Lenovo’s new Legion 9i is a liquid-cooled, Mini LED, RGB monstrosity

theverge.com:

By Monica Chin, a senior reviewer covering laptops and other gadgets. Monica was a writer for Tom's Guide and Business Insider before joining The Verge in 2020.

Lenovo has announced a new Legion 9i, and it might just be the wildest thing I’ve ever seen from the Legion line. It’s coming in October, it starts at a whopping $4,399 (you know, a totally normal price to pay for things), and Lenovo is throwing in all kinds of eccentric stuff.

The company is clearly most excited about the fact that the 9i is the first 16-inch gaming laptop with a self-contained liquid-cooling system. This is exactly what it sounds like. Most laptops use air cooling to transfer heat along heat pipes to a radiator; a fluid-cooled device instead does that with water and a pump which, as you might imagine, can handle much more thermal mass. Such a system could theoretically allow the 9i to pull truly massive amounts of power (up to 230W, Lenovo claims) for a ridiculous gaming experience.

To be clear, liquid cooling is a thing that’s been tried before in laptops of this size. But it’s generally done externally — that is, you plug a thingamajig into a little port in the back, and that thingamajig swooshes some water around inside. Lenovo’s claim appears to be that the Legion 9i can fully cool itself with this method, no thingamajig needed.

Now, this could be very exciting, but I cannot stress enough that we have no idea how well it’s going to work. Also, I feel compelled to point out that Legion cooling is already, famously, very good. The last two Legion 5i generations that The Verge has reviewed have been remarkably cool, without much noise, throughout testing. I’m sure a liquid system will make some amount of difference, of course, but how much