMI 2.1 two Thunderbolt type-c ports a type a port and 2.5 GB ethernet connection which means that most of you out there won't need to connect anything to either side of the laptop which is absolutely great you do get a 3.5 mm Jack on the left side which sits all the way towards the back and there's a fulls size SD card reader that sits a bit more to the front and on the right side there's an extra type a port near the back and another type c port and a physical switch to turn the webcam off near the front so objectively when it comes to connections this is a great setup and a great layout it comes with this 330 W charger that isn't too large but there are definitely smaller 330 W Chargers out there which I would like to see in future Generations but you also get this second much smaller 140 WT charger as well that won't be enough to properly game on an RTX 4090 but if you're just taking this laptop with you to school or to work and you only plan on using some lighter applications this charger will be just enough and you definitely want to take it with because the battery life is not that great but I'm going to talk about that a bit later in this video it is very easy to open it up with one hand and the inside looks and feels very decent as well the layout is a little bit different with a keyboard a bit more down than usual due to the extra ventilation and the extra emphasis on Cooling and it does take a bit to get used to this position because the wrist part is now a lot shorter as well now I don't mind it as much personally but it is definitely something to consider the keyboard itself is pretty decent they use scissor switches they're nice and tactile and there is no noticeable wobble while typing it also doesn't Flex until you press it down really hard which also doesn't happen in regular use and I also really like the addition of a numpad which is something that I personally cannot do without both the key caps and the actual switches can be replaced and you get this little box that has a bunch of extra switches as well as some ceramic caps so if you want to you can make your keyboard look just a little bit different than usual I have to say I don't really like the ceramic caps that much because they are very slippery for me but getting resered switches that you can easily swap in and out is just a great move so overall it is a very good keyboard as long as you're okay with the wrist area being a bit shorter and because of that the touchpad is a bit smaller as well but it is a decent smooth and very responsive touchpad that will be completely fine for basic use but as always using a mouse is just better in every possible way the webcam is positioned at the top and as I mentioned before it has a physical switch to disable it completely which is a bit more elegant than the usual covers or sliders it has a very decent quality as well which is still not the standard even for the highest end gaming laptops on the market in terms of specs there isn't that much to choose from uh in most countries you'll probably be ordering this from Lenovo directly and you will get an option to go for either a 480 or 490 with both of them going up to 175 Watts uh you can go for either 1 or 2 terabytes of storage and 32 or 64 GB of RAM uh most versions have the same processor and the same mini LED display so there isn't that much variation between possible models now on the Dutch website there is a non mini LED version listed but I was unable to find it in actual shops anywhere as I said at the start of this video the version I have right here has the I9 the RTX 4090 graphics card 32 GB of ddr5 6400 memory so the memory is a bit faster than in most other laptops and it has two 1 TB ssds in raid so let's see how this performs when it comes to Pure CPU performance it scored just under 30,000 points which is a bit less than the MSI Vector with the same CPU and this result is while it was running in its fastest performance profile and without any manual overclocks and keep in mind Lenova does let you manually overclock this laptop but as always the result will vary per sample if we look at a blender render for example it is only a few seconds behind the Raider completing the render in about 6 and 1 half minutes while a top tier laptop from three generations ago would take 20 minutes to do the same task so for CPU intensive workloads new high-end laptops like this one are definitely a huge upgrade over the older models with a resolution of 3200x 2,000 pixels this laptop has a total of 6.4 million pixels which puts it closer to a 4K display than a 1440p one and there is a lot of pixels for a 16in laptop so if you're gaming you will be completely fine to drop the resolution a little bit if you want to however you do not have to do that now we tested several big AAA titles on this native resolution and most games performed really well even heavy titles like cyberp Punk Dying Light 2 and alen wake 2 ran completely fine on high settings at Native resolution without any upscaling and Assassin's Creed Valhalla god of war and Spider-Man sat at over 100 FPS native and really made use of that 165 Hertz display only Microsoft flight simulator was just below 60 FPS but with a gsync display like this one it was still completely fine but at this high resolution I really do recommend using dlss upscaling which does improve the frame rate significantly for most games and it will also reduce the total latency now I know that opinions are very divided on this topic but in my opinion a dlss should be on by default on high resolution displays like this one and since this is an RTX 4000 series GPU you can also turn frame generation on but that works well for some games but not for all so for cyberpunk 2077 for example I would definitely not turn it on as you don't really need more FPS while the latency gets a lot worse but for Microsoft flight simulator which is running into a CPU bottleneck it can really help out and make the game much smoother than it was so it is an nice option to have and something to experiment with if you want you can also run your games at 1600p instead now normally I don't really recommend running non-native resolutions but the display here is more than sharp enough and you're just not going to see any issues and in most games you do get much better frame rates in return but in cyberpunk and flight simulator for example that are CPU bottleneck it actually doesn't make the game Run any faster and you might as well just run them in n ative resolution but frame rates aside the games just look really good on this display it is not just sharp it gets really bright as well it went to 610 nits in SDR mode and we measured a peak of 1,080 knits in HDR mode and since this is a mini LED display and not an Ola display you can actually get these high brightness values in larger parts of the display and for longer periods of time we even measured more than 1,000 nits on a 100% white image in HDR mode which is just insane and something that an OLED screen just cannot do it also has local dimming so it's not just bright it has a proper high contrast as well it comes with 1536 zones in total which is a lot of zones for such a small screen and that really helps to counter typical mini LED issues like haloing for example now you can still see it here and there if you're looking for it but in a typ typical use you will never notice it and it will definitely not be an issue color performance is decent but it is not perfect it has a fairly wide gamut with over 140% srdb volume but it doesn't cover the entire srdb spectrum and while color accuracy is great out of the box gray tracking isn't accurate enough so if you're watching this on a highquality display you can see that the lighter gray colors actually have this reddish tone in them and we can see that in this graph as well the color balance is just a bit too much towards red now this won't be an issue for Content consumption but for Content creation you will want to manually calibrate it yourself so while this is subjectively one of the most impressive displays that I've ever had a chance to play with uh even if you count desktop monitors it is still not perfect and there are some downsides that are definitely worth considering uh starting with the fact that this display is very clearly pwm driven which means it just flickers a lot and it actually flickered so much that I couldn't even use our osrt measuring tool to measure response times now a typical display would show a close to a straight line in this graph but here you can actually see the huge frequent and somewhat inconsistent Spikes all the way through now I don't think pwm is a big issue for most users but some people are sensitive to this and this laptop would definitely not be a good fit also you cannot disable local dimming now for gaming or content consumption that doesn't really matter that much but for Content creation it is definitely something to think about I mean you can get used to it it's not like you won't be able to edit some photos or videos because of it but if you plan to get a laptop for work to create content every single day you should have the option to turn it off the the extreme brightness also brings some very odd behavior in some situations so if you just set the brightness to the highest setting and look at some HDR games or movies some content might look really Overexposed and reducing the brightness setting can fix that I think that somewhere around 60% was The Sweet Spot but then when measuring brightness again it would still show peaks of 1,000 knits in some white area so yeah you really want to play around with these settings to make sure it is to your own liking while on some other laptops you would just set hdr on and then let your laptop do the work so that is also something to be considered here especially if you don't want to spend your time uh tweaking your display settings now the input latency came in at 16.9 milliseconds which is completely fine for a mini LED technology that is a bit more complex and does cause a little bit more latency than a simple LCD or an OLED display would and this is clearly meant for immersion games and not for competitive Shooters and then for that purpose this latency is more than good enough when it comes to Thermal and noise performance it will completely depend on which profile setting you're in and you do get plenty of them to choose from so there are several presets including quiet performance and balance modes and Lenovo also gives you a ton of options on top of those to completely just fine-tune everything including CPU and GPU power how much power can shift to and from each of those depending on the use case a thermal limits overclocking and so on which is just absolutely great the software itself looks a bit basic here and there and some of the settings could be better organized I would say but there are a lot of very useful options that you can definitely deep dive into if you again like tweaking your machine to Perfection and if you don't the the default profiles are perfectly well balanced if we just look at noise levels of the three default profiles we can see the clear significant steps in noise levels so you can just choose whether you want to keep it basically quiet somewhat audible or kind of loud depending on where you are and exact values will depend on the app or the game that you're running but while playing cyberpunk 2077 for example that is pretty heavy on the GPU and on the CPU numbers were pretty decent in the default performance mode the GPU was pulling 151 Watts on average with the GPU core sitting at 79° C with a hot spot of 86° C which is just fine the memory was running a bit warmer which isn't unusual but since Lenovo is very much so marketing this as a water cool device I kind of expected those temperatures to be a bit lower the CPU on the other hand was running cooler than expected with 77 C while pulling about 55 Watts on average and the fans came in at 52 DB at a 50 cm distance which is actually not bad considering how much power was being used but 52 DB is loud and in this situation you would want to put on your headset and if you already have your headset on you can just yank the fans to 100% which would be even louder but the temperatures would be even better the balanc and quiet profiles will reduce that noise while sacrificing some of the performance but you can still comfortably play most games in the balance profile without bothering anyone that might be sitting nearby opening the laptop is easy enough which is great if you want to clean the fans you can also replace its large 99.99 W hour battery uh both SSD slots are easily reachable and you can replace the Wi-Fi chip in case you want to swap out the Wi-Fi 6E for seven or eight at some point point the only thing you cannot really reach that easily is the memory and it is technically replaceable but you will have to take out the entire motherboard to do so so if you go for this Legion laptop uh do get the model with enough memory to last you for a while now I do wish that Brands will stop with ssds in raid uh it can be great for some useless sequential performance numbers to use for marketing purposes but if you look at Trace benchmarks there is no benefit in having two drives in raid compared to one proper high-end one uh two ssds also use more power than one bigger one and it also means you cannot just add an extra SSD without a complete reinstall so do yourself a favor and if you go for this laptop get the model with a single SSD and keep the option to upgrade open now as I mentioned earlier the battery life is just not that impressive uh even with the RTX 4090 disabled completely you will be lucky to get more than 2 hours with light use only and while gaming and using the graphics card it will drain the entire battery in about an hour so that smaller 140 WT charger for light work is actually more of a requirement rather than a nice little extra now I believe that the display is to blame for this and there is just no way around it it does have a fast charge option which does help a bit but it is far from an all day wireless laptop which some people do need for work and the built-in speakers are all right it has two two wat Harmon speakers that are Pleasant uh they have a bit of a base and they are loud enough and you can use the software to tune it all to your liking but it is missing those large top firing speakers that MacBooks have for example which do sound better and I mean no amount of software magic can compete with that so it's not the best but it's also very far from being the worst so after using this laptop for about a month now now I really enjoyed it and I've mostly had a great experience with it but it is not perfect and there are definitely some big things that you need to consider the main thing for me was the battery life because you pretty much need to have it plugged in all the time uh even if you're doing some very light work and that permanent local dimming which cannot be turned off and it can really affect content creation which is something I do need a laptop for there are also some minor things like you cannot upgrade your memory without removing the whole motherboard and the ssds are in raid which I find pretty useless but the price might be a downside for a lot of people as well and looking at the models that Lenovo is competing with I think that Lenovo is not in a bad position here now you can often pick it up for a bit less than a razor blade an MSI Raider or a strict scar for example and if you want to spend even less and you don't mind skipping some of the fancier bells and whistles you can always go for the seven series instead so it is far from being cheap but relatively speaking I think Lenovo is doing okay when it comes to pricing this laptop and when you do compare it to some of its competitors it is still very impressive overall it is really well built it is still reasonably portable for a gaming laptop that can replace your desktop PC it performs really well uh thermal performance is great with plenty of options to choose from uh you get control over almost every relevant setting there is and you get that super sharp super bright display that makes SDR and HDR content look fantastic it looks so much better than regular LCD panels without having that risk of burn in like OLED panels do so if you're looking for a gaming laptop in this segment and you really don't mind some of the downsides that I mentioned earlier this Legion 9i is definitely worth considering now that is all I had for today but before I go let's hear it from the sponsor of this video this video is brought to you by Corsair and their virtuoso Pro gaming headset with its open back design and 50 mm graphine drivers it offers an excellent sound quality in Games movies as well as music it is very light and extremely comfortable and you can easily adjust it to very small as well as very large heads you can also easily replace the cables uh ear pads headband and covers making repairs and maintenance e easier than ever check them out using the links in the description below thank you so much for watching and for sticking to the end if you like this video and you want to see more videos like this one please do consider clicking that subscribe button so you never miss my future uploads bye y'all and I will see you in the next one bye\n"