Gamers and game developers might just have a new portable workstation, but the definition of “portable” is a touch loose wit Lenovo’s latest.
Some laptops are clearly bigger than others, but with Lenovo’s 10th edition Legion 9i, there’s definitely a focus on being the biggest, and possibly the best.
Announced at the Lenovo Tech World Shanghai event this week, the maker of the ThinkPad, Yoga, and IdeaPad, as well as the Lenovo Tab Plus tablet we reviewed last week, the Legion 9i 10 is a little bigger and more powerful than the entire lot of those.
Inside is an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX chip from the second-gen Intel Core Ultra chips, faster than the Core Ultra 7 we normally see in laptops, and paired with up to a staggering 192GB RAM and up to 8TB of storage. That puts the laptop in portable desktop territory, as does the support of an Nvidia Geforce RTX 5090, making it suitable for games and 3D development, and possibly a little CUDA love if you happen to like working with AI, as well.
Keeping all of this cool is a thermal system with four fans and. a vapour chamber, plus a design that brings together eight layers of airplane-grade carbon fibre to make the laptop lid alone both lighter and stronger than aluminium, at least according to Lenovo.
The other major feature is on the screen, which will be an 18 inch display with an optional 3D support to run the screen in glasses-free 3D.
When in its 2D mode, the screen will be able to run at either 240Hz in 4K or 440Hz in Full HD, making the games played on the laptop super responsive and slick. When switched to 3D, a set of cameras will track eye movement and show side-by-side 3D in glasses-free dimensionality on the display for games and 3D development.
The idea of glasses-free 3D isn’t entirely new, with Acer showing how 3D laptop screens could work in the Spatial Labs edition of a Predator laptop in the past year.
Lenovo’s 10th-gen Legion 9i 18 inch — also known as the Legion 9i (18″, 10) — is the second version of this approach we’ve seen, though likely won’t be the last, and will also come with a pretty serious price because of it.
In Australia, that serious price hasn’t been announced yet, though a European price of €4400 suggests a minimum price of $8K in Australia and likely a little more for New Zealand when it eventually arrives. We’re not entirely sure when that will be, but with the European availability set for June, this part of the world can’t be too far behind.
